Esperienza operaia dell’ecologia e ambientalismo del lavoro all’Italsider/Ilva di Taranto. Dagli anni Cinquanta al 2018

Workers’ experience of ecology and labour environmentalism at Italsider/Ilva in Taranto. From the 1950s to 2018 The article explores the contradictory relationship between workers’ experience of ecology and working-class environmentalism in the case study of Italsider/(ex)Ilva in Taranto (Apulia, Italy), on the methodological basis of social ethnography. The main thesis is that a new – qualitative and historically solid – analysis of such, complex relationship makes it possible on the one hand to deconstruct the seemingly natural opposition between employment and health, and on the other hand to open up unprecedented scenarios for the development of a different labor-based perspective on the ecological crisis. The structure of the article is as follows: the first paragraph situates the research from a theoretical point of view, against the background of an emerging field of investigation: environmental labor studies (§1). The second makes its methodology explicit (§2). The following ones examine two phases of Taranto’s industrial, steel-based development – the public management (§3) and the private one, during which the eco-sanitary crisis deflagrates (§4) – in an attempt to articulate the elusive and non-linear relationship between workers’ experience of ecology and working-class environmentalism – until the agreement with Arcelor Mittal in September 2018, starting from which a largely different story opens up. Such story is briefly referred to in the conclusions, recalling more recent events and sketching possible lines of future research.