”I’d been back a few hours. I saw him for the first time. He was tall, handsome, strong and smelling of oil and sheet metal.
For years I’ve seen him get up at 4 in the morning, get on his bicycle and disappear into Turin’s fog, going towards the Factory.
I’ve seen him fall asleep on the settee, worn out by hours of work and alienated by the production of thousands of pieces, all the same, imposed by the system of piece work.
I’ve seen him happily spend his spare time with his wife and children.
I’ve seen him suffering when he told me his salary was not enough to have me go to university.
I’ve seen him humiliated when they offered him a rise of 100 lire for each hour of work.
I’ve seen him distraught, when at the age of 53, the factory manager told him he was too old for their needs.
I’ve seen managers and industrialists ask for the working age to be raised higher and higher. I’ve seen economists calling for the globalisation of money, but forgetting the globalisation of rights. I’ve seen newspaper editors stating that manual workers no longer exist. I’ve seen politicians asking manual workers to make sacrifices for the good of the country. I’ve seen trade unionists saying that modernity calls for turning back.
But I gasped for air when on 26 July 2010, in the Turin paper "La Stampa” I read the editorial by Professor Mario Deaglio . According to the professor, the “rights of the workers” become “non-monetrary components ofremuneration”, and the “difesa del posto di lavoro” {defending jobs} had to be substituted with a volatile “guarantee of the opportunity for the chance to work”. But above all, the worker, whose wages were by now pared down to the minimum, no longer needed “free time in which to spend his wages”, But he only had to think about satisfying the main requests from the other side (a theory repeated by Professor Deaglio on Radio 24 between 5:30 pm and 6:00 pm on Tuesday 27 July 2010). .... Just think that a man of culture, even with all the arguments he’s capable of producing, can get to the moment of saying that a manual worker’s free time has no value, because it is not correlated to money, took my breath away. I got into my car, built by the manual workers of Mirafiori in Turin. I rushed home to my parents. I saw him for the umpteenth time. He was bent, his labyrinthitis, caused by millions of press operations, made him shaky. He was weak because of his heart disease. He was my father, a manual worker in the press shop for 35 years, where he had sacrificed everything, apart from his free time spent with his family. That was free. He smelled of dignity.”Luca Mazzucco recommendation by anib roma

Download and print out the flyer “VIETATO L'INGRESSO AI POLITICI” {No entry to politicians}