The struggle of GKN workers in Italy
Passionate workers, militant researchers, and a short-sighted State
GKN is a British company which is active in the automotive and aerospace sectors. In 2018 it was acquired by hedge fund Melrose Industries. On 9 July 2021, Melrose laid off all 422 employees at the Campi Bisenzio plant (province of Florence, Italy) and decided to close the plant. Workers have been occupying it ever since.
The following piece illustrates the reindustrialization plan written by the workers in collaboration with a group of Italian scholars. It is a translation of an article published on the Italian national newspaper “Il Fatto Quotidiano”.
Working-class knowledge and militant research. These are the ingredients of the plan for the reindustrialisation of GKN in Campi Bisenzio (Florence, Italy). A plan that the workers of the factory are elaborating together with a group of scholars from academia.
It is a unique case in recent Italian history. From the economists of Sant'Anna in Pisa to the engineers of Siena and Florence, from ‘supportive’ (solidali) jurists to PhD students, academia has joined the workers' struggle.
“The research group, which is very militant, has met with the knowledge of the GKN workers in a horizontal way. This has made it possible to give value to workers' skills built up over the years,” Francesca Gabbriellini, a PhD student in History at Bologna who is part of the network, told Il Fatto.
The ambition is that the plan, now specific to the GKN dispute, becomes a model for other firms in a situation of crisis. It is a model for a new industrial policy, one that has two legs: on the one hand, energy and knowledge from below, and on the other, the necessary responsibility of the State.
The firm point is to guarantee work and income. As stated in a draft seen by Il Fatto, “no social shock absorbers will be accepted unless they are linked to the company's reorganisation aimed at implementing the plan, safeguarding jobs and protecting the heritage of industrial and trade union relations achieved so far”.
Various options are being explored in order to avoid new rips in the skin of the community and the productive fabric. One proposal put forward in the plan is the Public Pole for Sustainable Mobility: a measure that would respond to the profound crisis in the automotive sector and move in the direction of ecological transition. But there is also talk of reconverting some production.
As Dario Salvetti of the “Collettivo di Fabbrica” explained to Il Fatto, the workers' plan “starts from a banal observation: on the one hand Stellantis and its suppliers are downsizing their activities in Italy, and on the other hand there is talk of relaunching the national automotive industry in a sustainable way. The two things are not consistent”.
This is where the State comes in. “Either these decisions are endorsed,” says Salvetti, “or a different behaviour is imposed on the company (for example, with an anti-delocalisation law), or we opt for an industrial policy with strong public intervention. Our proposal revolves around some fundamental engineering points, such as public patents and sustainable mobility. We are also looking more closely at some interesting technologies such as green hydrogen.”
But what does GKN produce today? Mainly axle shafts and machinery, such as automatic cells developed in-house. Axle shafts are a product that is not very complex from a technological point of view and are exposed to strong international competition, while machinery offers greater production, technological and renconversion opportunities.
These are the constraints and possibilities facing reindustrialisation. But the State is still too timid. Giovanni Dosi, a professor at Sant'Anna in Pisa, says it clearly: “We are making up for a role that should be played by the public authorities, particularly MISE (Ministero per lo Sviluppo Economico, i.e. Ministry for economic development). Every day we experience the lack of technical expertise in the public sector. Since the 1980s, engineering expertise and the ability to assess who can do what have disappeared.”
In order to make up for these shortcomings of the State, it is crucial to create new public knowledge centres, to enhance the knowledge of workers and to renew the skills of the public administration. The closure of GKN, other delocalisation processes, and mass redundancies in general are not just a question of money or jobs. They are also a net loss of economic skills: the real resources that are most difficult to generate.
The GKN site cannot become an eco-monster, nor the umpteenth wound of a deindustrialised country. For the unprecedented team of workers and academics, the factory must be the outpost of a new industrial policy. But those who should be some of its key players (the Italian State and Italian capitalism) are still short-sighted.
Extra content
The official Facebook and Instagram pages of the “Collettivo di Fabbrica Lavoratori Gkn” (workers’ collective)
An article on Jacobin Italia by two scholars in the academia support group
The videoclip of a song written in support to the workers (here on Spotify)