Bread and poison: stories of labor environmentalism in Italy, 1968-1998

Abstract

This chapter tells the story of the encounter between a generation of Italian experts in industrial hygiene (physicians and sociologists) and factory workers, and how that encounter translated into new forms of knowledge and political action. The chapter aims to highlight the material relations existing between occupational, environmental, and public health as they were experienced by subaltern social groups, who knew industrial hazards through their bodies and through the environments where they worked and lived. This material reality—the organic relationship between humans and nature through work has been politically obscured by dominant social forces and by the divide between the labor and environmental movements. The case of labor environmentalism in Italy, however, shows how, in particular places and at particular times, the possibility emerged for a reunified consciousness of industrial hazards, one that challenged alienating forms of scientific knowledge and political-economic power.