Following our double-episode on the Florence Working-Class Literature Festival back in February, our co-host Matt was invited to this year’s festival, recording this episode on-site at the ex-GKN factory in Florence. Featuring the various writers, researchers, organisers, and activists in attendance, this episode captures the atmosphere of the festival at this critical time for the GKN struggle.
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Taking place on 4-6 April 2025, the opending day of the festival marked the 1367th day since the 400+ workforce at the GKN car parts factory in Florence was first made redundant. They subsequently seized the factory and remain in control of it to this day, despite receiving their third – and now final – redundancy notice in the days leading up to this year’s festival.
Recorded on-site at the occupied GKN factory on the outskirts of Florence, this episode features the voices of various writers, researchers, organisers, and activists that we spoke to while at the festival. These conversations took place against a frenzy of activity, both for the festival but also the GKN struggle itself.
Episode
- WCL 14: Live from the Working-Class Literature Festival: we talk to various participants and attendees of the festival, both about the festival itself as well as the GKN struggle. Speakers include union activist and author of Wage Slaves, Daria Bogdanska, researcher and editor of Asian Workers’ Stories, Luka Lei Zhang, and spokesperson for the GKN Factory Collective, Dario Salvetti
WCL14: Live from the Working Class Literature Festival – Working Class History
More information
- WCL 10-11: Florence Working-Class Literature Festival – Listen to our previous podcast episodes on the festival and the GKN struggle
- Buy Wage Slaves by Daria Bogdanska
- Buy Asian Workers’ Stories by Luka Lei Zhang (ed.)
- To donate money to support the GKN struggle, make a bank transfer to:
- Account name: Aps Soms Insorgiamo
- IBAN: IT75E0501802800000017261280
Images
Video
If you want to learn more about the struggle at GKN, we highly recommend this documentary by Reel News London.
Acknowledgements
- Thanks to all our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
- Our theme tune for these episodes is ‘Occupiamola’ (or ‘Let’s Occupy It’) as sung on a GKN workers’ demonstration in 2024. Many thanks to Reel News London for letting us use their recording. Watch the documentary it’s taken from here.
- This episode was edited by Jesse French.
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Transcript
Matt: Over the first weekend of April 2025, over 7000 people attended the third annual Working-Class Literature Festival, held at a former car parts factory on the outskirts of Florence. The opening day of the festival was the 1367th day since the workers first seized the plant in opposition to the company’s attempt to shut it down. In the days before the festival was due to begin, workers received their third – and now final – redundancy notice. Yet despite this news, the festival remained both a buoyant and militant occasion, as the workers push ahead with their plans to reopen their factory as a worker cooperative building ecological goods. This is Working Class Literature.
[intro music]
Matt: Before we start, a quick note to say that we’re only able to continue making these podcasts – both Working Class History and Working Class Literature – because of the support of our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do and want to help us with our work, join us on patreon.com/workingclasshistory where you can get benefits like early access to episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted books, merch and more. For instance, Patreon supporters got early access to this episode without ads, and they also get exclusive access to our two Patreon-only podcast series, Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. Link in the show notes.
You might remember that, back in February, we put out two episodes about the Working-Class Literature Festival in Florence. For the past three years, this festival has taken place at the former GKN car parts factory that, in 2021, was taken over by its former employees after they were made redundant, and has been under their control since.
To get a fuller understanding of how the festival got started, and the GKN struggle itself, we recommend you go back and listen to those episodes first. But as part of making those episodes, author and festival organiser, Alberto Prunetti (who we interviewed for those episodes), suggested that I attend this year’s event.
I should note, that, unlike normal episodes, the interviews used here were recorded on site at the festival itself so apologies in advance for the quality of some of the audio, which varies quite a bit.
As such, in April, I made my way out to Florence to experience it for myself: a weekend of music, talks, discussions and performances (not to mention food and beer!) that brought together over 7000 people, making it easily the biggest working-class cultural event in Europe (and perhaps even the world).
But more important than the scale of the festival was the way it was different from pretty much any other literary event I’d been to – even those specifically about working-class writing. As we touched on in the previous episodes, this festival is not just about increasing working-class representation in middle-class dominated areas of society like publishing and academia; it’s about transforming society itself, something that was evident in the slogan of this year’s festival: “We Will Be Everything.”
The result of this was that while there were professional writers and scholars who were from working-class backgrounds or writing about working-class issues, there were also many talks by people who write or research, but might not think of themselves primarily as writers or researchers.
Daria Bogdanska: My book is some kind of a chronicle or memo of my first year in Sweden. Basically, if you want to know my background, I’m a high-school drop-out and I come from Poland.
Matt: This is Daria Bogdanska, a union activist living in Malmö, southern Sweden, and the author-illustrator of the graphic novel, Wage Slaves.
Daria Bogdanska: I don’t come from a union tradition. I’m now 30-something and when I grew up, I considered myself a leftist but I had no idea of actual union work. I was part of the precariat and in this way, you read about union traditions and left-wing history but it’s very abstract. It’s the past. I was a millennial leftist but I couldn’t relate to this in my daily life. I was just working shit jobs and the way to change your conditions would be by changing your job instead of fighting.
The European Union opened up to Poland and, of course, I went to London [laughter] where I did bike messenger work for a few years. I consider it a shit job, absolutely [laughter]. I did some bike mechanic jobs and some waiting. I did any kind of shit job you can imagine both in Spain and the UK. I’m kind of a typical European EU nomad going around doing different shit jobs and just finding the means to live. I then ended up in Sweden. That’s actually a fun story because there are those people’s schools or folkhögskola. They’re vocational schools for people who didn’t finish high school. If you don’t have a high school degree or diploma, you can apply to one of these schools. I found out that you could apply to this kind of school. I always liked writing and drawing so I applied to a comic school actually.
I just wanted to try something new. I lied and said that I knew Swedish in my application but I got in. I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to Sweden.’ It was basically me, my backpack and a few hundred Euros in my pocket. The whole book depicts my first year in Sweden and my clashes with the Swedish system and the clashes of my imagination of the Swedish system as a kind of orderly, bureaucratic welfare paradise where everybody is equal and the land of social democracy where maybe shitty jobs would be less shitty. During this first year, I worked illegally in a restaurant even though I was from the EU and I had the right to work in Sweden. I found myself in some Kafkaesque situation where I had to apply for a personal number in Sweden like a Social Security number in order to have a legal job. In order to get this number, you have to have a job so it’s a catch-22 situation. I worked illegally at an Indian restaurant and I was the only white person working there. I earned five Euros an hour. This was shitty but I was used to shitty jobs. I just needed to pay my rent. I worked before and after school but what I realised was there was a hierarchy of workers there. I earned five Euros which, for a Swede, is a slave wage but there were people from Bangladesh who were earning four and a half Euros. There was a guy from Pakistan who earned three Euros. There was, what I called, a ladder of desperation. The more desperate you were for a job and money, the less you got paid. This was something that pissed me off and something which pushed me to try to organise which I formally did for the first time in my life. This is the story of me going through this journey of awakening and trying to organise a precarious situation and also navigating how to organise when there was so much at stake. There were people who had working visas and risked a lot; some shady connections with the owner who lent them money; they lived at his place or lived at the restaurant. It was about how to organise in those conditions. It’s the parallel story of union organising but also finding my way and my life in Sweden by observing and trying to understand what was going on around me in terms of what this country was about.
Matt: After this period in her life, Daria began organising among migrant workers with a number of different unions, something she continues to do to this day. But one thing she mentioned was how her writing and her activism are often in tension when it comes to competing for her time.
Daria Bogdanska: After I wrote the book, there was a lot of interest because they don’t have an immigrant woman talking about her own conditions. I understand the interest because I prefer to speak about myself and that migrants speak with their own voices rather than somebody else telling you about how things are. There was a lot of interest but I noticed that I would be invited by the major unions to talk about things. Both the cultural sector and the unions would invite me and I would talk about my situation and my book. They liked to hear about how terrible it was but as soon as I came up with some criticism or solutions and as soon as I was showing some agency, they were not interested anymore [laughter]. I ended up being a spokesperson for migrants in the cultural sphere by being a writer. I just got tired of it and I realised that I wanted to organise. I wanted to help other people who were in a situation like me so I started getting more involved with the union.
I struggle with this because sometimes we have this kind of idea of a successful person who is both an activist, a brilliant thinker and also a fantastic organiser and writer… I’m not so smart. I’m not so fantastic. Maybe I cannot manage to be everything at once. Right now, I wouldn’t manage to do both and I’ve chosen the other way. I’m more of a practitioner right now rather than a talker but I still think it’s valuable to talk about those things and I’m really happy that I did. I just got impatient [laughter] by just talking.
Matt: Daria was just one of the many excellent speakers I met over the festival weekend. But another that I had a chance to speak to was Luka Lei Zhang, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Macau in China, and editor of the anthology, Asian Workers’ Stories. In many ways, Luka’s research picks up where Daria’s graphic novel left off in terms of giving a voice to migrant workers. Though in Luka’s case, her focus is on those who are further down what Daria calls the “ladder of desperation.”
Luka Lei Zhang: I wrote my PhD on working-class literature in China and Singapore as a comparative study. One important part of my research focuses on migrant worker writings in Singapore and China. In Singapore, to put it briefly, there are a lot of migrant workers who come from less-developed countries such as the Philippines, Burma and Bangladesh. They work in those 3D jobs such as domestic helpers and construction workers.
Matt: ‘3D jobs’ here refers to the three D’s used to describe the work done by migrant workers. That is: Dirty, Dangerous, and Demeaning.
Luka Lei Zhang: Basically, that’s all the migrant workers do in Singapore but Singapore is not a unique case. They are also in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan and China. In China, it’s slightly different and they are not transnational workers but the nature of their work is the same. Along with my research, I have met a lot of worker writers who are writing a lot of things about their lives and their jobs. I have also read a lot of older working-class literature from this region; for instance, those who were actively writing in the 1970s. I found that it is very different how those older groups of workers wrote about their lives and work as working-class writers and contemporary domestic workers. After I did my PhD, I really wanted to collect those worker writers and put them together in one book.
I really want to highlight this kind of collective way of framing workers’ writing and not only as individual workers. For instance, a lot of migrant worker writers in Singapore have been framed as migrant writers and I have trouble with that term because, in general, when they talk about migrant writers, it seems worker identity has been erased or downplayed. There are a lot of literary events and activities about migrant worker writings in this region, for instance, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan but I’m always worried about how they downplay the worker aspect in these writings. There are a lot of things that also happened within this writing community. For instance, when migrant workers are writing about their home lives and personal emotions, they are very welcomed by the local government’s literary events but there is a line where, when they start writing about their working conditions as workers or when they want to have some improvements in their live conditions, they are no longer welcomed in these kinds of writing practices. I wanted to do a book where I didn’t encourage them to write about their working conditions but I really wanted to put this working-class literature class perspective in this book. Certainly, maybe the last one is that I wanted the writers to know that they are not writing alone. There are workers in different parts of Asia writing about their lives so I wanted to bring this book to them and let them know and say, ‘See, you are not working alone. We have a lot of people writing about their lives.’
There are writers in this collection who are very experienced writers and they have been writing for years. Some of the writers are very experienced ones and they are published and recognised but some of them are very, very new. There is also a relatively older worker-writer from Malaysia in this collection. I found him very interesting because he was connected to the older working-class writing in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1970s. In the 1960s and ‘70s, there was a very active working-class writing group and basically, all of them were factory workers, bus drivers or plantation workers. There was a very active working-class culture at that time but now, they are forgotten or marginalised because there are not a lot of working-class literature studies or institutions in that region. I read his books and the two self-published collections of his writings in Chinese. I read them and I asked him, ‘Is it okay if I translate one or two of your stories into this collection?’ He said, ‘Of course.’ That’s, again, one of my hopes that I can historicise those writings because those writings speaking from a working-class writer perspective are not something that new.
Matt: One of the interesting things about Asian Workers’ Stories is the range of different jobs (and nationalities) of its contributors, and how these interact with various literary traditions that inform their writing.
Luka Lei Zhang: There are a lot of domestic workers who are living in households and it is very hard to draw the line between life and work in the sense that they work where their employers live and they also live there. You can see their stories are very centred on the household. It’s no longer the traditional working-class life where you go to a factory or you go to a place to work.
Maybe Stefani’s story of ‘The Autobiography of The Other Lady Gaga’ is particularly interesting in terms of the form or the genre she uses. Her story in this collection is drawn from this form called dagli in the Filipino literary tradition. I think it’s similar to flash fiction, mini-stories or mini-fiction in English terms. Those writings started at the beginning of the 20th century in the Philippines after the Philippines and US war and people wrote in this form which was published in local magazines and newspapers in their vernacular language. She also uses this form for her writings which I find very interesting.
Matt: ‘The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga’ is a contribution to Asian Workers’ Stories by Stefani J Alvarez, a trans Filipina migrant worker who worked for almost 15 years in Saudi Arabia. As Luka mentioned, the dagli form that she uses in her story has its roots in the anti-American newspapers and magazines that proliferated after the Philippine–American War at the turn of the twentieth century. But as the translator’s note in the anthology makes clear, the dagli is also a form of vignette or sketch for expressing romantic love for a woman.
This context feels very present in Alvarez’s story: not just in terms of the political origins of dagli, but also its roots as a romantic genre. But those romantic roots contrast starkly with the multiple depictions of sexual harassment and violence in Alvarez’s story and, in doing so, Alvarez powerfully twists those roots into a sick parody of themselves. Like Luka says, for domestic workers the line between life and work is often hard to draw; and as can be read in Alvarez’s story, the same can be said about the line between workers’ issues or the issues of migrants, women, or LGBT+ communities, particularly in places like Saudi Arabia, where their vulnerability as oppressed groups is made worse by the conditions of their employment.
However, Alvarez is not the only writer in the collection to use form and genre in interesting ways.
Luka Lei Zhang: Speaking of form, I am very interested in, for instance, the form of journaling or how they document their factory life or construction workers’ lives. Those are the forms of bourgeois writers or middle-class writers but I find this kind of writing from the worker-writers gave a new meaning to the genre. Most of the time, we read a diary from famous writers like Virginia Woolf or others. For instance, a writer in this book, the last one, Md Sharif Uddin, is from Bangladesh and he used to work as a migrant worker in Singapore in construction. He published two books on his life in Singapore. Those two books are named as being diaries of a migrant worker in Singapore. Again, in terms of form, maybe journal-keeping or journaling was supposed to be very intimate and personal writing but his writing was meant to be read by others and others in terms of Singaporean people and other fellow workers for another different purpose.
Matt: Last year, on the Working Class Literature podcast, we published a three-part series on migrant worker poetry in China with a significant focus on the poetry anthology, Iron Moon. One thing that came up during my conversation with Luka, however, is that those Chinese migrant worker poets who have been translated into English themselves often reflect the biases of Western scholars and translators. If you’d like to listen to our series on Chinese migrant worker poetry, we’ll include a link to it on the webpage for this episode. Link in the show notes.
Luka Lei Zhang: In China, everything is very complicated even when it comes to workers’ writing. There are so many workers who are writing in China today or in the past and I find this is very interesting in terms of who got translated. Iron Moon did a great job in terms of collectively poets are translated but they are a certain type, I would say, of worker poets who got translated into English. Sometimes, I even feel that it depends on who was discussed or written about by Western academics.
Maybe this point is controversial or it could be controversial but what I wrote in my PhD is that there is a group of underground worker-writers or poets who are not popular in China but their work is not talked about by overseas readers or even scholars. Firstly, it’s extremely important and interesting that they have a very radical class consciousness. Secondly, they write and want to publish so they organised this collective because they wanted to build up a working-class culture. That’s also paradoxically the reason they stay largely unknown by most people because they don’t want to get to be known by the mainstream media or mainstream middle-class publishing houses because, in their publication, they have published three collections of their own works. They wrote very clearly, ‘Our aim of the writings and publications is to build up a working-class culture. It’s from the Chinese workers and it is for the working class.’ I find that extremely interesting and very important if we want to talk about working-class literature because, from my perspective, a lot of worker-writers are consumed today by middle-class taste and the mainstream publishing industry. Those writers are very radical also in terms of why they write. They see a political potential there in their writing and they want to change things. They want to call for a more collective way of writing and building up a culture of their own. Certainly, they want working-class solidarity from below. Even in the very beginning when I approached the poet and writer, Wu Ji, he was very suspicious of me, which is okay. He said, ‘Who are you?’ You could feel he had a sense that he didn’t want to be studied. I spent some time talking to him, explained my views and built up this kind of connection with him as well as with a few other writers from this collection. I find that’s really important, even in China or in Asia today, how the worker-writers are approached and how we collaborate with them as academics, translators or publishing industries. A lot of worker-writers, as far as I know, are consumed and I wrote about this in Singapore in terms of how worker-writers are made – and unmade – by middle-class writers or that industry in general.
Matt: Luka and Daria were just two of the incredible speakers at the festival this year, but there were numerous others, in both English and Italian, and always supported by a seemingly endless network of volunteer interpreters.
More than any one particular talk or performance, however, what really made the festival so unique was its connection to the ongoing struggle at GKN, which (as we’ve mentioned before) goes beyond the everyday struggle for work and wages towards something more fundamentally transformative. Over the years this struggle has been going on for, workers have put together an industrial plan to reopen the factory as a workers’ cooperative, but not making car parts as they were before; in the new industrial plan, the GKN workers intend to restart production making ecological goods, like a range of cargo bikes for fossil fuel-free delivery services, and solar panels, both to sell as a product in and of itself, and also for the factory to produce cheap renewable energy for the local community.
This is all part of the factory collective’s plan for what they call a ‘socially-integrated public factory’: a factory that will be at least 51% owned by the workers themselves and responding to the needs of the local area.
To help bring this about, the GKN factory collective proposed a law on public industrial consortiums which would allow public bodies to buy up industrial sites once companies try to shut down production. In December 2024, this law was approved by the regional government in Tuscany.
Dario Salvetti: The next step will be about fighting the city halls and the regional government to hurry up with the process of creating this public consortium which is the one that they can create to help with the decision on our loan. That may be in June or July and then they can start to bargain with the ownership in order that this building becomes public.
Matt: This is Dario Salvetti, the spokesperson for the GKN factory collective, speaking to a group of international attendees at this year’s Working-Class Literature Festival. Longer-term listeners might remember that we also spoke to Dario in our previous episodes on the festival and the struggle at GKN.
Dario Salvetti: The right-wing parties in Tuscany are attacking us. They say that our law on a public consortium is a law that brings back the soviets in Tuscany. I would like to but it’s not the case [laughter]. It’s a very, very moderate law that simply allows a public government to say, ‘If there is a factory, you have to behave like there is a factory. You cannot treat the factory like a real estate investment.’ This is the basic purpose of the law – not less and not more. We have a fear that the Democratic Party wants to invest in this law because they want to use it in the electoral field but it won’t succeed because their will is not what they sometimes do. This is a party that, for years and years, has been privatising everything. Now that they have to create a public thing, could also fail. There could also be the chance that they want to let us win but they are not able to because they don’t have the real mind to create something public. The worst scenario would be, in September when the election comes, that the right-wing will attack us because we have reached nothing. They will attack the Democratic Party because they formed a public consortium that has not functioned and that would be the worst scenario.
Matt: The Democratic Party that Dario is referring to here is not the one from the United States, but the main centre-left party in Italy, but one which (like many centre left parties in the West) has been firmly neoliberal for decades. And, as Dario explains, while the law itself will open space for workers to finally take control of their factory, it cannot simply be left up to a political party that for years has been dedicated to privatisation.
The plan will have to be fought for by the GKN workers and their supporters. And, as a result, the plan also includes space for other groups to be included.
Dario Salvetti: Our proposal will be that all this north part will remain a social part of the factory so that these activities will become regular and we will found a permanent office of working-class culture; not only literature but everything. The other part of the factory will be producing goods. Our plan is that there will be a part that won’t be used by us because our industrial plan needs 9,000 square metres. This area is 80,000 sq metres with 35,000 sq metres for the factory.
Matt: This permanent office for working-class culture that Dario mentioned is part of a plan to start a Working-Class Cultural Hub on the site of the former GKN factory. This cultural hub would include a museum, social and labour movement archives (beginning with that of the Tuscan metalworkers’ union), a permanent headquarters for the organisation of European Working-Class Literature Festivals, and an audiovisual centre including training aspiring filmmakers.
This is just one of the projects that will be developed on the site, which will be run by a cooperative made up not only of the former workers, but climate and migrants rights campaigners, mutual aid associations, and social centres. The plan is incredible, almost too good to be true. But as with all the other obstacles that have gotten in their way, the factory collective has a strategy for overcoming it and turning their plans into reality.
Dario Salvetti: More or less, we need €12 million and €600,000 can come from our unemployment benefit because we can shift our unemployment benefit into the cooperative. We have some ethical financial fund that could make €2 million, the ethical bank that could make €2 million and then we have another public sector that could bring into the project about €500,000. We then have about €4-5 million that should come from the bank. We are bargaining with some banks, as I was saying, they are not here because they are clever or they want our struggle to win, but because this struggle is so popular that it’s an occasion for the bank to do ‘social washing’. We know, this is the game, but it is impossible to restart the factory without a loan from a bank.
Matt: Unsurprisingly, the plan hasn’t been well received by the business community.
Dario Salvetti: What has been clear in the last months is that there is total scepticism from the industrial sector, in Italy at least, but I think it’s something across Europe. There is total scepticism about the chance to produce solar panels here. They want to leave the technology to China. You could say, ‘It’s better if someone produces solar panels and I don’t mind if they are produced in China or Italy.’ Yes and no. It would be better to produce solar panels with a short chain of value because, of course, the more kilometres that solar panels do, then later will be the recovery of the energy that solar panels produce.
We had to change a lot of things in the industrial plan. For example, we don’t want to produce classical solar panels like the Chinese ones. We can also produce those ones but the kinds of solar panels that we want to produce are those that are customised in order to be involved in the existing buildings and not to waste other square metres of free ground, for example, in the countryside. Everything was difficult but going quite well. From one day to another, we started to feel that every private investor was trying to find an excuse to quit the project. The real reason is that the industrial experts of the banks were saying, ‘It’s impossible to produce solar panels in Italy.’ Mario Draghi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, in a recent interview, was saying, ‘We have lost the technology. Leave solar panels to the Chinese and we will do other things.’ It’s not a question that we want to steal solar panels from the Chinese. We don’t want to steal from anybody. We want to cooperate, not to compete.
This context of struggle, of workers taking over a factory and reimagining what they could do with it, that filled the literature festival with so much energy. And, as in previous years, one way that this energy manifested itself was in a demonstration of thousands of attendees through the streets on the outskirts of Florence, singing (as always) the GKN workers’ anthem, ‘Occupiamola’, which in English translates to ‘Let’s Occupy It’.
[Audio from demonstration]
Matt: That final chant, ‘Siamo Tutti GKN’, translates as ‘We Are All GKN’.
This was very much something more than a simple literary festival; of course, it was also that, with the kinds of interesting speakers and discussions that you would expect at such an event anywhere in the world. But it was also something else, as well: it was working-class literature as an active part of working-class struggle, which gave the event a totally different energy and atmosphere. And, of course, this energy and atmosphere was in huge part down to the attendees, themselves often activists and organisers from across Italy, and beyond.
Francesca: Hi, I’m Francesca.
Gabriele: Hello, I’m Gabriele.
Bianca: Hi, I’m Bianca.
Gabriele: We come from Turin in Northwestern Italy and we represent Comunet which is a collective and mutual aid association which had a role in the GKN struggle in the past for years. Many of our comrades helped in many different ways. Some of them helped with the industrial plan. We also helped with communications and doing graphic design and helping with the media. We also helped with the legal part of the struggle, especially in the first years.
Bianca: Two or three years ago, we slept inside the factory. We spent a lot of time here with the Collettivo di Fabbrica and with a lot of associations. It’s the memory of the place and the fact that each time, we met new people and some people who we had already met in the past.
Francesca: In Turin, we have a very great history of factory workers who engaged in very great struggles but this is something new. As I said before, it’s not a struggle which is a struggle and then stops but it’s a struggle for a better future. For that reason, it’s a struggle that cannot stand alone on two feet but has to move with the whole society like the transfeminist movement and the ecological movement, all the struggles in society are involved in re-industrialisation in an ecological and new way. This has made the factory not an isolated place but a place of work and reproduction of life that is connected to all parts of society.
Davide: I think it can all be summarised in two words. It’s ‘building autonomy.’
My name is Davide and I’m one of the founders of an editorial project called Cronache Ribelli which is a project that was borne on social media in 2016 to talk about history from a bottom-up perspective and to talk about the history of common people, and minorities, and their struggles.
The history of GKN has been like many others in Italy, in Europe in general and in North America as well which is that of deindustrialisation and the taking down of all the industrial sectors of Western countries in order to relocate them. The only way it can be stopped is from below. Many workers have made the mistake of trusting the traditional parties and unions too much and thinking that they will solve the crisis from above. Actually, GKN is a clear example of how to construct something that starts from the lower levels which is the first step in gaining a sustainable solution.
Cosima: Hi, I’m Cosima and I’m from the south of Germany in Stuttgart. I’m here with some friends, especially in the context of the campaign called We’re Driving Together or, in German, Wir Fahren Zusammen.
Julia: My name is Julia and I live in Leipzig. I’m a PhD student there and I’ve actually been working on the GKN struggle for some years. I’m also here as part of the solidarity network from Germany as a scientist.
Cosima: I always wanted to come to see the GKN factory, especially because in the last few years, we’ve been involved, as we said, in the campaign We’re Driving Together or, in German, Wir Fahren Zusammen. That is a campaign involving the climate justice movement, workers from public transport and their union, Verdi, which included the bargaining campaign of the workers at the beginning of last year. We had the first climate strike which was also a warning strike by the workers. During that time, I think I was very inspired by the struggle that the workers are fighting here so it was always on my mind to, one day, come here to see it all.
Julia: I try to come here as often as possible but, at the moment, I’m here because, some months ago, a regional law was passed and they hope that the regional government will expropriate this building so that they can start their cooperative not in any place in their factory right here. At the same time, they were fired again some days ago so it’s a very contradictory moment. This is how you always feel being part of the struggle; that it could be the last moment to be here and to be part of that struggle in that place or this factory. That’s why I came and before they perhaps are finally evicted, everyone should come here to support them. This is actually part of their struggle and how they make history. Whatever attacks they face, they have a counter-action and I see this literature festival as part of that in order to mobilise people to make sure that the police don’t come to evict them
For me, the introduction yesterday was quite touching because Dario, one of the workers, said something like, ‘Okay, it’s important that we tell our story and that we do this literature festival because, as working-class people, we don’t have a lot of institutions or power resources as long as we are not working at the factory anymore. We cannot go on strike and stop production, for example. What we have is our history and our stories. This is how we can shape society and how we can build our alliances.’ As Marxists, we like to talk about the structures but they really remind us, the whole time, that also our stories and ideas do shape class consciousness enormously. This is why I think how they talk about their struggle and the fact that it is poetic is quite important.
One central question is how the climate movement and the labour movement can fight together because there are so many difficulties. Here, they show how industrial workers in this situation of dismissal can, with all their dignity, also be a part of the climate movement and shape climate politics in their own way. They show that there would be a way out and they do not show it only ideologically but with this new law, they could really be an example of how de-industrialisation here, and in other parts of the world, could be answered in an ecological way that’s really impressive I think.
Cosima: I think, in general, it’s so important and inspiring to have this utopia here for us in Germany, for example, in order for us to know where we have to go. We have to democratise union structures to work on the climate-labour turn in the climate movement as well as in the unions. To have an example of how it could be is very important and to also have hope by looking up to it.
Julia: This cultural place really feels like a small utopia. Everyone can go to an industrial area where there is only a shopping mall and some trees left rather than a big factory but you can come here and see how people are jointly fighting, eating and discussing politics which is just something I’ve never seen. It’s really a social movement in an industrial area which connects new social movements and the tradition of workers’ councils of the last one hundred years. You can feel it through social media that being here is something very special.
Matt: These are just a few snapshots of some of the conversations I managed to record while I was at the festival. But one conversation I had, which in many ways summed up everything from all the others I’d been having over that weekend, was with a trade unionist from the nearby city of Prato.
Francesca SUDD Cobas: I am Francesca and I am a union organiser. I organise with the union called SUDD Cobas which means ‘Union Unity, Democracy and Dignity’. Cobas means base committees as we are an autonomous union and we think that the core of union organisation should be the workers and groups of the workers who organise inside the workplaces.
We are here as volunteers. I’ve been translating for the panels in English and I’ve been doing security. I did a shift at the bar and various jobs.
We knew comrades from GKN even before 9th July 2021 [when the GKN struggle began – WCH eds.]. They were among the first to always come to the strikes that we were organising in the factories, mostly in the textile district in the Prato area which is one of the biggest textile districts in Europe. GKN workers were always among the first to come to show solidarity and cook meals for the workers who were on strike. During the years, we have developed these strong connections and we’ve tried to help the struggle as much as possible because we feel this struggle as if it’s our own somehow.
The majority of workers we organise with are migrant workers who come mostly from Pakistan but also from other countries. The majority of people who work here in the area have problems at work and work in exploitative conditions. A lot of people work 12 hours per day, seven days a week. One of the most important things that we try to do when organising together is be a megaphone for their voices, their experiences and their desire to struggle for a better life. I think that the Working-Class Literature Festival can really be a vector for this because its goal is to speak to the working class but also let the working classes speak, tell their own stories and talk about their conditions and working-class experiences at work but also what kind of alternative people think is necessary to commit to building together. That’s why I think this space is really something needed for the working class to tell its own stories and to share its own perspective.
It’s a podcast so you can’t see what we are seeing but looking in front of the GKN factory on the left, we have a hotel and inside this hotel, there is a group of female workers who are organising. They clean the hotel rooms and they are basically paid for the rooms they clean and not for the hours they work. That’s a big problem in the tourism sector in this line of work. On the right, we have a warehouse for a furniture company called Mondo Convenienza and they also work for a subcontract company in this warehouse. We were able to change these kinds of conditions after five months of strike and sleeping in front of the factory during this time. The workers are still organising because new problems emerge even though we won that struggle and people got a regular contract. We are now fighting for security in the workplace. In front of us, there is a supermarket called Panorama and the workers are struggling there against the lay-offs. At the side of the Mondo Convenienza warehouse, there was a supplier factory which worked for the brand Montblanc. Pakistani workers were working there making Montblanc bags for 12 hours a day, six days a week for €1,000 per month. When they unionised and they won the right to an eight-hour and five-day work schedule, Montblanc decided to take away the work from this factory so they found themselves without a job, basically. They have been fighting since 2023 to be reinstated in the Montblanc supply chain because ‘Made in Italy’ and fashion luxury is a sector that we often think is a good sector for people to work in because clothes or bags are so expensive so the working conditions must be good but, actually, it’s a sector where multinational companies and fashion brands try to extract the maximum profit possible from the workers.
The Working-Class Literature Festival is in front of all of these workplaces and we think that GKN, as a project of a socially-integrated public factory, could really be an important place for the workers to meet, recognise themselves and build a collective way to tell their own stories.
Matt: This really sums up so many of the things that made the Working-Class Literature Festival so special: partly the blurring of boundaries between attendees, volunteers and speakers that meant a union organiser might do security in the morning, translate in the afternoon, give a talk in the evening, and work the bar after dinner.
But also the way the festival was not just a platform for the former GKN workers, but also how it brought together the struggles of so many others. This is what gave the factory site the feeling of being a “small utopia”, as Julia and Kusuma put it. The quality of the conversations you had and the connections you made with people felt different to those in normal everyday life. It brought to mind a line from the novel, Disnaeland, by Scottish author DD Johnston (who we interviewed in Working Class Literature episodes 5 and 6) where he writes, “shared endeavour is the basis of meaningful conversation.” What made these conversations (not to mention the singing, and marching, and chanting) so meaningful was that they took place in a setting where people weren’t just talking about social transformation, but one in which transformation was actually happening.
Truth be told, I’m almost embarrassed at how significant an experience it was for me as I feel like it makes me sound like a born-again religious fanatic. But it’s like Hemingway once wrote about Paris, “If you are lucky enough to have lived [there] as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Unfortunately, I’m not a young man anymore, but regardless my brief visit to Campi Bisenzio was an experience that absolutely will stay with me for the rest of my life.
As I’m recording this, however, their struggle is in a state of flux: as mentioned right at the beginning of this episode, the workers were made redundant for the third and final time just before the festival. There is now the fear that they could be evicted at any point now. At the same time, they are waiting for the industrial consortium to become operational to allow their socially-integrated public factory to take shape. Yet the factory collective and their supporters are not resting: events continue to be organised in July to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the struggle, plans continue to be drawn up for the new factory, and financing continues to be brokered in order to make it a reality.
The Working-Class Literature Festival and the struggle of the former GKN workers highlight what literature and politics fundamentally have in common. That, in the end, both literature and politics are about producing stories to understand both ourselves and the world; and they both involve imagining new worlds. And, ultimately, a group of workers taking over their factory and fighting to transform it into an eco-socialist coop against a background of rising far-right reaction sounds like the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction, even mythology. And yet there it is, in an industrial suburb on the outskirts of Florence.
While I was at the festival, I shared a sleeping area with about five others. One of them was a retired firefighter and veteran of numerous Italian social struggles who said something that has since stayed with me. He said: “When you’re in the desert, you need to know where the oases are if you want to survive. But if you don’t look after your oases, even they will dry up.” The GKN struggle is one such oasis, and it’s down to all of us to help cultivate it, and to cultivate new oases, if we want to survive the moment we’re in.
Francesca SUDD Cobas: I think the GKN struggle is significant because, from the first moment, they put their struggle at the service of every struggle. Somehow, they started the struggle against the lay-offs and the closure of the factory by saying, ‘Yes, we are fighting for this but there is more to fight for. We want to put our struggle at the service of changing the whole system with all the problems in society that we experience; not only to struggle against all these problems but also to try to build an alternative.’ In that sense, the project of the socially-integrated public factory is a fundamental example of the necessity to struggle against the problems we face but also, in the meantime, already beginning to build an alternative. We cannot wait for the final victory to start questioning ourselves about what we want or need. We should start now to build the world we want to live in – a different society.
[outro music]
Matt: That’s all we have time for in this episode. If you want to learn more about the Florence Working-Class Literature Festival and the GKN workers’ struggle, we recommend you check out our Working Class Literature episodes 10 and 11. You can also find more info on the webpage for this episode. Link in the show notes.
It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.
Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
Our theme tune for this episode is ‘Occupiamola’ as sung on a GKN workers’ demonstration in 2024. Many thanks to Reel News for letting us use their recording, and you can find a link to the documentary it’s taken from on the webpage for this episode.
This episode was edited by Jesse French.
Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.
