Noxiousness as a contested terrain. Workers’ ecological agency and toxic labour regimes at the Taranto Steel Plant

Abstract

While different strands of literature highlight how labour and nature are equally exploited and depleted through accumulation processes, they generally focus on contentious, formal, and collective forms of workers’ agency overlooking less visible practices of resistance and coping. 
Centred on labour process theory, this article analyses the everyday practices through which labour exploitation and nature appropriation is secured at the workplace by capital and how workers’ agency vis-à-vis labour control and environmental degradation emerges. 
Drawing on 55 biographical interviews with workers, 18 months of participant observation with trade unions and environmentalist movements, research on personal archives of local unionists, a systematic newspapers review and extensive document analysis, the article focuses on workers’ ecological agency at Europe’s biggest steel plant, located in Taranto, Italy. 
By reconstructing the changes in labour regimes since mid-1960s with a particular attention to their ecological aspects, the paper teases out how managerial control practices and workers’ resistance and adaptation influence the ways in which labour is exploited and the environment is depleted at the workplace and beyond. Finally, the paper shows that the boundaries between inner and outer environments considered as the legitimate object of environmental negotiations is itself a crucial contested terrain of struggle.

Discussants

Camilla Macciani, Università di Trento

Natalia Magnani, Università di Trento

Chair

Katia Pilati, Università di Trento