Since early April, immigrant workers in the Tuscan city of Prato have staged a wave of strikes demanding their right to a forty-hour work week, or “8×5.”
Organized by the union SUDD Cobas, these walkouts, dubbed “Strike Days,” have directly involved seventy textile and garment factories in Europe’s biggest textile manufacturing hub. Highly successful, these simultaneous strikes have now won 8×5 — eight-hour days, five days a week—in sixty-eight fashion workshops and warehouses, all within the span of fourteen weeks.
These victories are the result of seven years of organizing in one of Italy’s most infamous industrial zones. Prato is estimated to host over seven thousand textile and garment companies, employing forty-three thousand people. Workers are typically hired by small companies engaged in distinct phases of fashion production — specializing in dyeing thread, twisting yarn, printing fabric, sewing T-shirts, or even moving hangers between establishments. Together, these activities generate almost €2 billion in annual export revenue, making Prato an important hub of world-famous “Made in Italy” fashion.
In Italy, however, the city is renowned for both its high presence of immigrant workers and its exploitative labor conditions, including fourteen-hour workdays, union busting, dangerous machinery, and makeshift dormitories inside workshops that led to the deaths of seven Chinese workers in a 2013 factory fire.
For years, this infamy brought a slew of journalists and scholars to the city, including myself. Today, familiar videos of workers at sewing machines circulate alongside images of marches and picket lines as the city has become the scene of an upsurge of immigrant labor militancy. Union organizers at SUDD Cobas call this upsurge the “8×5 movement,” tracing its inauguration back to the 2021 Texprint strike (which I wrote about for Labor Notes at the time); a nine-month strike at a fabric printing company aimed at winning a forty-hour week.
It was at Texprint that I first encountered the union, and I, like many others, found myself called into their struggle. Their bravery and humor was infectious, and I watched in awe as picketers held a twenty-four seven blockade to prevent the circulation of trucks at the factory gate, even as they faced months of fines, violence, arrests, and harsh weather.
SUDD Cobas is famous for these permanent blockades. Picketers eat, sleep, and hang out at the presidio, the term used by SUDD Cobas members to refer to the infrastructure of tents, tables, chairs, and gazebos erected to support everyday life at the picket line. Typically denoting guardianship or garrison in Italian, the presidio and its inhabitants ensure that finished goods cannot exit workplaces. The presidio allows the strike to hit the company’s bottom line regardless of the strike’s numerical strength; some of the strikes have been minority strikes. These financial repercussions and the threat of client loss eventually get many employers to the table.
SUDD Cobas was formed in May 2024 after a split from the independent union Si Cobas. SUDD is an acronym for Sindacato Unione Democrazia Dignità—the Unity, Democracy, Dignity Union — while Cobas refers to the many comitati di base (“base committees”) that populate Italy’s industrial landscape. Base unions like SUDD Cobas operate outside of the country’s three main labor confederations (the CGIL, CISL, and UIL), historically tied to different political parties. In Prato, SUDD Cobas has clashed with both employers and elected officials from the center-left Democratic Party as it demands rights for some of the city’s most marginalized workers.
The Strike Days model launched this spring is a new organizing model for the union: simultaneous, unlimited strikes with permanent picket lines across multiple companies, coordinated by geographic zone. Last week, I sat down with Sarah Caudiero, a coordinator of SUDD Cobas, to talk about the union’s experiment.
Great Job Sarah Caudiero & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
