The Contested Terrain of Noxious Deindustrialisation. Workers’ Ecological Agency and Labour Regimes at the Taranto Steel Plant

Political ecology and labour environmentalism identify constant devaluation of labour and nature as a core feature of capitalism. Work, in these accounts, is considered a crucial mediator of socio-ecological metabolism and labour a fundamental actor in any ecological transformation. These perspectives have focussed on structural dynamics of systemic change or trade unions’ environmental policies, relying mainly on the analyses of discourses, official positions, or the role of particular biographies of labour-environmental activists.

Yet, this literature tends to conflate labour with trade unions; it also overlooks how toxicity related to production processes is imposed, resisted and negotiated at the workplace level and how this process of ecological deterioration is concretely linked to labour exploitation.

Drawing on the concept of industrial noxiousness (Feltrin et al. 2022) and combining class ecology (Barca, 2014) and labour process theory, this paper considers the exposure to toxicity at work as a matter of continuous negotiations between workers and managers. Very much like exploitation, the exposure to toxicity is driven by structured antagonistic interests at the workplace that can be only temporarily stabilised through multiple forms of coercion, consent, resistance, and adaptation. The paper, therefore, teases out the everyday, often informal and individualized forms of ecological agency enacted by workers in an highly polluting steelmaking process.

Drawing on biographical interviews with workers, archival research and documentary analysis, this paper reconstructs how noxiousness has been negotiated at the workplace-level in one of the biggest steel factory of Europe, the ex-Ilva plant of Taranto, Italy since its foundation in the 1960s. Looking at managerial practices of coercion, consent creation, and labour’ segmentation together with workers’ forms of (individual and collective) resistance, adaptation and co-management, the paper teases out the emergence and decline of successive labour regimes and their ecological consequences at work and beyond.