The disaster that occurred as a result of the explosion at the ENI refinery in Calenzano is yet another example of how the ones who pay the consequences of negligence and the need for profit of companies are always and only the workers. At the moment, there are five deaths and 27 injuries at the production site, adding to the death toll from the bosses’ greed in 2024. A toll that is increasing compared to last year, so much so that the deaths at the end of October 2024 were already 890: 22 more workers than in 2023.
Adding to the anger and dismay over the continuous examples of negligent failures in corporate safety systems, including those of large companies, is the evidence of the billions in profits made by ENI, as well as other companies in the sector, following the spike in energy prices in recent years: in 2022 alone, the Italian multinational recorded a net profit of 13.8 billion, almost triple the 5.8 billion a decade earlier. A mountain of cash that evidently did not help convince managers and shareholders to invest adequately in workers’ safety. On the other hand, that public participation in a company – ENI is 30% state-owned – does not imply, in a bourgeois state, that it implements different and more sustainable strategies than those of private capital in general had already been demonstrated by how ENI and its subsidiaries had devastated the Niger Delta several years ago, due to oil spills from their pipelines.
To reduce the incidence of these tragedies we need to increase the intensity of the struggle. Today, the insufficiency of social conflict is reflected in inadequate legislation to prevent accidents and workplace deaths: in fact, the root causes of tragedies, which can be traced back to employers’ pressure on workers to ignore safety measures in order to save time and money, are almost always totally overlooked in judicial rulings. And this explains the very light sentences handed down to the owners of businesses where accidents occur. The current legal framework provides for the crime of aggravated manslaughter if the fatal event occurs as a result of violations of occupational safety regulations, but the vagueness of the obligations and the severity of the penalties provided for make the power of deterrence against perpetrators ineffective.
In this context, the last governments have contributed to making it easier for companies to violate the few existing rules: last July’s Legislative Decree 103/2024, for example, established the impossibility of carrying out different inspections on the same company at the same time, the limitation of surprise inspections and the enhancement of the employer’s adversarial role. During the Draghi government, subcontracting was further liberalized, one of the mechanisms that most play on the blackmail of workers and, therefore, at the origin of workplace accidents. Today it is urgent to fight to increase the capillarity and effectiveness of controls on businesses and to give strong criminal relevance to a series of specific conducts of the employer, such as the lack of investment in certain areas of safety and psychological pressure to ensure that workers do not comply with mandatory measures.
As long as political power is in the hands of the capitalist class and as long as the laws of the market dictate the spending or saving needs of businesses, however, every conquest will remain partial and temporary. It is also from this awareness that every struggle within the places of production must move.
