The premier among workers at risk: think of the life of our families

One hundred minutes in the crowd. With 300 people waiting for 5.20pm on 8 November 2019 to vent the pent-up anger that has been handed down from mother to son in Taranto for more than 50 years. The day of the premier Giuseppe Conte, outside and inside the gates of what was the Italsider, began in the car park of the concierge D, freed in a hurry, with the tow truck, from the workers' cars but not from the refuse that they do it look sadder than it actually is already in a day of strike against factory closure.

A strike with very low memberships, "because otherwise the company is doing itself a favor", explain the workers who return home. To leave the field to the other Taranto, gathered in the parking lot to wait for Count. The Taranto of the mothers of the Drums, of the cassintegrati, of the fired, of the tarantini that they don't want the monster anymore. So they call it, as they shout to the rhythm of Ta-ran-to li-be-ra. Tarantini of all ages who act as a counterpart to about fifteen mayors who arrived from the province, complete with a tricolor band, to ask Conte to "protect the occupation". Fortunately those of the associations do not hear them. The premier gives an appointment to the mayors in the evening, in the prefecture, where he also convenes the prosecutor Carlo Maria Capristo to ask him, in all probability, the situation of the Altoforno 2, one of the risk situations that led ArcelorMittal to bid farewell to Taranto .

Before meeting the institutions and workers inside the factory, which instead will reserve him a more hospitable welcome, also seasoned with applause, Conte decides to face the citizens who challenge him. In order to listen to them, he even makes his way through his escort: in a climate of tension, the police forces are struggling to hold back the crowd; but then in the end it is Conte himself who gets rid of them to meet as many people as possible. There is Carla, the mother who lost her 15-year-old son; Roberta, the social worker who works as a waitress so as not to leave Taranto, but wants to build the family in a healthy place; there is the worker of the mill, who feels "with a guilty conscience because I bring home the poisons of the factory, but I cannot fire myself"; and then the hooded boy to whom Conte decides to uncover his face before listening to him, and Sabrina, the mother of the Drums, who wants "the closure of the factory and the reclamation using the workers", what environmentalists call the Taranto Plan. Conte takes note, even of the woman's phone number, promising to go and see her at his home after dinner to try to better understand the proposal. Carla Luccarelli, who lost her son Giorgio for a sarcoma, shows his photo to the premier: "He wanted to live and have children, but it was not possible. And so now let's close: here there are more deaths than births ». The leitmotiv it is always the same, interrupted only by the choirs we-want-to-live: "Because in Genoa it was possible to close the hot area and here not? Why does Germany launch the green plan and we do not? ». In the crowd, Pasquale also makes space, fired on Thursday: he wants to shout his anger at Conte, five centimeters from his face. The Apulian president listens to everyone: "Who else wants to talk?" And Giuseppe, unemployed, comes forward: «I live with the Drums and I have always refused to work here because I met people who died there. I'm 38 and I don't want to have children in this city. " Conte listens to everyone, but in the answer he is sincere without deceiving anyone: "I came here without a mask, you saw me, but I don't have the solution in my pocket."

Inside the plant, then, in a more serene factory council, among the representatives of the other Taranto, the one that does not want and cannot disregard work, gives some more reassurance: «The former Ilva dossier – tells the 200 workers gathered around him, after listening to them for an hour – is a priority for the government. We must manage it all together, as a country system ». But we must convince the other Taranto, the one who shouts "or closes now or never"