Industrial sunset, Ecological sunrise. The Italian Workers' Movement between Deindustrialisation and Environmentalism

The article explores how the double challenge of industrial and environmental crisis impacted the Italian labour movement, acutely questioning its idea of the future. From the late 1970s, industrial restructuring processes strongly impacted on trade union participation in environmental and health conflicts. The defence of jobs became dominant and there were many local conflicts between workers and environmentalists. However, increasingly after the Chernobyl disaster, the trade union movement began a more complex reflection on environmental issues, also to respond to the challenge of deindustrialisation. Energy transition, compensation for victims of occupational diseases and industrial disasters, management of toxic waste and brownfield redevelopment, relocation and outsourcing as methods of bypassing environmental regulation, and corporate greenwashing strategies became issues of the unions’ agenda. If this did not lead to the birth of a true “eco-unionism”, it was nevertheless a significant rethinking of the ideology of productivism and unlimited growth.