Il polline e la ruggine : Memoria, lavoro, deindustrializzazione a sesto San Giovanni (1985-2015)

Pollen and Rust. Memory, Work and Deindustrialization in Sesto San Giovanni (1985-2015). Our research has been funded by the Lombardy Region; and we have worked in partnership with a local Foundation (ISEC – Institute for the history of contemporary age), an independent Association for ethnographic research (AVoce). One of the main requirements of the Lombardy Region’s call was the ability to reach out to a wider audience with respect to a strictly academic one. The call put a strong emphasis on dissemination, in order to involve /solicit the interest of the general public and go outside the university rooms. We intended our project as a project of public history and our research resulted in different research products: the documentary “Pollen and Rust” is one of them.
The documentary has no voice-over, not a single narrator; it is the result of a tight editing of almost 50 interviews. We have asked people: How they remember both industrial work and its loss; How they remember the aftermath of the closings; How they use the history of deindustrialization to understand the present and think about the future.
We mainly interviewed former workers: blue and white collars, local trade union leaders, residents. We interviewed mostly male workers, but also women. We interviewed mostly older workers, but also younger ones, in training [for becoming mechanics or chef in a school located in a former Falck building and new creative professionals.
In the documentary, we did not make any attempt to determine whether the steel plants in Sesto should or should not have been closed, instead we tried to elicit the “reasons” people invoked, and the options they faced. Our ultimate aim was to deconstruct the predominant inevitability discourse for closing.
That is why we interviewed middle and top managers as well: in particular, we met some of the Falck technical staff -mostly industrial engineers who spent their career in the firm - and the Falck top HR Executives who arrived at Falck at the beginning of the ‘90s to manage both the layoffs and the social buffers during the plant’s closing. In their experience of job insecurity, middle managers surely had more personal resources to mobilize in respect to workers (more human capital, for instance, and likely more financial resources), but they also have less or no access to social buffers, and stronger expectations about their own career and on upward mobility.
At the same time, in the transition, they experienced a total lack of social visibility. One of the main findings in our research has been that the most visible tension in the sense-making and memory of the abandoning the steelworks is the one between old middle managers and new top managers, especially the HR managers that came to Falck from outside at the beginning of the 1990s, new managers that held key positions knowing little or nothing about steel making and the Falck company.
So far, little or no attention has been paid to this perspective, which is also the middle class perspective vis a vis the broken promises of the upward mobility which was embodied in post war growth, and ist triad (big government /big business and big labour). We believe that this general trend in the big business under the Globalization pressure is quite well exemplified in the Falck case.
Not everyone is scarred by Deindustrialization: Deindustrialization is experienced differently, with winners and losers: at Falck we could explore those kind of fractures. So I believe that the documentary captures at least 4 narratives: the workers, the trade unionists, the insider middle managers, the outsiders top managers. But there is one more narrative: we took interest in considering not only those who are displaced from manu