Five dead and three seriously injured is the toll of this umpteenth workers’ massacre, a new blood sacrifice shed by the working class on the altar of profit. A massacre that could certainly have been avoided if the rule of economizing on everything, first and foremost on safety, was not in force.

As many as seven of the eight workers involved in the collapse were immigrants, confirming how the working class is an international class and at the same time how useful it is for the bosses to divide and oppose Italian and foreign workers in order to better exploit the entire working class.

Unlike the daily trickle of proletarians who die on the job - at least three a day - the massacre can excite and move the masses, reduced to resignation and indifference by decades of defeats resulting from the renunciatory and treacherous policies of the collaborationist trade unionism of CGIL, CISL and UIL. This is why the press in the hands of the big industrial groups carried out an infamous work of disinformation, trying as long as possible to conceal and reduce the number of workers involved and victims.

The Florence grassroots unionism reacted in the best way to this new dramatic manifestation of exploitation and oppression of the working class, proclaiming a unitary 24 - hour provincial general strike for last Monday and a demonstration in front of the Florence Prefecture.

This unitary action must be strengthened and extended to the entire conflictual trade unionism, to the combative areas within the CGIL, because it is the necessary path to restore the workers’ confidence in their ability to fight and defend themselves collectively, to get the workers’ movement back on its feet and rebuild a true class union, which can only happen in Italy outside and against the regime trade unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL), which have been submitting their policies for decades to the needs of the capitalist economy and the compatibility imposed by this economic regime.

The trade unions rightly denounce the system of contracting and subcontracting and call for stricter laws to punish guilty company managers, as well as for more controls by the safety authorities. But it is not at the judicial level that the problem is solved, with the employers’ parties able to deploy swarms of overpaid lawyers and a system that is inherently anti - worker. The deterrent effect of stricter legislation, if perhaps it can help, is not decisive where the political regime, with its state machinery, only masks with democracy its nature as an instrument of the bosses: as efficient at sending the police against pickets of strikers as it is inefficient at sending inspections in companies.

It is in the workplace, in the relations between workers and bosses, and thus in the general power relations between classes, that the heart of the problem lies. It is in a climate of social peace, i.e., of oppression of the working class, of resignation, of individualism that workers are forced to accept any working condition, or worse, they think they can protect themselves by themselves, running more and risking their lives and health.

The confederal trade unions limit themselves to hypocritically denouncing the umpteenth massacre, without ever organizing a decisive struggle in defense of working conditions, as is the case with today’s national strike, limited to two hours and only for the construction and metalworker categories!

Only by extending the struggle to all categories of workers, public and private, only by re - appropriating the methods of the class struggle, of the general strike, only by rejecting the damned regulation of the strike (law 146 of 1990 wanted by CGIL, CISL and UIL and voted by DC, PSI and PCI), will the workers be able to regain their strength and unity, that is, the indispensable conditions to put a stop to capitalist exploitation. But to prevent them from taking this road they often find lined up precisely those trade union leaders who should instead guide and defend them.

It is only with the strengthening of the class struggle, with the strengthening of conflictual trade unionism, that workers will be able to find the tools and the courage to put their lives before the demands of profit against the bosses’ and state arrogance!

And from these struggles, ever stronger and more extensive, will come the real protection of life and health only possible with the liberation of labor from the economic laws of profit, with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.