 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Over the past fortnight, Italy has seen a number of protests by student and youth organizations. These followed the death of a student 18-year-old Lorenzo Perrelli in a workplace accident. Lorenzo was killed while completing his mandatory internship at a private company. For many Italian youth, this tragic death was not a one-off incident, but symptomatic of a larger malaise in the education and employment sectors in the country. Decades of neoliberal policies have drastically reduced the opportunities available to Italian students. The latest round of protests has reflected the frustration and anger stemming from these realities. Origeno Coppola of Potheria al-Papolo talks about the recent protests and the nature of the Italian education system. Friday, 21 January, Lorenzo Perrelli, the young student working in an internship, died during the working accident. Even in the night of the 21st of January, students in Rome took to the streets to protest against this situation. Of course, it's not a case. It's not like an event once that happened. It's something that it's regularly like working accidents in Italy are very frequently. You have in the normal labor market four to five people dying every day. So it's like a record on the European level. But it was like a protest also against the general situation of students, because in the last two years, students were really the forgotten subjects of the politics in Italy. You had all the questions of distant learning, of the closing schools during the pandemic. They really were totally marginalized in their needs. They were totally marginalized in listening what the students are saying. And even if at the beginning students said, okay, it's okay that we are not going to school because we do not want to be infected with the virus. After a couple of months, the politicians, the governments didn't give any other response to school situation. So the classes, they still were overcrowded. All the infrastructural system was not improved so that students could return to school. And this is one of the most important reasons why what happened Friday with Lorenzo, then the students said, no, it's enough. It's enough. We cannot deal with it anymore. We cannot manage it anymore to be like such victims, such under pressure of the system. And of course, all these school problematics are not just linked to the pandemic. It's a huge, bigger transformation of the school system. Italy is living since more or less 15, 20 years. It's like more and more away from a school that gives you the cultural and the social instruments to understand the world, to be a person into this world and much more like a place where you increase your employability, where you are just formed as a labor market subject. And this is something that the students really do not want anymore, above all, because the labor market is not offering them anything positive. You have still like youth unemployment that is huge. You have still precarity that hurts every one out of two people under 35. So this was one of these were the main reasons why last weekend when Lorenzo Paredi died in a working accident, the youth took to the streets three days in a row. So the main educational system is still public, but there are reforms that were introduced like above all starting from 2013, 2014, and then 15 reforms which introduced like an internship, a working internship, mandatory internship for students. So every single student has to dedicate 200 to 400 hours every year in a private company to work there. And the explanation is with this experience, you can increase your possibility to find a job when you leave school. With this, we are adapting our school and the educational system to the European average, because you have in other countries like in Germany, like in Switzerland, like in France, you have this educational system that you are at school, but you're also in a workplace in a company making concrete experiences. What we are saying like a sewing five, six, seven years after the introduction of this mandatory internship is the fact that for a lot of younger people, this situation in a workplace means exploitation and means unpaid work, because first of all, these mandatory internships are not paid. So the people, the young people are going to the school, to the companies working there for free. And secondly, we have a lot of people explaining us that they are making very repetitive work, they are making very also dangerous work. And so it's not something that you are like introduced in the labor market to understand how the labor market is functioning to understand what you want to do with your future, but it's above all the labor market needs more people to be exploited. So we put there also the students. This is what the students are saying. And this is the big issue, because they are not saying that the mandatory internship is a problem per se, but it's a problem in the way the state is organizing it. So the state is pushing unpaid workers into the labor market to be exploited and the case of Lorenzo, who died on Friday, January 21, was really the most impressive example of how this exploitation works. That means that even you can die in a working accident during the internship. The protests peaked on January 28 when mobilizations took place across the country. Many of these mobilizations were met with heavy repression. What were the key demands of the students and youth on the streets? How do the issues faced by students also relate to the larger economic and social crisis in Italy? So the demands are really, really general in the sense they demand of first of all that it's not possible that the 18 year young student dies during a working accident in the internship. This is something that they cannot accept. It's something like really attacking the dignity and also like the solidarity between the students. So this is one of the first demands. Of course, they are also demanding like a reform of the school system because they do not want just to be unpaid and exploited workers for private companies, but it's a demand as I said also for a better future. They say the future it's unwritten. It's not like that we are condemned to be what we are today. We want to change the situation and that's the reason why we took to the streets. So the state in the last weeks they answered with a lot of repression, with a lot of violence in every single city where the students took to the streets. The police blocked the demonstrations. The police attacked the demonstrators violently and this is something that is really not acceptable. And for making a concrete example how the state and how the ruling class and the political classes dealing with the situation was last weekend when during the demonstrations of Friday afternoon all over Italy, Friday was mobilization day all over Italy from calls from students organizations. In the same time in the Italian parliament we had the election of the new president of the Italian Republic and Sergio Matarella was re-elected with a large majority in the eighth round of the elections and it was like he's a very old guy. He represents the old he represents the the incapability of the ruling class to renew the political institutions and so while the parliamentarians were electing an old guy that is just yeah I mean it was changing nothing to get the situation worse in Italy. The students took to the streets and they were beaten by the police and this is really an image that represents the Italian situation today. Yes of course I mean the last 30 years Italy was the only country where salaries didn't increase in the last 30 years but they even decreased by six percent and this is something that working class people and working class families are really feeling directly this is something that the the Italian economy could grow only thanks to more the more exploitation of the working class to inflation that blocked the increase of salaries and so on and this is the reason why the students protests are very important today. They are touching exactly this kind of problematics that the students situation in the labor market it's like the most precarious compared to the to the larger working class and they are making the link between the transition between the educational system to the labor market and this is also the reason why they called to unions to to showing themselves showing themselves solidarity with the students what didn't happen and I think this is the biggest the biggest problem we are living today that the student movement is able to take to the streets is able to condemn us also general economic developments in in in Italy but the unions do not recognize that there is a huge potential to be with with the with the students and to connect the workers struggles going on in Italy with the students struggles because we saw that since June 2021 a lot of companies private companies are firing the workforce are closing the productive fabrics are producing in the Eastern Europe so there is a huge precarization of the labor market and this could be like a moment of unity of convergence of the struggles between students and and workers but it's all about the unions if they do not decide to sustain to support this kind of student struggles it's very important very difficult also to win their struggles their working struggles