 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Italy has been one of the country's most hit by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The total number of cases is almost 25,000 and the death toll has cost 1,800. The entire country has gone into an unprecedented lockdown, even as we are seeing great gestures of solidarity among the people there. To talk more about the situation, we have with us Giuliana Granato, member of the National Coordination of the Leftist Political Organization, Pateria Popola. Thank you so much, Giuliano, for joining us. Great to hear from you especially at this difficult time. So first of all, could you tell us a bit about what the situation is on the ground right now, where you are? What is the kind of shutdowns that are happening? What is the kind of social situation there? The situation is quite difficult. We are living difficult times. Especially from a weak home. The situation started to be very serious just in the northern of Italy, especially in Lombardia, that is the richest region in Italy. But after a few days, the situation right now is very critical all over the country. The whole country, the whole Italy is right now a red zone. It means we are closed, we are locked in our houses. For example, I'm here in my house in Naples and I cannot go out. I can just go out to buy food at supermarkets. I can go to work. The situation is that many businesses are closed right now because of the degree of the government. The Italian government signed a few degrees. In a week, they signed something like 3-4 degrees, stating that many non-essential businesses have to be closed. The problem is that while shops and a few small businesses are closed, many large factories are still open and many millions of workers are compelled or obliged to go to work every morning in places where there is no guarantee for their health. For example, we have factories like Fiat FCA, the biggest car producer here in Italy. Just today, they decided to close for a couple of weeks in order to guarantee the minimal health conditions for their workers. But there are other factories that are still open because there is a struggle right now between workers and the government. The government is trying to keep the businesses open because otherwise, other international competitors could profit from the situation, especially the UK, USA, because they are acting in a very different way. The workers who are trying to impose their first need, they need to save their own life. So, this is an important struggle and we in the last day assisted to wild card strikes all over the country in large and small businesses, factories, offices, call centres. There is quite, I would say, a mass insubordination from the workers because they want to just defend their own lives and life of their families. And the situation is more complicated because there is a quite big contradiction because you cannot go out also to have work. You can, but the police can stop you and there are something like 6,000 cases against people who are found in the streets or just walking. But you cannot go out walking, but you have to go to work. And so this is an important contradiction because the life and the profits are not on the same side. You have to choose to defend the first one, the health of our own people or the profits of few businessmen. Right. So, going a bit back, I mean, now there is a call for, of course, solidarity at a national level. We have seen a lot of gestures of this kind of solidarity people singing, for instance, in the balconies and there has been an outpouring of support from people across the world. But to take a few steps backward in terms of the overall approach to public health itself, do you think that the situation right now is also reflective of a certain lack of planning that hit Italy's public health system? Yeah, absolutely, yes. There are structural problems and contingent problems because the coronavirus was undervaluated when there were the first cases. Every politician was just going in TV just to say, to tell people it's okay, it's normal, just a flu, no problems at all. We are not China. We will not have any problems here in Italy. In a few days, and you can read the declaration, the statements of the politician in the government, the national government, local level, you can read the change of the, also the communication. Now it's a pandemic all over the world. It's declared a pandemic by OMS and the situation is changing. But the structural problem is still here because in the last 20 years, we faced very tough austerity measures imposed by Italian government, by European Union, by international monitoring, by international institutions. In the health system, they meant we closed a lot of hospitals, about almost 400 hospitals and structures were closed. We have, we lack 70,000 workers in the health national system and we have destroyed the national health system that is still struggling because it was an important conquest by the people, by the workers in the 70s. And it's still here, but we have many, many problems, especially in the south, because also there is, we have not a unique national system. We have 20 different systems because of so-called federalism. So it's very difficult to have a centralized plan strategy. And we will need it right now, but we cannot have it in a few days. Basically, we lack personal, we lack structures. The money went to the private clinics and not to the public. And we have not, we have the culture of prevention. We are trying to impose a different culture even in the health system based on prevention, like, I don't know, in Cuba, small countries, small island, but there the health is guaranteed to the people. Here is very different. And there is another problem. We have seen it also in other countries. Italy is not producing the medicines. We are not producing the medical machines. So we have, we are obliged to buy them on the market. But the problem is that right now no one wants to sell these products to Italy. So we will need a national industry able to safeguard the health of our people. These are structural problems. They are not due to the center-left government that we have right now, neither to the legah government a few months ago. The problem is that we had 20 years of austerity and especially in the last 10 years, we lost 37 billions of euros that were not put into the health national system. And we are facing this situation because of our politicians and because of the austerity. Right. So a key question is in such times, how do the leftist and progressive organizations also respond to an issue like this? So there is, of course, a larger demand for the reversal of austerity. But then also I understand ground-level interventions which your organization has been making. So could you talk a bit about that? Yeah, we started to, we started from the basic needs from the people because people is very worried because they have daily needs who are not able to meet. And so we as a national organization started to with few, I will say services. We call it mutualism or mutual aid. We offer our help in order to buy food for other people who cannot go out from their houses also because they are the most vulnerable people in the country. And we offered our help in order to guard children because many parents are obliged to go to work. So the schools are closed, the universities are closed and the children are alone in the houses. We are interrupting this service because right now the situation is worse than in the past. So we cannot go easily into the houses of other people. And we started with another service of mutual aid. We call it red phone. Basically we have four lines and we are asking workers to call us to help to clarify the situation, to have legal aid because many bosses are simply abusing of the situation. For example, they oblige workers to go to work and they stay and bosses stay at home. They oblige workers to work even without any, and when I say any, I mean any DPE that individual protection mean. And so we are, in a week we had something more than 100 phone calls from all over Italy, from the factories, from call centers, from workers without any contract. They are the first one to pay the crisis because the crisis is on their shoulders and they are going to be fired and without a contract you cannot also demonstrate you were in that workplaces. So workers are very hit by this crisis but in terms of health and in terms of their own job. So we are trying to help our own people and to defend the people also because the government is not doing whatever they can in order to prevent the disease in order to help. So has there been any policy response by the government especially on the issue of the kind of problems workers are facing, especially those in the precarious sector, the gig economy for instance? About the gig economy nothing, quite nothing. There are a few degrees I was saying before but basically they oblige, they suggest to the bosses to put the workers on vacations. Obviously the vacations are right of the workers and in the future they will not have the right to go on vacation in August for example if we are going out from the emergency because they are obligated to go on vacations right now in order to let the bosses close the workplaces and in order of smart working, agile and smart working, the government is suggesting but it's all just suggesting they are not obliging bosses. They are suggesting bosses to concede, to give to the workers the chance of working from their own houses but many bosses, we are at different codes on this matter and many bosses are just refusing to concede smart working but because they have not the technologies to guarantee that workers can work from their from their own houses and but because they want to control their workforce, they want their own workforce in the offices, in the factories because they have to check if they produce or not. And there are other measures that the government is applying for example they are going today, they are going to approve another decree and it should guarantee more funds in order to give something like a basic income for people who are out of the day jobs and we are pushing for it because the crisis has not to put on the shoulders of the workers. Thank you so much Juliano for joining us and talking to us at this point. Thanks to you. That's all we have time for today, keep watching People's Dispatch.