 Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of DMTV. This is the Faces of DM episode series exploring the people making up our movement, where we discuss their inspirational stories, why and how they took the step from citizen to activism and politics. I'm Johannes Fair, I'm coordinating volunteers for DM35 and I have the pleasure to host some of our Faces of DM episodes and we are actually here tonight with Federico Rodolce, hi Federico. Good to have you. He is a part of our coordination team in Italy and one of the members currently running a DM25 campaign on the ground in Italy with the name Lavorose, which means work if or something around those lines. Federico will explain. It's a campaign on the ground and it aims to radically change the world of work and we'll learn about that today. You find all the details about the campaign on lavoro-se.it, but before we go into what this campaign is all about and why it came to life, let's hear a little bit from you Federico. Who are you actually? Where are you? What do you want to share with the audience? Well, hi everyone. I'm Federico, 40 years old. I'm from Turin into the northwest of Italy. I work as a partner into an advertising firm. I have a background as an IT programmer and I've been doing this for more than 20 years. I've been involved in cultural and association site work for almost 10 years, but my political involvement is way longer. And as you said, I'm part of the Italian coordination team and we are trying to make a huge grassroot campaign called lavoro-se, which is a huge aim, which has a huge aim, which is to change the media discourse about an incredible important topic that involves basically everyone. And it's so important for so many people, which is the work, the jobs, and the job market, and the opportunity to emancipate from everything. Thanks. You already went into what the campaign is about a little bit. Thank you for that. I think you can see your excitement to speak about that. One step back, maybe first to ask you when and how and why did you actually become a DM member in the first place? When did you join? Well, like many others, of course, I've been highlighted by the incredibly struggle by the Greek people when Yanis Varopakis was being served. And that was roughly the moment when I started to realize that my view of the European Union was clashing against the reality that was developing in that moment. And I tried so long to make my heads up about this kind of thing, because my whole generation and the generation that came next has, I think, has an innate willing to see themselves as European. And we always told ourselves as European. But in the media discourse, Europeanists and pro-Europe was becoming something very different, because none of us wore that thing that happened to me to heaven. And none of us really wanted this institution, this European Union, to be the final step of what was the project at the beginning. And somehow I focused, I pinned down the idea that in order for my will, my desire of European Union to become true, I had to get involved and change what people were thinking about the possibility of Europe and what we were experiencing in that moment as a European Union influence in our life. And the Yanis view of that final project was basically what I was hoping for. And I'm sure that that is what so many people want. Yeah, I think so too, obviously. Thanks for speaking also a little bit about European Union. I think, of course, the current situation and the situation of the past years has all of us brought to activism and work for political change, since current situation is just not going to be sustainable in any way. Maybe going a little bit towards the actual current political situation in your country in Italy, I think much like in the European Union, you actually have a leading person of your country, Mario Taragi, that is has not really been elected, right? Like Ursula von der Leyen, he somehow came, I don't know, threw the back door somehow into power. And yeah, tell us a little bit about that and maybe also what the political situation is in the country. Well, no First Minister get elected. We do immediately have this system, it's a parliamentary system where you do vote your delegates, your member of parliament, and they choose First Minister with a trust vote. But thing is, this is, Mario Draghi is the last of a small series of technicians, the Prime Minister, and they are a symptom of a crisis of democracy, of the representative democracy, because although it's all very legal and it's, we have to admit, it's within the border and within the rules to have that. We are suffering from a huge crisis of representative because it's not ideal that a Prime Minister can not refer to a single party, not refer to a single agenda that has been put to the vote for the public, for the citizen. And he basically had the support of the media and of so many parties into the parliament that basically just one is left of the opposition. This is not healthy for the political discussion, for the political, for the trust that the public put into the political field, because they don't feel represented anymore. I'm sorry, they don't feel represented anymore, rightly so actually. And also because that support the narrative, the sole existence of a technician, support the narrative that there is a right way and a wrong way to do politics without ideology, that the right way is beyond ideologies, and it is just the right way to do, and that's false, because the agenda, that the technician they wrote and they put into the laws, it's very logical. And that's been proven wrong many, many times. I mean, we are suffering, we are coming from two decades of economic crisis that shouldn't happen if they were right, basically. And the whole idea that you have to trust the technician because one plus one people's tube and everybody else support, all those ideas are just ideologically biased, poison the media discourse in a terrible way. It doesn't let you, the space to argue, to even discuss about politics, you just have to accept what has been given to you, because it was a technician's decision. And this is not working on so many levels and so many cases. So this came from a country that has an extremely conflicted relationship with the European Union, which is Italy. Italy has, thanks to a model two decades of political and media discourse extremely biased and poisonous to has a struggling relationship with Europe, because basically every politician campaign in the country against the European Union and then go to the government and then became part of the European Union government and do just what everybody else has done before. So here we have a common way of saying, ding a jalo, defront a man with two faces, because you tell one thing to the public, raising the public against the European Union, and then the day after you go to Brazil and decide the very same things that will make your country struggle. And that leads to a numerous party in the government area, which in time of election came anti-European. And then once they're at the government, they keep being pro-European, except they keep complainants about. So it's a nonsense discourse, political discourse, that led the Italian, the Italian constituency to be split into a false dichotomy. There is the anti-European, roughly composed by people who are truly nationalists, rightly we're nationalists, and people who just have lost all faiths into the uninstitution at the European level, that in their mind it will always be against the poor people. And there are the pro-European, which are not really pro-European, because they don't want the complete European Union with our European Union welfare and the European Union rights, they just want this crooked version of the European Union where they can decide everything they can impose an agenda decided elsewhere, and thanks to the democratic gap. So our way of thinking, the PM way of thinking, it's neither one of that, it's a third way, and it's the actual European Union complete democratic one, are united, are truly united, and a place that can actually decide for the people, by the people, for the common good. Indeed, you explained it very well. I think that is also what everyone can read in our new manifesto that we just published this year, and you can find it on dm25.org when you go about us to the about us section, to find why we are fighting for the many against the few, against the oligarchs, to actually change something in different countries here, where I'm speaking from in Germany, where you are in Italy, and in all the countries where there's the members, and yeah, there's a lot of countries where we are active. And after, thank you for describing the political situation, maybe now more specifically, because this campaign is about work. So what was it that you made you choose this topic of work as the topic for the campaign? Well, we do live in Italy in an extremely stressed situation on the job market, because we are one of the major country in Europe, but we don't have the industrial structure of the other major countries in the European Union, like France or Germany. We have so many small, little and micro enterprise, and very few big enterprise. And that's led to a lack of representation into the unions for the right, the worker right, and to national contracts. And this industrial fabric of entrepreneurs started very soon to try to keep up with the European economy by dumping all the cost into the labor cost, basically. And that's how we ended up in 2022 with a smaller, lower, medium wage than 20 years ago. That makes no sense. In every other country, small or big in the European country, the medium salary will level rise up, even though a little bit, even though only 5%, 10%, we are minus 3% for that. That's because we had several governments that tried neoliberal politics that disrupt completely the collective representation of workers. And that led to an incredible phenomenon, which is the working poor. People that are actually working are not unemployed, are not jobless. They are working, but they are so little represented, and they are so little empowered in terms of the negotiation with the employer, sorry, that their salary doesn't even is enough to raise from the poverty level. And that's a huge problem because when the government makes this decision and plans this decision on how to help the poverty and how to help the poor people, the people in need, for many, many, many years, the sole indicator was employment, employment rate. So if you're out of the unemployed, somehow you're good to go. We don't need to think about you anymore. But now we have new 3 million families that fell into the working poor area. Those are people who cannot access to government and state aid, and yet they cannot bring themselves up out of the poverty zone. This steps to a completely neoliberal working market, jobs market, and working right registration. We have to change that. We have to do it because meanwhile, this is the reality, but the media discourse is something that I can only describe by Orwellian, because the only thing that we are talking about is how the poor employer cannot find enough people willing to work for 200, 300 years a month. And they cannot find an employee for the beaches, for the restaurant, for the... And they are starting to, like every summer, discussing the possibility of giving visa, work visa, to migrants because migrants are willing to accept such lower wages. That brings up the migration problem, and that makes the racism toward the migrants' ways, because they are stealing our jobs, except they're not jobs, they're slaves. They are only accepted because in that way they can come up immediately in the European Union. They are basically working for free and they know that, but they are willing to do it anyway. And this is a way to ruin a country, to make people look anger and anger and always more to the right if you don't manage to make them aware of what's happening on a bigger scale. This is why we launched a campaign, which is extremely provocative. We know that. It's a campaign that, as you just translated it, I work only if, because we are too used to accept everything, non-paid internship, more than 20 years of work a day. This is an recovery, but not so much because when you work into the restaurant field, you can do up to three, four shifts consecutively and they add up to basically 40 hours of work in three days. And you have no time for yourself, you have no time to disconnect from your job. When you do an office job, you have always to be reachable. And all of this without a real perspective, without a security, without the security to know that, okay, you have this salary as small as it can be, you will always have it. No, you don't have that security anymore. You don't have the chance to hope for a raise in the future for a growing position because we don't have that kind of possibility. Because we have accustomed our whole country, industry, fabric into not invest into the human capital and therefore make them grow. But just to exploit the human labor to compete with the southern eastern market and southern eastern producer, which is nonsense. And we need to change to revolution at least the way we talk about job. We need to be aware again that we can fight. We can say no. We can say we don't deserve this. We don't deserve to be treated like this. We don't deserve to be treated like meat, just work meat. We have a right to live our own life to have hopes to accept a level of dignity. Only offer the kings up on a very low, at least a very low level of dignity. Because otherwise makes no sense. And people would do what young people are doing a lot in the last 20 years, which is leave the country. Thanks. Actually, a lot of things that I again relate to since also for part of the workers, the same, of course, is happening here in Germany. And I think, unfortunately, it is also part of the EU that, you know, you let the different regions, countries, people work against each other, which, of course, doesn't lead anywhere good. And yeah, this is something that we are working against. And I'm glad that you're doing that in Italy. And thank you for putting in the time and keeping this campaign running. And maybe more concretely now, what is actually the work that you're doing with the campaign on a day-to-day basis that the team, you and the team. Yeah, I extremely happy and numerous team of people, which are contributing. And we are trying to work on a different level of action. We are organizing small events into every city. You know that Italy is a country with so many cities. So there's many little towns. And we try to be present as much as possible in every town to try to wake up the population. You're not alone. And we think that we know you think these two. And we can join and we can show to the rest of the country that we can hope it's something better. We are trying to, and we are a small city involved with the small unions, local-based unions and not confederate unions, which are new unions. For example, the unions that support the riders, right? And the unions that support the fieldwork for farms and all the agricultural summer work that are usually migrants, by the way, just like the riders. And I'm not saying that we're trying to unionize, but in the end, somehow it will happen. And we will try to run some big events after the summer, with all these association work together. And we will try to do something a little bit greater marketing, like stickers and washable spray paint on the advertising of work, of terrible work, jobs that we find around the cities. We need to be heard somehow, because we are fighting against a rubber wall of the media. Although every time we talk to people, new people, common people, everybody knows that this is the main issue. Everybody knows what the reality is. And very few people are willing to accept it. So we are fighting a good response, and we are hoping in the end to gather so much signatures and support to ask at least to be heard into the labor committee in the parliament, so that we can publicly say what's going on. We can probably say that economies all across the world found and proposed a real solution to this, that some in some place somewhere someone is trying to apply and they're given good results. And so that there are good practices that we don't have to wring the wheel. We just have to see that in other place these kinds of things are working, working out, and try to, for once, try 100 degrees and go the other way. If we do that, if we manage to put the parliament facing this issue for the first time, then it will be up to there to reply. They won't, most surely won't. And then we'll see. And then we'll see what we're doing with that. Yes, I think it is just very, very important, especially if in the media there is not much talk, which is a common thing. I think a problem that we have everywhere that these issues of the day-to-day people of the working class in the end are not often discussed. I also have an example that just came to my mind from the west of Germany where the workers in the hospitals are on strike at the moment. And I'm following a little bit on social media since I'm not there. But I also hear them saying, like, what the fuck? We are on strike here and nobody talks about it. Heroes, remember, they used to be the heroes during the pandemic. Because they wouldn't talk now, nobody listened to them. And then, of course, it's not just Germany. We had the same situation months ago. Okay. And we are, take two more than 12 years of expending restriction from the EU Commission. We have downsized our health system for so long before the pandemic. Then when suddenly we need, we need to hand the people back, the doctors back. We didn't have any. So the actual doctors went double, triple shifts, and half of them burned out because we didn't have and don't have anymore enough public health, the employee. And that's ridiculous. We are still ending a pandemic. And, nonetheless, we still can face the fact that there were conscious politics put in place to downsize salaries, places and funds for the health system, national health system. That cost us lives. Big time. Yeah. And that's, that's the, that's a very sad truth. And I can again, just say, same happening in Germany over the last years. So you are out there, if you see this now, then, you know, whether you are in Germany, you know, Google, Krankenhaus, Bewegel, and, you know, support them, or you're in the UK, or in Italy, or wherever you are, try to, you know, reach out directly to workers and try to see how you can help them to improve their working conditions. About your campaign, what can people concretely do? What can you tell people out there that are watching now? What should they, what, what should they do? Even if they are maybe outside of Italy, but especially if they are in Italy? Well, of course, like I said, we are organizing a lot of events. So everyone who wants to bring this issue to their city, we will more than have to, more than willing to help them in any way to come to their city, help them organize, and hold up an event to explain the campaign. But even though from, in front of a PC, everyone can go to the website, sign the petition, of course, sign the manifesto, go look up into the heart proposal and start to make some noise by tweeting, by directly writing to the member of parliament who are into the Labor Committee. Start pressuring them, start making feel anxious, start making feel like the public is realizing that this is the reality and we can no longer stand for it. We can, you can use the tool on the homepage to tweet to our Labor ministry, Orlando, or to write an email directly to every member. There's a tool where you can choose your own region and try to do a little local pressure, even though we don't have an election system where you can choose your own deputy light, for example, in the United Kingdom, but still, we think that every, every member of parliament from the right to the left wing can be a little sensitive with people from their own region is writing them to tell them we can go on the side for it, we can don't, we don't hold them anymore. And so you can tweet, you can show social, you can of course donate so that we can have the resources to keep up this fight. And you can contribute with videos telling your stories, because something that we found is that the more you go deep into the stories of common people, the more you get enraged. So we are collecting a lot of single stories, but there are tons, tons of example of how the system is not working. The system is brought us nothing but misery. And we are collecting a lot of videos, we are collecting a lot of proposal for what the people will like to do if they had some more free time, like for example, eight hours a day or three times, dreams like this. And of course, the more you talk about it, the more you support like writing the hashtag or Facebook or Instagram, the more, the more noise we make, the more possible it's for us to achieve an audience into the member committee. Great. Thanks. So you out there, go to labroto-ce.it, support the campaign. It's made by the people like Federico and many others, for the people, for you, or you can join the buy the people site and be part of the campaign. I think, yeah, you should do that. And if you want to get in touch directly and help out in your city, I can, I will be able to connect you with Federico if you want to reach out, volunteer at dm25.org. I can always make the connection since I'm reading those emails. And also, of course, if you want to help dm25 in any other way, maybe to finish, let me please know what being zooming out again a little bit, where would you like dm25 to go the next years and what are the most important issues that you think that we should solve? Like I said before, Italy and not just Italy is victim of this false vision. We do have a vision that nobody else does. We are basically the only one who are truly willing to proceed it. So my vision for the future is to give the people the opportunity to know that there are other options other than those two, that there are a third way, that there are someone who is really fighting for a working European Union that works for the working class, that works for the poor, that works for the young, that works for the women, that works for the migrants. And because everything I just said is for the common good. So I think, and I'm willing to hope that dm is the way we can finally break this charade and bring some hope again into the political discourse, into the media, into the people, and into the politics as well. All right. I think there's nothing I can add here of value. Thanks. It was a very nice conversation and very inspiring to hear from you. Keep up the good work and you are there. If you want to join, go to dm25.org and subscribe to this channel. Tune in the next time. Carpe diem and bye-bye.