These are public posts tagged with #YesWeWork. You can interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
"#YesWeWork is a good motto to describe the anti-human absurdity of capital. It is not a mere gesture of cynicism, even if it is." - Grupo Barbaria: A world that is gone - Read more: https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/12/18/grupo-barbaria-a-world-that-is-gone/ #Lockdown #COVID19 #antireport
** Bergamo, the massacre that the employers did not want to avoid. **
The area of Italy most devastated by the Covid-19 is a large industrial centre. It was never declared a red zone due to pressure from business people. The cost in human lives has been catastrophic.
There are images that mark an era, that are engraved in the collective imagination of a country. The one that the Italians will not be able to forget in years to come is the one that the residents of Bergamo photographed from their windows on the night of March 18. Seventy military trucks crossed the city in the midst of a sepulchral silence, one after the other, in a slow march as a sign of respect: they were carrying corpses. They were taking them to other cities outside Lombardy because the cemetery, the morgue, the church converted into an emergency morgue and the crematorium operating 24 hours a day were no longer adequate. The image captured the magnitude of the ongoing tragedy in the area of Italy most affected by the coronavirus. The next day, the country was awakened by the news that it was the first in the world in official deaths from Covid-19, mostly in Lombardy. But why is the situation so dramatic precisely in Bergamo? What has happened in that area so that in March 2020 there were 400% more deaths than in the same month of the previous year?
On February 23rd, there were 2 positive cases of coronavirus in the province of Bergamo. In one week, they reached 220; almost all of them in Val Seriana. In Codogno, a town in Lombardy where the first official case of coronavirus was detected on 21 February, 50 diagnosed cases were enough to close the town and declare it a red zone. Why was the same not done in Val Seriana? Because this valley of the Serio River is home to one of the most important industrial centers in Italy, and the industrial employers put pressure on all institutions to avoid closing their factories and losing money. And so, incredible as it may seem, the area with the most deaths from coronavirus per inhabitant in Italy - and in Europe - has never been declared a red zone, despite the astonishment of the mayors who were calling for it, and of the citizens, who are now demanding responsibility. The general practitioners of Val Seriana are the first to speak out: if it had been declared a red zone, as all the experts advised, hundreds of people would have been saved, they say, powerless.
The story is even murkier: those who have an interest in keeping the factories open are, in some cases, the same as those who have an interest in the private clinics. Lombardy is the Italian region that most represents the model of commercialization of health care and has been the victim of a large-scale corrupt system led by the former governor for 18 years (from 1995 to 2013), Roberto Formigoni, a leading member of Communion and Liberation (CyL). He was from Berlusconi's party, who defined him as "governor for life of Lombardy", but he always had the support of the League, which has governed the region since Formigoni left, accused - and then convicted - of corruption in the health sector. His successor, Roberto Maroni, initiated a health reform in 2017 that cut back even further on public health investments and has practically abolished the figure of the family doctor, replacing him with the "manager". "It's true, in the next five years 45,000 family doctors will disappear, but who still goes to the family doctor," said the League's politician Giancarlo Giorgetti, then Deputy Secretary of State in the Conte-Salvini government, undaunted in August last year.
The epidemic in the Bergamo area, the so-called Bergamasca, officially started on the afternoon of Sunday 23 February, although the general practitioners - in the front line of denouncing the situation - said that they had been treating many cases of abnormal pneumonia in people as young as 40 since the end of December. On 23 February, the results of the coronavirus tests of two patients admitted to the Pesenti Fenaroli hospital in Alzano Lombardo, a town of 13,670 inhabitants a few kilometres from Bergamo, were positive. Since both had been in contact with other patients and with doctors and nurses, the management of the hospital decided to close the doors. But, without any explanation, they reopened them a few hours later, without disinfecting the facilities or isolating the patients with Covid-19. What is more, the medical staff spent a week working without protection; a good number of the hospital's nurses became infected and spread the virus among the population. The contagion multiplied throughout the valley. The hospital turned out to be the first major focus of infection: patients who were admitted for a simple hip problem ended up dying from coronavirus infection.
The mayors of the two most affected municipalities in the Val Seriana, Nembro and Alzano Lombardo, waited every day at seven in the evening for the order to close the town, which was what they had agreed to do. Everything was ready: the ordinances had been drafted, the army had been mobilized, the chief of police had informed them of the shifts to be taken in the guards, and the tents were set up. But the order never came, and no one could explain to them why. However, there were continuous calls from the businessmen and factory owners in the area, who were very concerned about avoiding the closure of their activities at all costs. They were not hiding.
Without any shame, on February 28th, in the middle of the Coronavirus emergency - in 5 days the 110 official infected people in the area had been reached, already out of control - the Italian industrial employers, Confindustria, started a network campaign with the hashtag #YesWeWork. "We have to lower the tone, make the public understand that the situation is becoming normal, that people can go back to living as before," said the president of Confindustria Lombardia, Marco Bonometti, in the media.
The same day, Confindustria Bergamo launched its own campaign aimed at foreign investors to convince them that nothing was happening there and that they were not going to close down. The slogan was unequivocal: "Bergamo non si ferma / Bergamo is running".
The message of the promotional video for the international partners was a nonsense: "Cases of Coronavirus have been diagnosed in Italy, but as in many other countries", they minimized. And they lied: "The risk of infection is low. They blamed the media for unjustified scaremongering, and while showing workers working in their factories they boasted that all the factories would remain "open and full, as usual.
Only five days later the huge outbreak of contagion and death broke out, which ended up being the largest in Italy and Europe. But even then they did not withdraw the campaign, much less consider closing the factories. Confindustria Bergamo groups 1,200 companies that employ more than 80,000 workers. All of them were exposed to the virus, forced to go to work, largely without adequate measures -sheltered, without safety distance or protective material-, putting themselves and their whole environment at risk.
The mayor of Bergamo, Giorgio Gori of the Democratic Party, had also joined in the clamour not to close the city and on 1 March he invited people to fill the shops in the centre with the slogan "Bergamo does not stop". Later, in the face of the evidence of the catastrophe, he regretted it and admitted that he had taken too soft a measure not to hinder the economic activity of the powerful companies in the area.
On March 8, official reports in the Bergamasca had gone from 220 to 997 in one week. In the afternoon it was leaked that the government wanted to isolate Lombardy. After hours of chaos in which many left Milan in a stampede, Giuseppe Conte appeared, already at dawn, in a confused press conference through Facebook to announce the decree. It was not what the mayors of the towns of the Val Seriana expected: no red zone, but orange. In other words, entry and exit to and from the municipalities were restricted, but everyone could still go to work.
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