The GKN Driveline Firenze factory sits prominently on the main artery of Campi Bisenzio, a suburb of Florence, across from the sprawling Gigli shopping center. While the company’s name is still displayed on its buildings and signposted on the street, it is now crowded out by a several banners facing the sidewalk. One hanging along the exterior fencing proclaims the site a “socially integrated public factory.” Another, sitting higher than the rest across the roof of the entryway, is printed rather than handwritten: “#RISE UP – FACTORY COLLECTIVE – FLORENCE GKN WORKERS.”
This factory was the venue for the Working-Class Literature Festival – a series of public performances, readings, and discussions with authors that ran from Friday through Sunday afternoon. Alberto Prunetti, along with Collettivo di Fabbrica (Factory Collective), organized the event to raise funds and awareness for their ongoing battle to reopen the GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio, which has been shut down since July 2021.
The story that leads to last weekend’s festival really starts in 2018, when GKN, a British international engineering firm with thousands of employees, was bought in a hostile takeover by Melrose Capital. Melrose is known for its motto of “Buy, Improve, Sell,” but what qualifies as improvement is not without controversy, as the company is open about its strategy of breaking up businesses and stripping them of assets in this pursuit.
This has lead to ire across the political spectrum, with Tory MP Robert Halfon once describing Melrose as “robber baron capitalism at its worst – many British jobs being destroyed by the few, corporate vultures plundering a company for short-term profits but long-term disaster.”
Melrose did not hide its intentions of imposing cuts on GKN, having already shuttered operations in Great Britain and Germany before setting its sights on the Campi Bisenzio automotive manufacturing plant on July 9th 2021. “Melrose asked the workers to take the day off, complaining about supply chain issues and delays with Stellantis (the parent company of FIAT, a major partner in the plant’s business),” says Matteo Moretti, a former employee who had worked at the plant since 1997. Moretti is part of RSU, the local union organization of GKN workers, as well as Collettivo di Fabbrica, which he describes as an after-hours worker organization in the vein of worker councils from the 1970s.
The day off given to Moretti and the rest of the workforce wasn’t what it seemed. “It was all planned out,” he says. “On the day off they sent out an email firing everybody.” After the email, workers gathered outside of the factory, which was now guarded by private security hired by Melrose to keep them out. “These guys had tasers, and they were all really buff. But there were around twelve of them, and we were about 400, so they didn’t manage to keep control,” says Moretti with a laugh. The workers took back the factory, and formed a permanent assembly with the support of Collettivo di Fabbrica and Italy’s national worker unions.
The factory’s ownership on paper has changed since then, as an advisor who was initially contracted by Melrose to manage the situation, Francesco Borgomeo, eventually bought the factory from them on December 23rd 2021. Despite initial promises from Borgomeo to restore activity at the plant with a plan to build electric motors, nothing has come to fruition. The GKN workers now find themselves in a protracted legal dispute with him over what was promised and what is owed. Labor courts have granted numerous injunctions against Borgomeo’s company to pay overdue wages. Having gone without a paycheck since October 2022, the workers are surviving instead on strike funds and a crowdsourcing effort called GKN For Future. The Working-Class Literature festival was part of an effort to buttress those funds.
Borgomeo’s partner Gianluca Franchi has threatened to “report to the authorities” all of the organizers and anyone attending, citing safety concerns.
The festival is as well-organized as anything one might expect outside of this context. Lunch and dinner are provided to attendees at the mess hall; there’s merch and a bookshop near the stage; a series of events are organized in a “kids’ space” concurrent with the discussions and readings. The otherwise unremarkable patch of grass that separates the offices from the factory floor looks more like a campus quad on this Saturday afternoon, as dozens of attendees sun themselves and chat between events.
Dario Salvetti, a GKN worker and member of Collettivo di Fabbrica, addresses the audience on the factory floor between events. He thanks them and gives them a summing up of the situation so far, highlighting the plans drawn up by the workers themselves for bringing the factory back to life. One is to build cargo bikes (both human-powered and electric-assisted), a prototype of which is displayed outside the factory. Another potential path would be a collaboration with an Italo-German startup to make photovoltaic panels and batteries from graphene – a potentially much greener alternative to the materials currently used for such products. Dario then returns to the role literature has to play in this situation as well: “we commit to an international, influential act of narration of our class and by our class.” Dario may be speaking broadly about a narrative created by this event, but he is also referencing the literal one that he and his fellow workers created, having published a book relating their experiences called Insorgiamo: Diario Collettivo di una lotta operaia (Rise up: A Collective Diary of a Working-Class Struggle).
This guiding principle of centering the working class as the narrator of its own story is carried throughout the festival. While some critics and academics of different socioeconomic backgrounds are part of the panels, the vast majority are writers who speak of the working class from their own personal experiences, not from the outside looking in. D. Hunter, author of Chav Solidarity and Tracksuits, Traumas, and Class Traitors, started his first book as a series of Facebook posts relating his life experience and squaring it with his politics, written during his downtime working third shift in a psychiatric care home.
He self-published these with the help of his girlfriend (“I can’t spell for shit,” he explains), selling copies individually. Hunter sees the market dominance of just a few players in the publishing industry as a problematic hurdle for working-class authors who dare to make their writing politically engaged: “When we don’t own the means of production, when we don’t have these small presses or publishing houses, we get these large monoliths, and they get to gatekeep which voices get heard […] There seems to be an eagerness by those big publishing houses to strip any writing of its politics, or maybe the writer themselves have probably had to strip the politics away because otherwise it wouldn’t get published.”
Anthony Cartwright, author of the award-winning novel The Afterglow, shared the stage with D. Hunter, and agreed with his assessment on the erasure of the working-class perspective from bigger publishing houses: “particularly in mainstream UK publishing, I think anything that is referred to as ‘regional’ or ‘working-class’ or ‘committed’ or ‘engaged’ is kind of pushed into another category outside of the literary arena.”
Cartwright confirmed Hunter’s emphasis on the value of small local publishers, crediting Tindal Street Press (a publishing house in Birmingham) with giving him his start. Unlike mainstream publishers, their interest was in lifting voices that spoke to the specific realities of daily life in the Midlands. “I sent them some work,” he says. “It was a mess, but they were very encouraging in terms helping me shape that first draft of a novel.”
After the discussion and Q&A with Cartwright and Hunter, a message of support from socialist film director Ken Loach – winner of two Palmes d’Or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake – is read aloud to the audience: “Writers who describe the texture of working-class life with authenticity and insight are rare indeed. […] To read stories that reflect one’s own life as recognizably true can be empowering. I hope your festival will achieve that and bring enjoyment to many readers new and old.”
The fate of the workers at the GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio is still uncertain, but Matteo Moretti remains confident, explaining that while support from the national government is scant, local and regional officials have been supportive and helpful. Indeed, this tracks with Tuscany’s overall reputation as a left-wing bastion in the country. Even the Gigli shopping center across the street has hung a banner facing the factory expressing support.
For Moretti, the factory being up and running is more than just about having an income, it’s a source of pride and culture. Moretti calls it “part of the city’s heritage.” GKN Driveline Firenze used to be a FIAT factory that had roots stretching back to the 1930s. His grandfather and mother both worked there before him. Dario Salvetti’s ideas on the factory go beyond mere employment as well: “there’s no reason that this factory can’t work, that it can’t be a source of social wellbeing, harmony, and community, as we aspire it to be.”
