Lorenzo Parelli was 18 years old when he died crushed by a steel beam that fell down inside the factory building where he was working. Lorenzo was a young student from Udine (North East Italy) and he attended the fourth year at the professional institute of industrial mechanics. As typical for the public schools in the latest years useful to forge a flexible workforce, the educational training includes a part of classical school learning and another part that’s practical job internship in companies. Many of girls and boys of mid low workers’ families accept voluntarily this free opportunity to alternate between school and work. It is free because the young should not pay anything for such internship, while it is conveniently free of charge for companies to use some auxiliary unpaid workforce.
Students are educated to the workforce must be flexible and volatile, the school system prepares young to a society where job opportunities are scarce and with a market where there are few well paid jobs, with few rights an abundance of immigrant workers without any kind of normal right. Then if the modern society employs immigrants into farms of south and of north east of Italy to three euros per hours living in shacks, so this alternate between school and work is seen as a good opportunity.
The young learn early that the society is highly competitive to reach some job that is not precarious. Also the school careers are really expensive and full of difficulties, so a greater mass of young opt for minor professional and technic institutes that give low graduate diplomas. Differently from US schools where students are excelling in sports can achieve credits to continues their educational careers (but for a really tiny portion of them), here the modern Italy school that comes from a series of legislative reforms give some credits of merit for each kind of project job activities students do during their school life. More hard job you do and more credit the young can achieve. More credit the student can have achieved and maybe it is possibile to earn some ranks into the list for first employment. This is the realistic horizon for girls and boys from low and medium workers families, for those families are living at the borders of the modern urban areas cannibalized by years of deindustrialization, work flexibility, social precariat and under employment.
Factories union employers associations sign agreements within the public schools to offer job training, professional formation and future opportunities engaging students for free into their businesses. For many students the normal school day life is divided between the modern factory under some team leader and classroom. The school teaches the ethic, moral capitalistic society values based on free market and competition, the alternate school and work project completes it adding practice discipline to these, while the student would be grateful for the hope.
The January 21, the day Lorenzo Parelli found his death, he was working into the Burimec company, that is a medium enterprise specialized into advanced industrial weighing systems and mechanical constructions industry. It was his last day of the school alternate job project. Then if the job discipline can tolerate workplace safety lacks and negligence, it also provides the most important teaching: the respect of the pacing and productivity, that pacing and productive that too much often kills people in the profit name.
Lorenzo Parelli was a young like any other, that is not interested about politics or other things. He was, as the capitalistic society says, a “good boy”. Who knows how many credits it earned if that steel beam hadn’t broken his life. Who is in charge for his killing? The direct team leader, the Burimec enterprise, the Confindustria industries private corporates union that engage workforce from schools without any safety conditions? Is the Italian state, is the school system? Are the newspapers, media and televisions that educated the supremacy of the productivity, of the production of capitalistic value that in its supremacy scares people, workers and young about competition of immigrant workers that are forced to any kind of low wages and unsafety jobs?
Who must be in charge of this murder? All of them, but the main accountable has one given name, it is the capitalistic mode of production, it is the profit. Immediately these questions surrounded the streets full of young crowds and young workers parents in many cities, all unbelievable about the fact. Could the school kills our children? Yes it can in a normal day of life at the capitalistic school teaching.