Since early April, immigrant workers in the Tuscan city of Prato have staged a wave of strikes demanding their right to a forty-hour work week, or “8×5.”
Organized by the union SUDD Cobas, these walkouts, dubbed “Strike Days,” have directly involved seventy textile and garment factories in Europe’s biggest textile manufacturing hub. Highly successful, these simultaneous strikes have now won 8×5 — eight-hour days, five days a week—in sixty-eight fashion workshops and warehouses, all within the span of fourteen weeks.
These victories are the result of seven years of organizing in one of Italy’s most infamous industrial zones. Prato is estimated to host over seven thousand textile and garment companies, employing forty-three thousand people. Workers are typically hired by small companies engaged in distinct phases of fashion production — specializing in dyeing thread, twisting yarn, printing fabric, sewing T-shirts, or even moving hangers between establishments. Together, these activities generate almost €2 billion in annual export revenue, making Prato an important hub of world-famous “Made in Italy” fashion.
In Italy, however, the city is renowned for both its high presence of immigrant workers and its exploitative labor conditions, including fourteen-hour workdays, union busting, dangerous machinery, and makeshift dormitories inside workshops that led to the deaths of seven Chinese workers in a 2013 factory fire.
For years, this infamy brought a slew of journalists and scholars to the city, including myself. Today, familiar videos of workers at sewing machines circulate alongside images of marches and picket lines as the city has become the scene of an upsurge of immigrant labor militancy. Union organizers at SUDD Cobas call this upsurge the “8×5 movement,” tracing its inauguration back to the 2021 Texprint strike (which I wrote about for Labor Notes at the time); a nine-month strike at a fabric…
Auteur: Sarah Caudiero
