The film is always the same. Seen and seen again. In black and white and technirama , as if the story were flowing on frames already imprinted in a script written long ago. Eurallumina, Russian property, closed in March 2009. Four hundred and fifty direct workers sent home without too many pleasantries. Fifteen years later, gates still barred, no serious reopening project, workers perpetually deceived by continuous announcements of news and promises without follow-up, plant reduced to a pile of rust. Alcoa, American property, closed in November 2012. Never reopened. An endless river of public money "given" to a Swiss company with no history that from 2018 to today has done nothing but announce production relaunches and new employment. For now, however, nothing concrete, despite the plethora of Ministers who have come over the years to the bedside of the aluminum factory. Finally, Christmas 2024, the year of the Jubilee.
Glencore, the escape
It is the turn of “Portovesme srl”, in reality Glencore, a Swiss multinational. After having “buried” the lead production line, on the eve of the opening of the Holy Door, it has decided to close the zinc asset as well. Twelve hundred employees in total: 500 directly who will be laid off, while for the workers in related industries the future is on the streets, as befits multinationals that first exploit, pollute and then run away. More Ministers will arrive at those barred gates. The script includes indignation, severe and shouted protests against the multinationals of the moment, complete with rhetorical appeals for foreign “clemency”.
Yet another blackmail
And yet, here, deep in Sulcis, the one industrialized by the State in the seventies with the aim of extracting lead and zinc from the galena torn from the metal-bearing bowels of Iglesiente, yet another “blackmail” is taking place to the detriment of workers, health and the entire territory. According to some, the word “blackmail” cannot be used. Just so as not to offend the “sensitivity” of foreigners, as if they had not already taken advantage enough. At stake is a sneaky and creeping attitude, with some accomplice in Sardinian soil ready to be enchanted by the mirage of the world’s “poisons”, capable of raising, according to the new visionaries, the fate of employment and development. In reality, it would be a matter of allowing those who have stopped everything, lead and zinc, to impose a “backtrack” on development on an entire territory, forcing it to sacrifice thousands of jobs, in exchange for a few workers to create a real global crossroads of poisons, steelworks fumes and lithium . One way like any other to “bury”, forever, Sulcis’s ambition to live without blackmail, those between work and health, markets and pollution. The Swiss multinational did not take well the decision last year by the Region not to passively accept the plan to recycle the global , lithium battery waste, in Portovesme, a project that harbors within itself the unhealthy goal of transforming the future of this strip of Sardinian land, already raped with both hands, into a gigantic global of poisons.
