Since early April, immigrant workers in the Tuscan city of Prato have staged a wave of strikes demanding their right to a 40-hour work week, or “8x5.” Organized by the union SUDD Cobas, these walkouts, dubbed “Strike Days,” have directly involved 70 textile and garment factories in Europe’s biggest textile manufacturing hub. Highly successful, these simultaneous strikes have now won “8x5”—eight hour days, five days a week—in 68 fashion workshops and warehouses, all within the span of 14 weeks.
One thing the article omits, for obvious legal reasons, is that a lot of these companies are connected to the mafia, either Italian mafia or chinese Mafia, and there are plenty of cases of physical violence and assassinations of union organizers in that area. So this is all higher stakes than it looks.