In a defiant response to worsening labour conditions and Italy’s role in global warfare and the genocide in Palestine, the rank-and-file union SI Cobas called a nationwide general strike on Friday 11 April 2025. Lucia Pradella reports.
Italy’s recent general strike merged workplace and political demands, opposing the war economy and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. Key demands included higher wages, shorter working hours, a ban on layoffs and outsourcing; an end to European rearmament, the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza; and opposition to the new Meloni-Mattarella “Security Decree”, which aims to repress militant dissent against Western imperialism and criminalize protests and blockades—explicitly targeting combative unions like SI Cobas. The strike culminated in a national demonstration for Palestine on Saturday 12 April, in Milan, called by Palestinian organisations.
Disrupting the Supply Chains of Genocide
Despite the lack of participation of other base unions, the general strike succeeded in mobilising workers across Italy. Blockades, pickets, and stoppages paralysed major logistics hubs from Naples to Bologna and Milan, with participation from Palestinian groups like the Young Palestinians (Giovani Palestinesi Italia) and allies like the Naples Unemployed Movement. At Bologna Interport, one of Italy’s main logistics hubs, a six-hour blockade caused kilometre-long queues of trucks, which also disrupted the nearby highway. SI Cobas also blockaded the ports of Genoa and Naples, which are critical nodes for arms shipments. They also blocked Rubiera logistics hub (Reggio Emilia) used by Maersk to ship F-35 components (made by Leonardo, Italy’s top arms manufacturer) to Israel. In Turin, workers staged a sit-in at the prefecture, denouncing Meloni’s “police-state” policies. Nationwide, major logistics companies like GLS, SDA, BRT, DHL, and Fercam were targeted. Workers in the chemical and metalworking sectors also participated. However, school workers—who had joined previous general strikes called by SI Cobas in relatively high numbers—were barred from striking due to Italian trade union laws prohibiting strike participation within two weeks of a previous strike.
How Workers Won—and Why They Fight
The success of the strike was driven by the participation of an international workforce, including many immigrant workers—a majority of SI Cobas members—who experience imperialism and state racism first-hand. Many have seen substantial improvements in their conditions over the past 10–15 years thanks to SI Cobas’s uncompromising tactics, which leverage on workers’ power to blockade the flow of commodities to force employers to engage in meaningful negotiations and make concessions.
While picketing the SDA warehouse in Vimodrone, Milan (a subsidiary of the Italian postal service Poste Italiane), workers told me how much things had changed since they organised with SI Cobas. Fifteen years ago, when they worked at the SDA’s logistics hub in Carpiano, one of the most important SDA warehouses in the country, the work was “on call”: when trucks arrived, workers—waiting outside—were summoned to unload them. This meant spending up to 15-16 hours at the site just to secure 5-6 hours of paid work, often at 5 euros per hour. During peak times, they could work 12-13 hours straight without a break. Now, working times are defined, there are breaks every two hours, workers have access to a canteen and bathrooms and, most importantly, they have reclaimed their dignity. Many workers can afford to bring their families from their home countries and buy homes and cars.
In 2011, over 300 workers, mostly immigrants, launched a strike that severely disrupted SDA’s operations, including the distribution networks of one of its key clients, Amazon, forcing the bosses to the table. The strike revealed not only the multinational corporations’ reliance on super-exploitation but also the power of logistics workers to disrupt global supply chains. By 2017, workers’ militancy stopped management’s plans to sell SDA, possibly to Amazon itself. When SDA bosses hired about 200 thugs to assault the picket line, workers stood steady to fight back. Eventually their determination, along with police intervention, defused the clash.
This is just an example of a broader pattern of repression at the hands of the bosses and the state against SI Cobas, including intimidation, police and legal repression, direct violence, the involvement of private security and criminal organisations, and high-profile arrests and smear campaigns. In 2016 and 2021 Abd El Salam (USB) and Adil Belakdim (SI Cobas) were murdered by truck drivers attempting to break pickets. Even during the latest general strike, a truck driver at a Unes warehouse revved his engine, threatening to drive over picketers, only to be met by fearless defiance.
“The union changed our way of working, our way of living”, one worker told me. “They wanted us as slaves.”
I heard many similar stories across Italy. Workers see the growth of SI Cobas as a movement against slavery, for the freedom of the worker. These words carry a special weight when spoken by people who left their home countries and faced perilous conditions to reach Italy, in many cases surviving the EU neo-colonial system of detention, forced labour and militarised borders in the Mediterranean. For these workers, the union represents their first real line of defence against a system designed to exploit and break them.
The growth of SI Cobas, in turn, was deeply shaped by the wave of uprisings that swept North Africa and the Middle East after 2011. The prospect of ending imperialist domination empowered immigrant workers whose struggles challenged racist discrimination in workplaces and society, reclaiming both individual and collective dignity. Their victories were understood as part of a centuries-long struggle against colonialism and racist oppression. This movement catalysed a new generation of immigrant cadres within SI Cobas, embedding a deep sense of internationalism and anti-racism within its organising practice.
Internationalism in Action
Thanks to their hard-won victories, workers now have faith in the method—in striking, in picketing—as a way to improve their conditions and to bring about change in society. “Palestine disrupts everything; it radicalises the youth,” a coordinator told me. After October 2023, SI Cobas was one of the few trade unions in Italy to respond to the call of the Palestinian trade unions, committing to direct action to stop Israel’s war machine. In an open letter that same month, the union wrote:
“Being a major union in the logistics sector, SI Cobas workers will oppose any shipment of weapons to Israel they become aware of. We are convinced that a just solution to the Palestinian question will not come from the big powers or the capitalist governments of the region, but only from the joint struggle of the workers of the Middle East—of all ethnicities and religions—together with the workers of the whole world.”
With its base in the logistics sector, SI Cobas is uniquely positioned to offer material solidarity to the Palestinian people and disrupt the supply chain of genocide. The union has made clear that street demonstrations are necessary, but not sufficient. To halt the Zionist war of extermination, it is necessary to organise “an extraordinary mobilisation to boycott Israeli goods, arms flows and commercial activities on an international scale”, a task that only workers, especially in logistics and ports, can carry through.
Since October 2023, SI Cobas has called three general strikes in solidarity with Palestine and against the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, linking these with demands for higher wages and against repression. The union has also coordinated direct actions to block arms shipments to Israel, including a major blockade of the Port of Genoa last June. In Bologna, workers at Dachser Fercam took their struggle further: in May 2024, they won an agreement to stop strike action including a clause saying that they would not handle commodities destined for or arriving from Israel, a measure informally adopted across the Bologna province.
Palestine solidarity has had a radicalising impact not only among workers but also among second and third-generation youth, many of whom have joined the movement with growing political consciousness. General strikes for Palestine have repeatedly surpassed expectations. Despite the challenges of mobilising an international membership, as workers grow more aware of how wars and war spending affect their own conditions, political strikes have initiated a cross-national process of radicalisation.
Voices from the Picket Lines
At Ferrari’s logistics operations near Modena, hundreds of subcontracted workers—many of them immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—joined the general strike. They demanded the enforcement of national labour contracts, proper sick pay, respect on the job, and an end to management’s discriminatory and racist practices. Workers report being forced to work without proper safety gear, denied insurance and basic rights, and subjected to wage theft and long hours with little compensation. Some are paid as little as €800–900 per month despite working night shifts and weekends. Warehouse bosses systematically mistreat unionised workers, going so far as to slap some of them. Their participation in the general strike exposed the systemic abuse, precarity and racialised exploitation that underpin Ferrari’s outsourced labour supply chain:
“We are more than 2,000 workers [in Modena]. When we declare a strike in solidarity with Palestine, all the workers—of all nationalities—stop working and join.”
Many Moroccan workers at the Milan national march spoke with pride and enthusiasm about the huge demonstrations for Palestine that have swept Morocco in recent months. Just as importantly, Morocco has seen mass mobilisations against Maersk and calls to sever of diplomatic relations with the Zionist State. The mobilisations were also supported by the Union of Port Workers. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in Modena, SI Cobas activist Enrico Semprini explained the reasons behind the Rubiera blockade of Maersk on Friday 11 April:
Boycotting these goods is a clear act of solidarity with the people of Palestine, where dozens of women and children are killed every day, treated as subhuman by the Zionist Israeli army that is stealing more and more Palestinian land.
During the block of Bologna Interport, a coordinator drew a connection between the struggle against exploitation in Italy and the Palestinian resistance:
“Many SI Cobas workers are part of every picket, every strike, because their story is the same as Palestine’s. […] No one abandons their home, their family, their history, their school, their neighbourhood, and risks death crossing the desert and sea unless they are forced. We fled the wars, destruction and looting brought by the British, the French, the West, the United States, in our home countries. We have all been forced to escape from war, hunger, and misery to be exploited and work for free in Europe’s factories and logistics warehouses. […] Our story is part of the story of the Palestinian people. And when we defend the Palestinian people, we defend ourselves. Their struggle is our struggle.”
These workers are acutely aware that the new “Security Decree”, which criminalises road, railway, and port blockades with up to six-year in prison, directly threatens their organisation. By merging anti-terrorism, labour and migration law into a unified repressive framework, the Italian state is targeting immigrant workers and combative unions like SI Cobas, aiming to criminalise their solidarity itself. This general strike was also an affirmation of workers’ strong and enduring commitment to the union and to each other:
“Everything we have achieved is at stake. […] Even the so-called idea of the integrated immigrant is a myth. They can revoke your citizenship. Citizenship for us has become like an unlimited residence permit. As the level of conflict increases, they too escalate their side of the conflict with laws that repress and attack immigrants. It’s no coincidence that they are targeting immigrants more.”
Marching for Palestine
The energy of the general strike carried into Saturday 12 April, when 50,000 people (according to the organisers) joined Italy’s largest pro-Palestine national demonstration since February 2024. Called by a coalition of Palestinian organisations, the march brought together a broad and diverse coalition of youth, organised workers, families and Muslim communities under slogans demanding freedom for Palestine, an end to the genocide, and a halt to rising arms spending and the authoritarian security decree. Demonstrators also demanded the release of three Palestinian political prisoners currently detained in Italy—Anan Yaeesh, Mansour Doghmosh and Ali Irar, who face terrorism charges for their participation in armed resistance in Tulkarem, occupied West Bank.
Militant workers’ blocs drew sharp connections between Italy’s role in war and genocide abroad, and attacks on wages and working conditions and political repression at home.
Marking the second day of implementation of the new security decree, a massive police deployment, which included officers displaying neo-Nazi Polish insignia, eventually used minor acts of vandalism as a pretext to launch a frontal assault on the demonstration. This orchestrated escalation aimed to divide and demoralise a movement grounded in working-class resistance and prevent its potential growth among broader layers of the working class who remain organised in mainstream unions but could join the movement as conditions deteriorate.
The power of this movement lies not only in its defiance, but in its shared vision. Across borders, languages and struggles, new generations of workers are reclaiming internationalism as a living, breathing practice. What unites them is clear: a refusal to accept genocide as normal and a commitment to freedom—for Palestine, and for each other. The state’s attempt to repress and divide this movement only highlights the urgency and necessity of continuing and expanding this path of resistance.
