On 9 July 2021, the workers of Florence’s GKN Driveline took over their car axle factory after an email announced that all of them, more than 400, had been fired with immediate effect. The GKN Factory Collective thus kickstarted a long struggle against decommissioning. Having witnessed and analysed so many past episodes of mass layoffs, they decided to play a more creative game. With the assistance of an interdisciplinary group of sympathetic researchers, they drafted a conversion plan to produce components for sustainable public transport and demanded its adoption via a nationalisation that would put the factory under workers’ control. On this basis, they proposed and sealed an alliance with the international climate justice movement and local environmental community groups, igniting gigantic mass mobilisations in support of their project.

Four and a half years after the beginning of the dispute, the struggle is still open and the Factory Collective finds itself engaged in a long war of position against the intransigence of the capitalist front and institutional inertia. In an important development, the Tuscany regional law on industrial consortia was approved in December 2024. This legal instrument would allow the “regionalisation” of the plant abandoned by the British fund Melrose Industries, by entrusting it to a consortium aimed at reindustrialising the area. The Industrial Consortium of the Florentine Plain was in fact established in July 2025, as a partnership between the Tuscany Region, the Metropolitan City of Florence, and the municipalities of Campi Bisenzio, Sesto Fiorentino, and Calenzano. This should place the GKN For Future Cooperative (GFF), established by the workers’ collective, in a position to finally implement its latest plan for sustainable energy and mobility under workers’ control, with the recycling of solar panels and the production of cargo bikes.

However, six months after its creation, the Consortium remains inactive due to a bureaucratic subterfuge: the authorities’ failure to merely appoint an auditor to supervise it, which is a legal condition for the project to become operative. After the 18 October 2025 national march in Florence in defence of the Ex GKN experience, during which demonstrators also blockaded the Amerigo Vespucci Airport, the President of the Tuscany Region, Eugenio Giani, once again committed to resolving the deadlock. Yet the elusive auditor is still nowhere to be found. The elusive auditor was finally appointed in December, but this has changed nothing in respect to the Consortium’s immobility.

The political reality behind the formalities is clear. The centre-left governing Tuscany does not want to appear comparable to Meloni’s far right government and its open hostility toward any initiative guided by working-class interests rather than by “national priority.” However, within the mainstream of the Democratic Party, there is no real willingness to allow the project to develop. On the one hand, this would entail a financial commitment, however minimal. Yet a quick comparison between Europe’s and China’s performance in “green” technologies should be enough to understand how free market dogmas failed even in their own promise to guarantee cutting-edge innovation. On the other hand, the real issue is that the success of an autonomous workers’ initiative, supported by social movements, is inconvenient for those who have always feared that this dispute could become a precedent and an example. The decision to create an ENI-branded “green” hub in Calenzano – just a couple kilometres from the Ex GKN plant – completely bypassing the most important working-class environmentalist struggle in the country, is highly indicative. Finally, at a time when Western governments have effectively abandoned their ambitions for an ecological transition in order to prioritise rearmament, the GFF project is even more disturbing to them. As the Collective itself has written: “We believe that the ‘rubber wall’ preventing us from reopening the factory is due to many reasons, but among these there is certainly one decisive factor: you cannot allow an example of ecological reindustrialisation from below if you want to convince society that rearmament is necessary to stop industrial decline.”

Despite all the sabotage they have faced, the Collective remains strong thanks to mass support ranging from the local to the international level. Since that July 2021, solidarity initiatives for a convergence of different but interrelated struggles have followed one another without pause, recently culminating in the Factory Collective’s important role in Italy’s mobilisations against the genocide in Gaza, which link the fight for an ecological transition from below to that against the proliferation of war fronts. To push the dispute beyond the muds of institutional wear down, the Collective has relaunched the popular shareholding campaign inaugurated about three years ago. In earlier phases, joining required only submitting a declaration of interest, committing to the future payment of the participation fee. Today, instead, we are called upon to make a more concrete effort. It is now possible, with a bit of patience, to pay one’s share via the dedicated online platform. A quicker option is sending a contribution through a crowdfunding campaign on Produzioni dal Basso . If the reindustrialisation project does not get off the ground, the funds will be returned to the “popular shareholders.” If instead – as hoped – the project takes off, it will be a way to collectively take part in a small but important swing of the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.