A full square, attentive, angry, moved, listened to the terrible story of the death of Patrizio Spasiano, a young apprentice earning 500 euros a month, killed at the age of 19 by an ammonia leak, told by his parents.

 Thus began the public meeting of the USB delegates in a square a few metres from the Parliament and the offices of the European Union Representation in Italy.

 In 2024 there were more than 1000  murders at work in Italy and more than 500,000 accidents. The internal war is also part of it, while the external war is dangerously approaching and the people of Rome have strongly denounced it through the voices of workers from all sectors and from all over the country.
The war economy is already devastating our country. The public sector workers, who are fighting to reject unacceptable contracts in a country that ranks last in the G20 wage rankings, have been joined by the metalworkers fighting for a real contract and against deindustrialisation, the transport workers fighting against privatisation and for the right to strike, and the drivers and logistics porters fighting for fairer working conditions. Commercial workers, young people working for 6 euros an hour in social cooperatives, seasonal workers have all spoken out about their  unsustainable conditions, and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants living and working in Italy have spoken of exploitation and how the powerful are fomenting an internal war against them, blaming the poorest for their situation. And then those fighting for the right to housing, for a fair and decent pension, were greeted with thunderous applause by the young people from schools and universities who, together with the USB strike, had filled the squares and streets of over 30 Italian cities the day before.

 In all the speeches there was a strong, decisive and uncompromising 'no' to rearmament, to a common European defence, to the race to convert factories to produce weapons, to the European Union's lust for war.

There was a strong revival of the mobilisation in support of the Palestinian people and the denunciation of the genocide perpetrated by Israel with the complicit silence of the European Union and the Italian government and politicians. The delegates all agreed and applauded the slogans for internationalism, the confirmation of their strong support to the WFTU, the need to unite more and more the struggles against capital and war at European and world level and the condemnation of the complicity of the yellow unions of the ETUC at national and European level. 

At the end of this important day, an enthusiastic crowd repeated the call of the USB to organise a big national day of mobilisation against the war.