It was not an accident: Adil was killed in the name of profit! – SI Cobas

Adil Lives in Our Heart

This morning, during the national logistics strike, Adil Belakhdim, our coordinator for Novara and a member of the National Coordination of SI Cobas, was killed by a truck that broke a picket line in front of Lidl warehouse at Biandrate (Novara).

The picket, consisting of a few dozen workers, was hit by a criminal driver, who at the sight of the picket did not hesitate to press the accelerator, first running over two workers who barely managed to save themselves and who are now hospitalized, and then running over our comrade, and fleeing.

Adil was married with two young children. After working at Tnt for years, he chose to return to his country and start a business. Things didn’t go as he had planned, so he came back to Italy and became active in the SI Cobas.

It was he who gave his commitment in Novara to build a provincial coordination, working on daily basis to develop SI Cobas in the Novara area. Comrades from other cities heard his words at the last national coordination, urging the struggle and the participation in tomorrow’s demonstration in Rome. Two years ago, when SI Cobas met Morocco’s largest union representatives, he participated in the delegation and generously hosted us at his home.

Although still incredulous and appalled by this tragedy, we can not silence our anger for a death that cannot in any way be dismissed as a simple accident (as some media presented it at first), nor as the simple action of a lone madman!

Adil’s murder is in fact the culmination of an escalation of organized violence against Si Cobas, which has been going on for months and is now without limits.

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SI Cobas coordinator of Novara, Adil Belakhdim has been murdered while on the strike picket line. This is a collective crime of the bosses and the Draghi government – TIR

This morning, during the strike at Lidl in Biandrate, a truck driver broke the picket line of the workers on strike, running over and crushing under the wheels of the truck, Adil Belakdim, the SI Cobas coordinator of Novara.

The behavior of the truck driver was criminal, as it had been that of the truck driver who years ago in Piacenza ran over Abd Elsalam Ahmed Eldanf, a worker of the Usb, in very similar circumstances. It would be too easy, however, to blame an individual for this murder. The killing of Adil Belakdim is a collective crime that directly involves the bosses of logistics – with FedEx at the head –, all the employers, the Draghi government.

This killing calls into play the bosses of logistics, because, with FedEx playing the leading role once held by Marchionne’s Fiat / FCA, they seem to be willing to launch a frontal attack on the immigrant proletariat working in the logistics sector; the very same proletariat that in a decade long cycle of struggles led by the SI Cobas has been able to inflict important (although not definitive) blows to the mafia-like system of contracts and sub-contracts, conquering levels of wages, working hours, a long-time-denied freedom of organization in the workplace, respect for their dignity – a mafia-like system, which is the weapon through which multinational companies super-exploit worker labor (not only in logistics: think of Fincantieri, world record holder in the use of sub-contracts), imposing levels of precariousness, of intensity of work and of working hours, so devastating that within 10-15 years they end up wearing out and breaking the muscles and bodies of many workers; all of this in exchange for wages that were often, until recent times, below the subsistence levels.

These employers (with the US FedEx in the lead), who have been working for some time to build and put into action their private squads against workers’ strikes, have blood on their hands.

But it is not just about the emplyers in the logistics sector.