For the past 21 months, the foundry has run reduced shifts and workers have taken it in turns to spend time at home on lower pay. But they still have their jobs and they say there are signs that business is improving.
Aristide, like other colleagues who chat about their experience at the end of the morning shift, is a committed, left-wing CGIL member. Often speaking in thick Paduan dialect in a factory hut decked with a Cuban flag and other leftist icons, the workers are proud of what they have achieved, but also exasperated by the political apathy of their colleagues. Unions, they say, are now reduced to a rearguard action to save jobs. It's a last line of defence, rather than a first line of attack to secure wage rises or even change government policies.
"There will never be social revolt in Italy because there is no leadership on the left, no union unity and no social cohesion, it's each labour category for itself," says Ivan Maso, 41, who checks the chemical components of the iron ore every morning in factory temperatures of around 45 degrees Celsius.
MOVING THE GOAL POST
For many of these workers, European labour protections are a cruel joke.
Fifty-six year-old Silena Trentin was earning 900 euros a month as a textile worker in Padua until June, when the clothes factory where she worked went bust.
Trentin doesn't want her job back, she says. She wants her money for several months of unpaid work. And she is desperate to retire. Successive governments have kept "moving the goal posts" by raising the years of pension contributions needed for retirement, from 35 to 37 to 39, just as she approached the previous target. But the company went bust when she was just a few months short of the current requirement of 40.
A longtime unionist, Trentin sees a bleak future for organised labour in Italy, as traditional industries are replaced by services and more and more jobs are offered on temporary contracts with few protections. "Years ago when the union reps said 'Everybody out!', everybody got up and walked out. Now, even when we weren't being paid, a lot would stay put and say: 'Why, what's happened?' It's incredible, now people are willing to even work for nothing."
COMPETITION AND YOUTUBE
Could that change? Will hard times in Europe lead to stronger unions, a rebirth of the labour activism? "Potentially, yes. They have nowhere to go but up," says historian Powell in Madrid. "If they do succeed in finding a voice which is relevant, the danger of course is that they move in a much more competitive environment now. You have NGOs, the green movement. It's a much more competitive world for them as organisations than it was in the '70s. People have other institutions to turn to."
If this year's strikes are anything to go by, worker power in China and South Africa and other fast-growing economies is growing. In Europe, it's often harder to get workers on the street.
To drum up support for this week's strike in Spain, the general secretaries of the country's two largest unions embarked on a whirlwind national tour this month to explain their stance. In order to win over the young, one has launched a video competition on the strike, while the other is running a controversial series of Youtube videos starring a caricatured boss playing games in his office, behaving in a sexist fashion and patronising workers.
"When a union needs to call a general strike for three months down the line, it's because they need a lot of time to convince people to come out in support," says Ana Maria Villanueva, 50, a hotel worker having a glass of wine on the terrace of an Oviedo bar with a friend after work. "The unions are doing a lot to force an impact, but I don't know to what extent they'll manage it."
(With additional reporting by Renee A. Maltezou/Athens)