In an interview with Sergio Bologna, Gianni Boetto recounts his decades-long experience of labour struggles in the Bassa Padovana, a region near Padua with a high proportion of medium-sized industrial supply companies. Boetto describes the experience of organized autonomy in the factories during the 1960s and 1970s and the impact of the defeat at FIAT in 1980, as well as the migration that intensified from the 1980s onwards, which restructured the labour market in various “waves”, thereby following the recomposition of capital. He describes the intensive collaboration needed which allowed grassroots unions to organise these migrants by way of operaist approaches, thus enabling them to establish themselves alongside the majority unions as equal opponents to capital, in order to counter the exploitative working conditions in the logistics and service industries. Sergio Bologna adds important remarks on the history of Italian cooperatives and their negative instrumentalization that has taken place since the 1990s in these class struggles of a newly constituted proletariat.