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The article sets out to provide an overview of the industrial decline at Porto Marghera (Venice). The dockland and industrial area was created with State funding in 1917 and developed tremendously in metallurgy and chemical industry, employing thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside. Already in the 1970s it entered a crisis in which the health and environmental issues played a major role. State intervention, unions’ collective bargaining and workers’ subjectivity are considered in the process that led from the hope of a sustainable restructuring, through the phase of decline, to a proper deindustrialization. Today Porto Marghera is struggling to find a possible future around the commercial port and new activities in the field of knowledge and technology.