ITALY
Resisting rationalization
THE defeat at the big Italian car firm FIAT in the fall of 1980 symbolized the beginning of the retreat of the workers movement for the following decade. This setback dampened militancy in Turin, the "FIAT city", though other centers of major capitalist industrial production in the
North like Milan and Brescia experienced important workers' mobilizations around national engineering contract negotiations and the struggle for the defense of wage indexation.
CICI MALABARBA abandoned by the unions (the latter have recently signed agreements concerning factory closings). The COBAS mobilized alongside "Essere sindicato" against the accords on the cancellation of the indexation of wages in December 1991.
The demand for union democracy is one of the central points of these workers' initiatives as has been recently demonstrated by the COBAS at Alfa Romeo. Their professed objective is to refound a class unionism on the model of the factory committees of the early 1970s.
Alfa Romeo at Arese, with 13,000 employees, was acquired by FIAT in 1987 without spending a lira (the first installment should be paid to the state in January 1993), essentially to prevent competition from Ford or the Japanese which could injure the traditional monopoly conditions of automobile production in Italy. These developments have also affected the two other enterprises in the Milan area, Autobianchi and Maserati, which will be closed next July.
The Alfa Romeo vanguard
There remains at Alfa an important nucleus of vanguard workers with mass influence that has resisted the thorough restructuring of the previous years. In order to eliminate this grouping, FIAT, following an old pattern, organized a clandestine parallel structure — the so-called "Gladio" - to that of the official leadership, in order to neutralize the most militant workers.
According to the testimony of a part of the former union leadership in the plant, starting in 1987, this body, with the aid of certain sectors of the state apparatus, trailed union militants around the clock, tapped their phones, and fabricated "accidents" and other "proof" that was used to victimize them. Since the unions accepted the principle of political firings, the struggle against these practices was organized outside of official union channels by the workers themselves with legal and political support coming from outside the plant. The bitterness of this struggle and the determinaSabadel tion of FIAT to "normalize" the situation in the plant has been underlined by the fact that some workers have been fired and re-hired under court order seven times. Fired workers have come to the factory gates, attempted to enter and have organized meetings and occasional strikes.
After several years of struggle within the union this nucleus organized a
GIGI MALABARBA T ODAY, the bosses are entering a new phase of economic restructuring in a strong position thanks to the growing subordination of the unions and of the left to the capitalist demand that foreign competition be confronted. This situation reflects the weakening of the mechanisms of wage recuperation and the facility of lay-off procedures that have been adopted by the government without opposition. This in turn has favored the shift to the right that has been seen on the social plane as well as on the level of political institutions.
An acceleration of this on all fronts stemmed from the double need to respond to economic integration into the single European market on one hand, and the pressure exerted by some sectors of the bourgeoisie whose privileges accumulated during the speculation boom are now threatened.
The opportunity for the bosses to register a strong financial recovery and at the same time to strike at the bastions of the working class has been provided by the possibility of "liberating" vast of areas of industrialized urban space through real estate speculation undertaken by massive groups of public and private Italian capital like Fiat, Pirelli, Montedison or Ansaldo.
The state has massively intervened to facilitate the partial transfer of production to southern regions controlled by the Christian Democracy and the mafia. For their part, the unions accepted exceptions to labor laws and workers in the southern factories were forced to submit to "total quality" schemes.
In fact, the transfer of production and capital often takes the form of expansion into other countries. After the failure of 8 several Italian industrial groups to make inroads into the West European market, efforts have been made by companies like
FIAT to penetrate the East European market while other firms like Olivetti have turned to the Far East.
Sirens of the free market
Unionization is not in a free fall, but the strong attraction of the sirens of the free market of the key centers has been undermining worker militancy. In the General
Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL), collaboration between the Socialist Party and the Democratic Party of the Left (the ex-PCI) is quite close.
At the last congress a national opposition called "Essere Sindacato" (ES - "To be a unionist") was formed with strong rank-and-file support. It managed to obtain representation on leadership bodies.
At the same time some sectors of the workers' vanguard initiated for the first time in the industry an embryonic form of self-management which broke with the union bureaucracy in large factories in
Milan, Rome and Naples. The industrial
"COBAS", like those which have already occurred in public sector employment and in the services, have a clear class connotation. Though they are still rather limited in scope, they have already played a key role in defensive struggles that have been nternational Viewpoint # 229 • May 25, 1992
COBAS at Alfa Romeo that was elected by 2,000 workers.
It has been recognized as a representative of the workers and has its own offices within the factory. It is a body that has developed a series of initiatives opposed to that of the national union structures — the CGIL, the Confederation of Free Italian Unions (CISL) and the Union of Italian Labor (UIL). It has shown itself capable of organizing plant-wide strikes around wage demands, against lay-offs and political firings.
Over the last few months, some COBAS delegates, a majority of whom have a background in the far left, have,
Expo 92:
THE Universal Exposition at been devoted to this?