The Fiat Model

Wretched and reactionary as always – what else can be said of the owners of Fiat, or of the banks that dog its heels, in the labour dispute of Melfi⁽¹⁾? It’s a key plant, essential to the “just-in-time” system that abolishes stores and stock; it’s the second factory in terms of productivity in the whole of Europe, but Fiat insists on keeping the fifty thousand employed at salary levels 15 to 25 per cent lower than its other factories, with a faster pace and with work-weeks of six days.
 

And when, after years and years of a strangling contract signed as Fiat-Sata, the workers of Melfi ask for a contractual level similar to the others, it doesn’t even respond. And when, exasperated, they organise a protest, they hurl the police at them with their helmets and batons.

This happened the other morning. We’re in 2004, we fill our mouths with words such as globalisation and competitivity but the heirs of the Advocate⁽²⁾ direct the labour like a miserly farmer of a hundred years ago. They think that you can do what you like to the people of Basilicata⁽³⁾, it’s a poor region of the south, they have hired workers over a very vast territory so that they will be distant two-hour’s drive, and with their own means of transport, and on rickety roads where accidents are the norm, in order to keep them divided outside as within the huge spaces of the plant.

Doesn’t matter if they are dead tired, that punishments rain down in the thousands (nine thousand in five years), that many leave because they can’t bear it any longer, something that doesn’t happen in this scale in any other place, but better dissipate the know-how counting on the unemployed of the surrounding areas rather than pay the workers a normal wage for normal working hours. That’s the way our manager class, that used to boast about having made of Italy the fifth industrial power of the world, thinks. It’s a management not just arrogant but also stupid. It mustn’t have paid even a sociologist sufficiently intelligent to point out that in the south it is an error to believe that the lack of a long tradition of struggle means eternal resignation.

Fiat has tested the patience too long and now finds itself facing a protest that has suddenly caught flames over elementary necessities that decency should have averted. Its the RSU⁽⁴⁾, the organism of the factory, that set out blocking the accesses to one plant in which internal communication is difficult. The direction has believed it can ignore it by make an agreement with the pliable Fim-Cisl and Uil⁽⁵⁾ and by terrorising the workers of Mirafiori⁽⁶⁾, suspended between one integration fund⁽⁷⁾ and the other, until some of them wrote to Melfi imploring them to stop it because: our work is in your hands. As if both weren’t in the hands of the Turin⁽⁸⁾ family.

The printed and the spoken press has not lost the opportunity to rush to condemn the lack of global conscience of the workers and to exhort the freedom of blackleggery. All wrong. Melfi has held, ten thousand persons encircled the complex the day before yesterday, and Fiat just like, I suppose, the Prefect of Potenza⁽⁹⁾ have lost their heads by sending the police to break up the garrisons.

Rash move. Tomorrow metal workers all over Italy will go on strike and we’ll see who is the winner. And how long will the government be able to feign to not get involved. And how long will the opposition hesitate to enter the field on a question of equitable salaries and such elementary norms. We aren’t yet the pale imitation of the United States of the right-wing Republicans.

(2) Agnelli, the owner of Fiat, is an advocate by title (torna al testo)

(3) Basilicata is the name of the region of which Melfi is a town (torna al testo)

(4) United Labour Union Rappresentation; it is the factory’s labour union with representatives from the various national labour unions (torna al testo)

(5) The three major metal worker unions in Italy are under CGIL, CISL and UIL (torna al testo)

(6) Mirafiori is the principal factory of Fiat (torna al testo)

(7) Government funds to assist industries in trouble in paying the workers’ salaries (torna al testo)

(8) The Agnelli family is from the city of Turin (torna al testo)

(9) Potenza is the capital city of the region Basilicata (torna al testo)