On October 4, 2009, Gino Giugni died in Rome, after a long illness that had torn him from legal culture and politics a Master and a fruitful thinker to the country.
Giugni was not only a skilled labor lawyer, founder of the Bari school, in close collaboration with his friend Federico Mancini and his Bolognese school. In the role of close collaborator of the minister Giacomo Brodolini and Carlo Donat Cattin, after the disappearance of the first, linked his name to the Statute of Workers' Rights in 1970, close to the warm autumn.
It was seriously wounded in an attack by the BR, arranged to kill him. About himself he said he didn't know if he was a professor lent to politics or the other way around. He was PSI Senator for various legislatures, president of the Labor Commission; Then Minister of Labour of the Ciampi Government in 1993, when he oversaw and signed (together with the social partners) the Protocol that regulated collective bargaining. But the Master's main merit remains that of having founded the modern trade union law, through an operation of a cultural nature that had the sense of a real Copernican revolution.
Even in the absence of the ordinary law envisaged by article 39 of the Constitution which should have regulated the activity of the trade unions for the purpose of extending erga omnes of collective bargaining, Giugni sensed that it was formed and consolidated a complete trade union order based on the real processes of daily action and on the recognition of mutual representativeness by each of the social partners. Thus Giugni widened, with this vision, the horizons of modern trade union law, freeing it from the messianic expectations of the de jure condendum assuming as a reference "an activity that took place in the precarious context of the common law of contracts, was tainted by a thousand insufficiencies, but is nonetheless constitutive of a valid heritage of experiences of 'living law'". This approach found its own source of formal legitimacy in the Workers' Statute of 1970.
Gino Giugni was not only a master of law, but a personality of great political prominence in the context of socialist reformism. To a student who asked him: “Are you therefore stating that the ethical foundations of the Constitution will remain unchanged?”, Giugni replied: “Your question contains in itself an effective answer: the ethical foundations will not be changed. As long as the Republican Constitution of 1948 remains in force, we will have the certainty that its ethical principles work and, above all, that they have a significant degree of effectiveness. When these foundations change – together with the corresponding institutions – we will find ourselves faced with phenomena which I will be happy not to witness: I hope for you that there will not be episodes of crisis of the institutions such as to cast doubt on these ethical principles”. It happens to great men to also be prophets.
