On October 14, 198040 years ago, at around 11 in the morning, Rai interrupted the transmission to send live commentary from Turin of an event, unexpected in size, which in the following decades would be evoked more than once in the topical moments of union disputes in the our country: the march of the forty thousand.
There was a difference of opinion on the number of forty thousand: for the union there were no more than fifteen/twenty thousand demonstrators, even less for the then mayor of Turin, while in the first afternoon edition for Stamp Sera they were thirty thousand. But how did we finally get to forty thousand? Here's how it went.
On the morning of 14 October I left Mirafiori by the Drosso gate, the only one of the thirty-five gates of the Mirafiori district that the union had not succeeded in or had not wanted to block with a continuous garrison, and I went to the Teatro Nuovo in Corso Massimo d' Azeglio, where for 9,30 the Central Committee for the coordination of Fiat cadres and middle managers had organized a general assembly-meeting to "finally shout to the fugitive authorities and public opinion its ENOUGH!" and their right to return to the factory to work.
It all began at the beginning of September, when the restructuring of the Auto started with the 35-day blockade of Mirafiori and other factories and with the reporting by the company of 23.000 redundancies, which in the face of the persistence of union misunderstandings became 13.000 layoffs announced, until they were suspended at the time of the fall of the Cossiga government and turned into lists of layoff earnings.
It was known that going through with the 13.000 layoffs would be difficult, but we also knew that sooner or later what had to happen would happen: thus the moment was reached when the mobilization of managers and middle managers became the decisive element .
For 35 days, from 11 September, the day on which the federal procedure for collective redundancies due to reductions in personnel was launched, I spent my days in my office in Mirafiori, equipped with makeshift facilities for the night, except for the rare exits, through the usual door del Drosso, to make a trip home to visit the family.
In the five factories of the Mirafiori area, however, around a hundred people were present and handed over in my same condition, including plant managers, personnel managers, workshop heads, heads of the workshop personnel function, and also staff in the medical rooms, switchboard telephone and general services. Similarly in the other blocked establishments.
From the Office Building at door 5, in front of which Berlinguer's rally was to be held, we in the Central Personnel Department held the liaison between Carlo Callieri, the Personnel Director of Fiat Auto (and one of the four members of the company delegation at the table of negotiation with Cesare Romiti, Cesare Annibaldi and Vittorio Ghidella), the Turin car factories and those outside Turin of Verrone (Vercelli), Vado Ligure, Autobianchi of Desio, Florence, Cassino and Sulmona.
Communications took place exclusively by telex, fax or by telephone from a landline and sometimes, when the switchboard found the lines free, even with the then innovative system of telephone conference.
Normally the journey by car from Mirafiori to corso Massimo d'Azeglio takes no more than fifteen minutes: that morning it took me much longer, stuck in an unusual traffic for that hour, made up of columns of Fiat Panda 30 and 45, from 127 and 128 and from some Fiat 131, generally with only one driver on board: they were the Fiat bosses heading to the Teatro Nuovo, where they had been summoned by their Central Committee.
In fact there was some uncertainty in the company about the success of the event: some thought that it would already be a success to be able to fill the audience of the theatre.
The idea was born to Cesare Romiti, as he tells Giampaolo Pansa in the book-interview These years at Fiat, when one evening he drove around the perimeter of Mirafiori and did not recognize among the "picquettes" those he believed to be Fiat workers. He spoke about it with Carlo Callieri and the organizational machine took off.
The headquarters of the operation was placed, in a secluded position, in Ville Roddolo, at the time a nursing home for the elderly Fiat on the Turin hills.
The corporate hierarchical and functional organizational structures were mobilised. All the managers and middle managers of the Turin plants were invited to take part in the demonstration, as well as large representatives from outside Turin were also invited with the organization of trips by bus, train and plane.
When, at the end of the speech by Luigi Arisio, the recently deceased leader of the Fiat leaders and cadres, I left the theater, I found myself facing a human wall: the "call to arms" had received a response above all expectations.
An impressive number of bosses and executives from all over Italy had gathered around the signs indicating their respective factories: Mirafiori, Lingotto, Avio, Materferro, Rivalta, Teksid, Iveco, and then Lancia Chivasso, OM Milan, OM Brescia, Lancia Bolzano, Autobianchi Desio, Trattori Modena, and gradually all the others.
There were many numbers: some said ten thousand, some twenty thousand, the company Press Office spokesman told me that the journalists present risked perhaps thirty thousand.
We decided to hear from Carlo Callieri and went back into the theater lobby where I had noticed a pay phone, which I had well equipped with. I called the Bristol hotel in Rome where, as the secretariat of the Fiat management in via Bissolati had informed me in the morning before leaving Mirafiori, I would find Doctor Callieri in a restricted meeting with Lama, Carniti and Benvenuto to prepare the trade union meeting which they would have had in the afternoon at the Ministry of Labour.
With Callieri we decided to circulate a realistic estimate of about forty thousand people, so when the Digos official, seconded to the Industrial Union, asked us what number we were giving to our bosses and journalists, he agreed that he too would send the same number to the Police Headquarters and to Rome.
Perhaps there have not been many other occasions in which the Police Headquarters has given the same number of participants in a demonstration as that of the organizers.
The march of the forty thousand was immediately perceived as the historic defeat of the union. When I returned to Mirafiori in the afternoon, the pickets were already demobilising.
