Nineteen years ago, Marco Biagi, professor of labor law at the University of Modena and adviser to the minister Roberto Maroni as well as coordinator of the group of experts who had drawn up the White Paper on the labor market, was expected outside his home in via Valdonica in Bologna by a brigadier commando and was assassinated. The family members - who were waiting for him for dinner - heard the sound of gunfire. His wife Marina understood that what her husband had feared for months had happened due to the threats he continued to receive.
I had been his friend for thirty years, we were both pupils of Federico Mancini, we had worked together and hung out with families, I had seen his two sons Francesco and Lorenzo grow up. That evening, I was in Rome, at home, attached to my computer. I listened to a football match on the radio, even though I wasn't a fan like Marco who never missed a Bologna match. In the interval, a short radio news broke the news of the killing. I warned my wife in Bologna that she immediately went to Marina's. Marco had had an escort for some years; then the provincial committee for safety had taken it away from him, despite the concerns that my friend had expressed, in vain, in all the competent offices.
When a few months later the police got their hands on the killers it became known that if he had still been under protection, the Red Brigades would not have identified him as a target because they would not have been able to deal with a firefight.
Marco Biagi was born in Bologna in 1950 (he was 52 at the time of the killing). He had graduated in law from the AlmaMater with Federico Mancini and had followed a specialization course in Pisa with Luigi Montuschi. From 1974 he had begun his university career in various universities throughout the peninsula, until, 10 years later, he had landed at the faculty of economics in Modena; in 1987 he had become professor of labor law and industrial relations; until 2002. He had gathered around him a real school of brilliant young people, a cultural center (the Center for International and Comparative Studies) which has always continued to carry out its activity (with a landing in Bergamo) under the direction of the favorite pupil, Michele Tiraboschi.
Good connoisseur of the English language Marco carried out teaching activities at Dickinson College and (for twenty years) at Johns Hopkins University, important American cultural institutions based in Bologna. Also in those years he oversaw the formation (at Sinnea) of the League of Cooperatives (Marco was one of the first jurists to address the issue of the employment relationship in cooperative companies). His international study experiences (particularly in Japan) are very significant for his academic growth; and European as vice president of the Employment and Labor Market Committee representing the Italian government.
Friend, colleague and close collaborator of Tiziano Treu as owner of the Dicastery of Labour, he also followed him to Transport while at the same time remaining advisor to Antonio Bassolino at Labour. In 2000 he founded Adapt, a study center that still aggregates the most important associations in the world of work with the exception of the CGIL. Relations with this confederation were interrupted when Biagi, on behalf of the Municipality of Milan, worked on an agreement called the Labor Pact, with inclusive aims of marginalized sectors. The agreement - the first of this type - was not signed by the CGIL.
Threats to his safety also began, and, therefore, the protection, until it was unexpectedly interrupted. From 2001, demonstrating his institutional correctness, he was appointed consultant to both Minister Maroni and the President of the European Commission Romano Prodi.
The collaboration with the Berlusconi government isolated him from the context to which he had always belonged. The criticisms became even more severe - but unfair and sectarian - when the group of which he was coordinator prepared and presented, in the fall of 2001, the White Paper on Labour, strongly criticized by the CGIL and from circles of the left. Marco – although saddened by the ostracism to which he was subjected, he did not lose heart and lent himself to defending his work in all offices. But the bad faith of his opponents gave him no respite; thus Marco was indicated as the inventor of the so-called precarious job, despite the fact that his commitment was to indicate the rules and rights for those sectors of the labor market which went beyond the standard discipline of the permanent subordinate relationship. Basically opponents traded the cure for the disease, as if the transformations of work should always be governed in the same way, rather than looking for suitable solutions for both companies and workers. They were moments of great bitterness that Biagi faced with courage and determination, despite being aware that the hostility that surrounded him was arming the gun that killed him 19 years ago a few hundred meters from the Two Towers. On March 21, 2002, two days after his killing, Il Sole 24 Ore - the newspaper with which Biagi collaborated - published a short article written in one go before his death. By sending the text to the editor, he wanted to define it as ''the editorial''. He became the spiritual testament of Marco Biagi.
THE DICE IS CAST: MODERNIZATION OR CONSERVATION?
21 March 2002
“I instinctively jotted down these lines. See if they can help you." This brief message addressed to the director of the Sole-24 Ore accompanied the latest leading article by Marco Biagi. As if he, in writing it, felt the need to leave a testimony and a warning.
''Our labor law has become a matter of strong attraction also for public opinion. Just a short while ago, no one would have ever imagined that the media would gain enormous attention from labor market reforms. And now that, after the Government's latest choices on the experimental reform of art. 18, we are on the eve of a social clash complete with a general strike, even industrial relations will enter a state of suffering. In reality, art. 18 has little or nothing to do with it. We cannot pretend not to see that real dissent is not so much (or not only) referred to this norm, which is so emblematic in our legal system. After all, in the recent agreement on European Works Councils, transposing a long-awaited directive, the social partners have agreed to no longer refer to art. 28 of the Workers' Statute (anti-union behavior). A no less characteristic norm, for many years the true flag of the trade union left. The real battlefield is more generally the one concerning a reform project of the entire matter, on the one hand, and the strenuous defense of the current system, on the other. reservations in relation to the Government's choices, some certainly more persuasive than others. On the other hand, we do not understand the radical opposition to considering the current structure of labor law practically unchangeable, pleading at every turn the violation of fundamental rights or attacks on democracy. It is legitimate to consider any element of modernization or progress a danger to the classes socially weaker. It's always been like this in history that it repeats itself in this case too. The entire bill 848 constitutes the passage from the old to the new and one thinks that after the art. 18 there would have been other parts of that text to be vetoed by the union side. The "Work Statute" itself means reviewing the protection of the various forms of work and not just extending the current ones to those who do not yet have them. Every process of modernization takes place with pain, even with social tensions, in short, also paying high prices for conflict''.
