July 1962: for three days, from Saturday 7 to Monday 9 July, one of the main squares of Turin, piazza Statuto, and the adjacent streets were the scene of violent clashes between the police, in particular the famous in those years and the demonstrators with dozens injured on both sides and over a thousand arrests.
Remembered as "the facts of Piazza Statuto", over time they became a sort of legendary epic of workers' spontaneity and autonomy, even if the chronicles of the time report a series of infiltrations and provocations of apparently incomprehensible signs.
While the Minister of the Interior, Paolo Emilio Taviani, blamed the Turin communists for the accidents, the Turin-born Giuseppe Saragat, secretary of the social democratic party and future President of the Republic, signaled that the Catholic fundamentalists of the Cisl of the powerful Christian Democrat leader were also in the square , also from Turin, Carlo Donat Cattin.
On the other hand, the secretary of the Chamber of Labor Sergio Garavini and the secretary of the Turin FIOM Emilio Pugno denied an active participation of the union in the riots, indeed they dissociated. But what was the pretext that triggered the fuse of the street riots, spontaneous or not?
In February of that year, with the birth of a DC-PRI-PSDI government presided over by Amintore Fanfani with the external support, for the first time, of the PSI, a rift opened up between Fiat, which supported the new government in what, as Valletta said, "the fruit of the development of the times" and Confindustria led by the electric front, who were firmly opposed to the nationalization of electricity envisaged by the government programme.
1962 was also a year of contract renewals, including the main one, that of the metalworkers.
The President of Confindustria Furio Cicogna, President of Chatillon, elected at the end of the previous year against the opinion of Fiat and representative of the anti-government front, seized the opportunity to take a very rigid position with respect to contract renewals, rejecting trade union platforms of claim .
Valletta, on the other hand, believed that the metalworkers' contract, which would expire in October, should be closed quickly and possibly without recourse to strikes and consequent production losses.
In 1962 Fiat had exceeded 80.000 workers in Turin, and car production in the Lingotto and Mirafiori factories would have amounted to 769.000 units, almost 200.000 more than the previous year.
Furthermore, Valletta thought like Henry Ford: the workers had to be paid well because they had to be the company's first customers, and precisely in an interview that year with the newspaper Il Messaggero, the Professor underlined that "our workers for 30 percent today own a car”.
Moreover, the position of Confindustria stiffens the unions, in particular the metalworkers of FIOM-Cgil and FIM-Cisl, who choose Fiat as a battleground, also to recover from the very hard defeats in the elections of the Internal Commission, when the company union SIDA ( Sindacato Italiano dell'Auto) had achieved a landslide victory with 72 elected members followed by UILM with 64 and at a distance FIOM with 35 and FIM with 32.
In June, the strikes at Mirafiori begin, organized by FIOM and the FIM: membership is not high but incomplete cars leave the assembly lines and end up on the yards and cannot be delivered to the sales network.
Fiat reacts harshly. For two days all the workers of the Turin plants are released, the so-called "defensive lockout", while only a few hundred specialized workers are sent to work (able to give a mustache even to flies, according to a Piedmontese saying) to complete the fitting out of the vehicles stationary in the shipping yards.
The protest of the national unions was not long in coming: a national strike of the metalworkers was proclaimed for two days, on 9 and 10 July for the renewal of the national contract and against the anti-union lockout of Fiat.
The position of the PCI is more secluded: in mid-June Valletta was in Moscow to meet Kosygin, the head of the Soviet government, to define some industrial agreements, including the construction of a Fiat car plant in Russia, the first Western company to do so.
To prevent participation in the national strike, Fiat signs a pre-contract with the SIDA and the provincial Uilm and with the relative members of the Internal Commission, who form the absolute majority of the same, during the night between Friday 6 and Saturday 7 July.
The requests of the union claim platform are practically accepted, as a contractual advance, with the addition of some company specificities connected to the organization of work, such as the piecework allowance and line hardship.
The accumulation of renewed salary items brings the average hourly wage of the Mirafiori worker, excluding the contingency, from 307,53 lire to 361,97 with an increase of over 17 percentage points.
The news of the signing of the agreement is spread immediately at 6 in the morning at the entrance of the first shift (in 1962 the weekly working hours of the metalworkers were still 44 hours, so the shift workers mounted the first shift on alternate Saturdays) by the trade unionists signatories of the agreement who invite the workers to abstain from the strikes proclaimed for the following week.
However, the signatory unions and the company had underestimated the discontent that was growing in Turin in those years, where antagonism and aggressiveness coalesced in that working-class population made up of young people mainly of recent immigration from the south who manifested all their social unease in the transition from a culture peasant to an industrial culture not yet assimilated.
That Saturday 7 July it was precisely these young people who, upon hearing the news of the separate agreement, flocked from the Fiat factories, not only at Mirafiori and Lingotto but also at SPA, Grandi Motori Marini, Avio or Fucine e Fonderie, in thousands towards Piazza Statuto where the provincial UIL has its headquarters.
The most troublesome throw stones at the windows and try to break into the union headquarters, the police intervene, the clashes begin, the trade unionists present from the CGIL and CISL lose control of the square.
The violent protest, with numerous injured demonstrators and the forces of order, will continue, except at night, on Sunday and Monday July 9, the first day of the general strike proclaimed by metalworkers.
The chronicles of the time tell us that already on Saturday afternoon the workers' protest had transformed into something indecipherable: demonstrators appeared armed with slingshots, sticks and chains, and provided with porphyry cubes to throw at the police.
Some will claim to have seen groups of "anarchoids" connected to a Milan newspaper and mysteriously sent to all Fiat workers, among those arrested there will be neo-fascists and communist activists from other cities, but above all many will claim to have been hired for 1500 lire and a pack of 20 cigarettes for export.
Finally, there are a whole series of groups of hooligans in the square who had already made headlines for having split the cameras of a well-known national-popular broadcast in Turin a few months earlier or had devastated the theater at the Exposition for the Centenary of the Unity of 'Italy.
From a testimony collected by some young journalists of the Gazzetta del Popolo (future signatures of the main Italian newspapers), who had prevented the invasion of the headquarters of their newspaper in Corso Valdocco, a stone's throw from Piazza Statuto, we read:
“I don't know who was the one giving the money. He wasn't alone, he had gotten off a truck, there were other people on the truck. There were also stones on the truck. They told me that with the small ones I had to punch, so the punches hurt more. I had to throw big stones”.
On August 5, 1962, Fiat fired 84 workers identified among the promoters of the events in Piazza Statuto.
However, the trade union dispute ended in October of the same year when Fiat and Olivetti signed a protocol of advance on the future contract with the national metalworkers' unions, which followed the separate agreement of July.
The "protocol of advance" was then implemented by numerous other companies, marking the definitive break between the line of Valletta and that of the Presidency of Confindustria.
The model of trade union relations based on company agreements anticipating national contracts, which developed after the war, was however at its end: a few more years and then the contractual seasons of the "hot autumn" would arrive.
