A year that more than others changed the industrial history of the country in the last century was the 1939. That year, the new production complex of mirafiori, on an area of one million square metres, of which 300.000 are covered, with an initially planned employment of 22.000 workers (which exceeded 60.000 in the XNUMXs) in the foundry, moulding, mechanical and bodywork departments.
Mirafiori, as the lawyer Gianni Agnelli called it, was the "icon" of the economic boom that made Italy an industrial country, with the transformation of thousands of farmers (first of the north and then of the south) in workers of the big factory.
Between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, Mirafiori was in fact a sort of big one laboratory of industrialization and social transformation.
The productive concentration of cars and the immigration and urbanization of the workforce were indicators of the driving force that pervaded Turin in those years, but they were also the causes of the subsequent social tensions that emerged in the following years.
Mirafiori as an emblem of the country's development was, moreover, what Senator Giovanni Agnelli, the lawyer's grandfather and president and founder of Fiat, and the managing director, Professor Vittorio Valletta, had set out to create a factory competitive at international, ready to seize the opportunities of an expanding market.
On the model of the American plants, in particular that of Ford's River Rouge, Mirafiori was conceived in an era in which world industrial development was based on "mass production" and on the mass market, and therefore on the need to have large enough to maximize economies of scale.
Lo Lingotto plant, built only a few years earlier, could not increase the production spaces because it developed vertically on several floors, while Mirafiori developed horizontally, with the possibility therefore of expanding the departments and processing lines in the face of production increases.
The realization of the project was, however opposed by Mussolini and the fascist regime who viewed with concern the concentration of thousands of workers employed in a large factory as a potential breeding ground for union and political opponents.
However, this prediction promptly came true on 15 May 1939, at the official inauguration of the plant, when Mussolini, annoyed by the coldness with which the workers present in the square followed his speech, left the stage halfway through the ceremony or the 5 March 1943 when, for the first time, the Mirafiori workers went on strike, which soon spread to other factories in the North, marking the beginning of the end of the regime.
With post-war production recovery, the growth of Mirafiori in the fifties and sixties corresponds to the rise in the standards of well-being of Italians: production grows, the employment base expands, the motorisation of the country increases, offering Italians that sense of freedom of movement they never had had.
The newsreels of the time hand down to us the images of the queues of cars heading to Ostia Lido or Fregene from Rome on Sunday mornings, or the August exoduses from Milan and Turin to reach the countries of origin of the southern workers of the northern factories.
These are the years in which Mirafiori is identified with its products, the "500"And the"600”, but these were also the years in which Fiat, with its company school, carried out the most intense training operation that Italian industry had ever attempted.
Thousands and thousands of young people receive professional training and education that goes beyond work performance, and extends to the fundamental principles of corporate action and the responsibilities that it implies. (experience resumed decades later, albeit to different extents and methods, by Sergio Marchionne with the "cultural reconversion" of the Pomigliano plant).
This was the moment in which the industrial culture, which until then was the prerogative of a small managerial and entrepreneurial elite, became the heritage of a large stratum of the corporate population, made up of managers, technicians and even workers.
Starting since the "hot autumn" of 1969However, Mirafiori, with over ten million hours of work lost due to strikes, assumes a totally different image for public opinion, becoming the symbol of union struggles and permanent conflict.
With the signature of metalworkers' contract of 8 January 1970 the warm autumn comes to an end, but not a contractual season, both national and corporate, will go by that is not pervaded at Mirafiori by internal strikes with "sweeper" marches, both for the workshops and for the offices, with the bosses forced, sometimes by kicking butts, parading in the front row waving union flags, or by "persuasive" pickets at the entrances from the first light of dawn in the case of all-day strikes. And then, to press on the closure of the contractual dispute, we arrive at the final push with the blocking of Mirafiori even for several days.
While the workers' struggles escalated and the strikes multiplied, another drama, the most serious of all, was increasingly taking hold. brigade terrorism, which made Mirafiori its preferred target: more than forty of his paintings and leaders were shot in the legs in those years by the Mirafiori Red Brigade column.
was inOctober 1980 that Mirafiori became a symbol of the most "irreparable" workers defeat, not only in Fiat but in the country, from which the opposing trade union has never recovered.
After more than a month of union blockade of the plant to counter the company's extraordinary redundancy fund provision, on 14 October a silent procession through the central streets of Turin of thousands of Fiat workers who wanted to go back to work (gone down in history as the "march of the forty thousand”) was the element that resolved the conflict.
With the "glorious" defeat of the conflict union, the rules of civil life are re-established and the reformist and participatory union acquires more and more consensus over the years until January 15, 2011, when the workers of Mirafiori express themselves with a majority Referendum for Sergio Marchionne's plan to leave Confindustria and implement the new Fiat Employment Contract.
On an industrial level, however, Mirafiori had long since lost its role as the "production centrality" of the Fiat system.
With the development of the plants in the south of Cassino, Pomigliano and Melfi, and in Poland of Tichy, the production of Mirafiori cars goes down from one million per year in the late 1980s to XNUMX per year in the XNUMXs, reaching around XNUMX at the beginning of the XNUMXs. The drop in production volumes proportionally corresponds to the drop in workers who from sixty thousand in XNUMX are reduced to only a few thousand.
It will be in 2010 that Sergio Marchionne, to relaunch and consolidate Mirafiori, will revolutionize the production structure of the plant from "generalist" in which end-of-series cars were now being produced and increasingly declining (such as Idea, Lancia Musa, Multipla, Alfa 166 or Lancia Thesis) to exclusive manufacturer of high-end cars such as Maserati.
Today what was once the largest factory in Italy, a true symbol of industrialism, has taken up its new challenge: one in which research, innovation and expertise support the mobility of the future, starting with the cars that will be produced right at Mirafiori, the electric 500 and the electric Maseratis, not neglecting any contributions to autonomous driving deriving from the announced merger of FCA and PSA.
