On October 9, 1979, Fiat Auto dismissed 61 employees of its Turin plants for the same reason, that of having provided work services that did not comply with the principles of diligence, correctness and good faith and of having constantly displayed conduct that was not in keeping with the principles of civil coexistence in the workplace.
The motivation was deliberately generic and not supported by specific disputes, so as to suggest that the company had acted brutally and without guarantees, but it was justified by the fact that it was not intended to list the circumstances and the violence suffered by various garments over the years in order not to expose them to reprisals from the subjects concerned or their associates.
The choice of Fiat provoked vehement protests on the left because it was interpreted as an explicit accusation of the proximity of the workers' movement to terrorism. However, the company action was necessitated, as the facts later demonstrated, by a very heavy situation that had arisen in the factories where the terrorists could now count on solid complicity.
Fiat's goal was to make the union aware of the characteristics and extent of the violent phenomenon in the workplace as a prerequisite for an agreement to restore a climate of normal civil coexistence in the factory and of struggle to terrorism, but the union did not want or was unable to get the message.
In 1979, workers' unrest within the Fiat factories had in fact reached a point of no return. The episodes of factory violence, which had intensified during the seventies, and which had emerged in all their evidence even under the pressure of the most serious and shocking episodes of terrorism, were those of the invasions of offices, threats and intimidation to the leaders, of the beatings that followed these threats and intimidations; of the compulsion of the bosses in moments of greatest tension to parade at the head of the "sweep workshops" processions with placards around their necks or carrying banners.
But we must also not forget the ostentatious refusal to work, the carrying out of alternative activities to work (such as the alternative canteen at Mirafiori run by collective workers during their working hours), the abandonment of the workplace and the inciting other workers to do the same, the self-reduction of work performance up to total unproductiveness; or the arrogant and intimidating behavior aimed at frightening the bosses so that they would not exercise, as indeed at a certain point they no longer exercised, their powers of control and discipline, nor would they notify the superiors of what was happening in the various departments, behaviors that they colored with particularly effective threats, such as those made above all to middle managers, of possible attacks on them, their cars and even their families.
These attitudes, which occurred not only on the occasion of contract renewals, most recently the engineering contract of 1979, but also on every occasion offered by the rampant micro-conflict, assumed a particular relevance and resonance, in the context of the terrorist events, which bloodied the city of Turin, and for which many Fiat men notoriously paid a heavy contribution.
Moreover, until that moment there was no evidence, and Fiat did not support it, that there was an immediate connection, or rather a coincidence of people and purposes, between extremist terrorism, which nonetheless boasted of constituting a advanced or marching wing of the labor movement, and violence in the workplace. But it was believed for sure that between one and the other cases of violence, even so different and differently evaluated, there was a creeping connection, so to speak a red thread of continuity.
The events of September 1979 precipitate the situation and strengthen the conviction of this connection. On returning from holidays in Mirafiori, the painting strike starts. With the resumption of production after the summer closure, the new automated painting booths had been put into operation, which no longer required the presence of workers inside them. The additional work breaks previously granted were therefore canceled precisely to allow the workers themselves to leave the booths for ten minutes every hour, in order to avoid continuously breathing the miasma of the painting even if equipped with protective masks.
The Mirafiori works council, against the abolition of the additional breaks in the booths even if they are no longer necessary, proclaims the strike of the painting workers and then of the whole plant, and for fifteen days Mirafiori was the scene of intermittent strikes, internal marches , invasions of the management building, roadblocks, without the trade unions, including the confederal ones, offering a valid contribution to re-establish the indispensable conditions of governance of the establishment.
On 21 September at 8 in the morning a terrorist commando assassinated in the doorstep, while he was on his way to work in Mirafiori, ing. Carlo Ghiglieno, director of strategic planning at Fiat Auto. It is at this point that the company decides to act: an internal investigation starts to identify and fire the most troublesome people in the factory. A list of over a hundred names was drawn up, later reduced to 61 because the members and some representatives of the then powerful union of metalworkers were expunged, in order to avoid the accusation of anti-unionism against the company.
Instead, the union charged with bowed head, proclaiming an immediate strike at Mirafiori and gathering in Turin the more than 3000 Fiat union delegates in Italy to define the state of agitation and struggle, under the slogan of a national secretary of the metalworkers: "Better a terrorist in factory than an innocent fired”.
A large defense panel was set up made up of the most well-known left-wing labor lawyers of the time who activated, on behalf of the FLM, the unitary union of metalworkers, a complaint against Fiat for anti-union activities, rejected by the judge similarly to the individual appeals presented in defense of the licences.
In the end, none of the 61 returned to the factory: some concluded an economic transaction with the company, some emigrated abroad, to France or Central America, some were subsequently implicated in terrorism investigations, others were completely lost. .
A crazed trade union system had been given a push: the day of reckoning would come a year later with the 35 days of Mirafiori and the march of 40.000 Fiat bosses and middle managers.
