Anyone passing in front of the headquarters of the Unione Industriale in Turin last Monday, at the start of negotiations for the new contract of the Fiat Group, should have encountered a rather unusual situation, even for the anomalous Italian industrial relations. Two groups of Fiat employees faced each other, one made up of members and militants of the trade union organizations who accepted and signed the company agreements of Pomigliano d'Arco and Mirafiori, the other made up mainly of Cobas members.
The two groups were separated and kept at a distance by a cordon of police forces. It is all too easy to see that such an acute laceration, at least as regards the forms of trade union life, has never been recorded at Fiat, not even during the extremely harsh XNUMXs, when the factory was dominated by the backdrop of the Cold War. There are almost no direct witnesses of those times and those events and the echo of a head-on collision that reflected the opposition of the US and USSR blocs has been extinguished for decades.
So, faced with a scene like the one taken up by last Monday's news, one almost discounts a sense of disbelief at first glance. And then one wonders how it could have happened that the conflict between Fiom-Cgil and the other unions could have become radicalized in this way, so much so that a possibility of conciliation appears unlikely, perhaps at least on the rules of confrontation, if not on the contractual guidelines .
The first observation that the current situation calls for is that the union - and its industrial soul, which should represent its most lively and dynamic expression - risks paying for the conflicts that divide the various components with a decline such as to undermine the its foundations. A trade union movement that can no longer agree on anything, starting with procedures, is condemned to suffer an inevitable loss of influence.
Continuing at this rate, it will be the workers' representation as a whole that will no longer have an impact and will be relegated to a marginal function of factory life. In the last year and a half, what has happened in the Fiat automotive plants (and is about to be extended to the rest of the Group) shows an incurable contradiction. Its premises, of course, go back to the trade union history of the last twenty to thirty years in which the occasions for disagreement have been much more numerous than the moments of unity.
But for a long time the latent crisis between the organizations was kept under wraps, contained in a framework that allowed it not to explode. Subsequently, the change that Sergio Marchionne imprinted with the alliance and merger between Fiat and Chrysler changed things suddenly, introducing globalization into the structure of industrial relations. The question of the "collectability" of contractual commitments was the detonator.
In a global enterprise such as the one Marchionne is building, the spaces for autonomous policies in the field of industrial relations are greatly shrinking, while the will to homogenize the production organization and, with it, the forms that regulate the performance of work predominates . In such a framework, the company negotiates more easily with a single or at least unitary trade union, able to enforce full compliance with the agreements it signs. This strongly conflicts with a disorderly union pluralism such as the Italian one.
Hence the company drive to regulate the behavior of workers' representatives. But, as we have seen, Fiom-Cgil is irreducible to a policy which, in its view, conflicts with its mission and status as a class union. It therefore believes that it cannot sign any agreement that affects these characteristics. On the other hand, organizations such as Fim-Cisl and Uilm have accepted the corporate contractual scheme, undertaking to have it recognized by the workers.
At this point the final squeeze has been reached: the Fiat agreement will be a contract that takes up the nucleus of the Pomigliano d'Arco and Mirafiori contracts with some adjustments. However, the new contract introduces a radical change in internal representation. It replaces the Rsu with the old RSA, originally envisaged by the Workers' Statute, which are however not elected by the employees of the various plants, but designated by the trade union organisations. In addition, each union that has signed the contract will have two representatives, regardless of the number of members. Fiom, which has not signed the agreements, will instead remain excluded.
The dispute between the unions has reached its climax here. Fiom denounces the other organisations, accusing them of corporateism and accusing them of acting as the company's armed wing. For Fim and Uilm it is the Fiom that excludes itself, refusing to recognize the contracts. However one judges the story, it is clear that it has reached a dead end. Beyond the vehement controversy of Fiom, the problem of representation and its nature remains effectively open. The trade unions that signed the Fiat agreements cannot limit themselves to designating their representatives without electoral passage.
A union edition of the "Porcellum" which creates a caste of company union representatives who answer exclusively to the secretariats of the organizations from which they have been expressed is not desirable. In America, where the union is fully responsible for the contracts it signs, there are regular election checks. The factory representatives are bound by contractual discipline, but are elected by bodies where there is a deep-rooted democratic sensibility. In the prevailing climate of confrontation, trade unions that have chosen the path of company cooperation must not give in to the temptation to reward the most loyal members by giving them an unchecked mandate to represent workers in the company.
As we have seen, the company has effectively transferred the conflict to the other party. But perhaps not even it can remain completely indifferent to the issue of representation: if it asks for more involvement from employees, it can do so provided it has a representative interlocutor in front of it. Otherwise, tomorrow he runs the risk of finding himself faced with a state of disaffection such as to pollute the social climate in the factory, which is particularly delicate when significant organizational changes are introduced. In short, the question of trade union democracy remains on the table, especially if we want to give rise to a new course in industrial relations.
