Ten years ago, on June 22, 2010, workers Fiat of the Giambattista Vico factory in Pomigliano, so renamed to mark the turnaround with Alfasud's past, in approving the agreement on the recovery plan of the themselves allowed Sergio Marchionne to bring about a revolution in the company's organizational and production management and the consequent industrial relations.
The Pomigliano agreement was followed in rapid succession by the agreements of Mirafiori and Grugliasco, always approved by the workers with a referendum majority, and the stipulation of the new National Labor Contract for the workers of all Fiat plants, external to the inter-confederation agreements and the CCNL for metalworkers.
But let's go back to that June 22nd and to the reasons that led to the drafting of the plan for Pomigliano and to the signing of the trade union agreement.
With the reallocation of Panda production from the Polish Tichy plant to Pomigliano (and subsequently the production of Jeeps in Melfi) Marchionne sent a strong signal to those who, pressed by global competition, had chosen to divest in Italy.
In reverse, Marchionne was betting on the revival of national manufacturing; in exchange for such a commitment, he asked the trade unions and workers to intensify, regularize and predictability of work performance, with an increase in the productivity of the labor factor aimed at saturating the plants.
Today, as ten years ago, the priority issue of a global automotive player, without prejudice to the effects of the pandemic crisis, is not to lower wage levels (labor costs are only 8% of total production costs), but to ensure a production regularity such as to satisfy the economic return of the very significant investments.
The enormous amount of capital necessary for the automotive industry to compete on the global stage (today it is sufficient to think of the electric car) makes it unavoidable, in addition to corporate mergers, to comply with new rules that guarantee the intensity and continuity of production , in other words the governability of factories.
The need for more flexibility in the use of plants in order to be able to compete effectively on the markets and, above all, having certainties on the applicability and enforceability of the agreements signed were the reasons that prompted Marchionne, starting from the Pomigliano agreement, to seek trade union agreements compatible with a market and production scenario that was rapidly deteriorating with the worsening of the economic crisis of 2010-2011, even at the cost of definitively breaking with an important, even if not majority, part of Italian trade unionism, the Fiom-Cgil.
Marchionne, whose managerial culture was formed in American and Swiss multinationals, cannot adapt to a trade union practice that has been in force for decades at Fiat: that agreements are systematically ignored or renegotiated when company needs require their application.
Obtaining compliance with trade union agreements is the main criticality Marchionne encounters in a system of industrial relations in which everything could be renegotiated, even in the presence of well-defined contractual rules, with behaviors that in practice disregarded the agreements signed, such as with the strikes declared by Fiom-Cgil at Mirafiori in 2008 against the use of Saturdays of free overtime defined by the just renewed CCNL for metalworkers signed by Fiom-Cgil itself,
The challenge to the unions comes when Marchionne bets on the competitiveness of the Italian industrial system by moving, with an investment of over 700 million euros, the production of the Panda, the best-selling Fiat car in Europe, from Poland to Pomigliano, asking in exchange greater flexibility in the use of plants and certainty and enforceability of the "agreements" entered into by the union by signing a "liability clause", i.e. a system of sanctions in the event of non-compliance with the agreed rules.
The trade union negotiation for Pomigliano will last from 30 March to 15 June 2010 and will conclude with a separate agreement signed by the reformist unions Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil and with the opposition of Fiom-Cgil precisely on the liability clause, an agreement that the company will ask to submit to the workers' referendum for the following 22 June.
The consultation obtains the victory of the "yes" to the agreement by about 64% of the workers, but the result, although relevant for an Italian factory, causes a disappointment in Marchionne that he expected a plebiscitary endorsement similar to the one he had obtained a few weeks earlier, when American Chrysler workers approved with a majority of more than 95% the agreement with the powerful auto union UAW on the restructuring of the plants with the related cuts in the cost of work and pension and health care.
Indeed, a few hours after the official announcement of the referendum data, Fiat issued a press release which affirmed its will to identify and implement, together with the trade union parties who had assumed responsibility for the agreement (namely Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil), the conditions of governance necessary for the implementation of future projects, also acknowledging the impossibility of finding agreement from those who had, however, hindered the plan by resorting to specious arguments (with clear reference to Fiom-Cgil) .
Panda's allocation plan in Pomigliano seemed to have jumped: but Marchionne, as a lover of the game of poker, was only upping the ante.
In reality he did not even think for a moment of changing his plan for two reasons: the first was that in one of the presentations of a new car at the Quirinale he had reassured the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, one of the few Italian politicians, perhaps the only , which he estimated, that he would find a solution for the Pomigliano plant and workers, the second is that he already had the move prepared by his two industrial relations advisers to make the commitments undertaken by the union enforceable in a framework totally free from snares and snares of the confederal contractual system.
The solution to carry out the investment in such a way as to ensure all the conditions of governance of the plant was the transformation of the Pomigliano plant into a new.co not a member of any business association and therefore free from the application of inter-confederal agreements on trade union representation and national bargaining.
For the workers of Pomigliano who passed ope legis to new.co, the separate agreement of 15 June signed by Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil became their Collective Labor Agreement and, on the basis of art. 19 of the Workers' Statute which obliges companies to recognize trade union representation in the company and to guarantee a series of trade union rights only in favor of trade unions that are signatories of collective agreements applied in the company, union representation and rights were recognized only to the unions that signed the agreement in the new.co with the exclusion of Fiom-Cgil, not a signatory to that agreement.
After about a year this scheme, also following the analogous referendum agreements of Mirafiori and Grugliasco, was extended to all companies of the then Fiat Group, meanwhile released by Confindustria and by Federmeccanica, with the consequent non-application of the inter-confederal agreement and the metalworkers' CCNL, and the replacement with the Pomigliano employment contract revisited at national level in the Specific Collective Labor Agreement applied to all Fiat workers, renewed in subsequent years always and only with the first signatory unions and still in force.
