Five years ago, on January 15, 2011, the workers of Mirafiori, the historic heart of the workers' struggles not only of Fiat but of the country, expressed themselves with a referendum majority for the plan to consolidate and relaunch the plant presented by the company and for the simultaneous application of the new Fiat Employment Contract, external to the inter-confederation agreements and the national contract for metalworkers.
For Mirafiori it was a revolution. On an industrial level, the production structure of the plant went from "generalist" (up until a few years earlier, no less than 7 models were produced, of all ranges and brands: Panda, Punto, Idea, Lancia Musa, Multipla, Alfa 166, Lancia Thesis ) to the exclusive manufacturer of high-end cars (with the Maserati factory in Grugliasco it would later form the Turin pole of luxury cars).
In terms of industrial relations, for the first time in more than thirty years, Mirafiori won the "yes" in a referendum among the workers called to vote on an agreement signed by Fim, Uilm and Fismic, but not by Fiom.
If the Pomigliano affair of June 2010 had been interpreted, even by the unions themselves who had signed the agreement, as a fact that could be limited to a particular reality, characterized by excessive conflict and anomalous forms of absenteeism, in the autumn following the opening of the negotiating table for Mirafiori, Fiat, to guarantee an investment plan of over one billion euros, reiterated the need for any agreements reached to be respected by the union and not systematically ignored or renegotiated when company needs required them the application (precisely in Mirafiori in the summer of two years before there had been a tough clash with the Fiom which had proclaimed the overtime strike during the production Saturdays contractually due without union agreement).
Fiat essentially bet on the ability of the country's industrial system to be competitive, asking in exchange for certainty and enforceability of the "agreements" signed with the union. To do this it was necessary, on the one hand, that we free ourselves from those trade union "snares and snares" which in a market economy constitute useless brakes and that, on the other hand, we could operate in a framework of certainty and similar to those present in competing countries.
After more than two months of negotiations, with the Fiom which chose the extremist line of "refusing blackmail", on 23 December 2010 the agreement was signed with the reformist and participatory unions which implemented the new factory rules, already provided for in the agreement of Pomigliano, with the transfer of Mirafiori workers to the Fiat-Chrysler joint, the new company that would have been set up to carry out the planned productive investment.
The new company would have had a specific employment contract and initially would not have joined Confindustria, waiting for Confindustria itself to formalize a new contract with the unions for the "auto sector", at least according to the so-called "New York Pact" established between Sergio Marchionne and Marcegaglia, at the time President of Confindustria.
In the following week, 29 December 2010, a specific national collective labor agreement (the XNUMXst level CCSL) was signed by the national secretaries of Fim, Uilm and Fismic to be applied to Fiat workers who would have moved to the new companies of Pomigliano and Mirafiori , replacing the Confindustria collective agreement for metalworkers; Fiom was excluded from the contractual table for not having wanted to sign the Pomigliano and Mirafiori agreements, not even with a technical signature as repeatedly suggested by Camusso.
With the application of the new collective agreement, only the signatory unions would have enjoyed union rights and their own representation in the new companies, on the basis of the provisions of the Workers' Statute: it was from the sixties, with the Internal Commissions, that Fiom remained without trade union representation within Mirafiori.
The debate whether or not to accept the conditions set by Fiat for the relaunch of Mirafiori involves not only Turin, with the mayor Chiamparino who immediately sided with the company, but extends nationally (Mirafiori was a symbol of workers' struggles much more than Pomigliano): in the days of the referendum and on the night of the counting of the ballots, the symbol entrances of the factory, Door 2 and Door 5, will be constantly manned by televisions and journalists, as well as by professional representatives of the "no ”, who came from different parts of the country.
It is in this scenario that on 13 and 14 January 2011 the workers of the largest factory in Italy are faced with a choice. After two days of voting, the victory of the "yes" came narrowly and was clear only at 6 in the morning on January 15, when the counting of the last ballot box, that of employees, ended. Among the workers the "yes" won with a difference of just 9 ballots, while out of all workers the votes in favor exceeded 54%.
Mirafiori had accepted the new Fiat contract, albeit with half the factory against it. The "Feroce" (so called by the old communist workers) was safe, and Turin breathed a sigh of relief.
The following May, the workers of the ex-Bertone plant in Grugliasco, taken over by Fiat and a stronghold of the Fiommina working class in Turin, also approved the new regulation of of work: the company union representatives of Fiom invited them to vote "yes" even though they knew that, with the application of the new contract, they would lose their positions.
The definitive turning point in that year finally came with the Marcegaglia-Camusso inter-confederal agreement of 21 September, which in fact was a preventive renunciation by Confindustria to use, in industrial relations and in matters of labour, the greater spaces granted by Parliament with the well-known art. 8 of law 148/2011 on proximity bargaining (a rule that has always been opposed by the union and now surreptitiously referred to in the document issued a few days ago on the bargaining of Cigl, Cisl and Uil).
With the signing of the interconfederal agreement, a heated political-union debate began which, with contradictory stances and even with declarations of will, in particular by the opposing unions, to avoid the application of the agreements in daily practice, greatly reduced expectations on the effectiveness of the company bargaining envisaged by article 8, and therefore of the Fiat agreements.
At this point Fiat, unable to afford to continue to operate in Italy in a framework of uncertainties that would have further distanced it from the conditions existing in the industrialized world and realizing that the conditions did not exist for a Confindustria contract in the car sector (as hypothesized in the previous New York Pact), decided to leave Confindustria with effect from 1 January 2012, maintaining only the historical relationship of collaboration with the Industrial Union of Turin.
At the same time, the first level Specific Collective Labor Agreement (FIAT CCSL) dated 29 December 2010, signed in its final version on 13 December 2011, was extended to all companies and all workers in the Group.
