July 1988: after eleven years, Fiat and the metalworkers' unions meet again at the negotiating table to renew the supplementary company agreement, in force since July 1977. The supplementary agreement of July 7, 1977 was signed in a tense night, after the Turin residents had been blocked for over a week and after the previous afternoon, at the entrance to the Iveco management building, scuffles had arisen between security personnel and pickets who prevented access to top management.
Even the night of 18 July 1988 closed in a traumatic way, with the abandonment of the table by Fiom-Cgil and the signing of the agreement only with Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil. But the trade union framework has now completely changed: the renewal of the Fiat supplementary contract did not cost even a minute of the strike.
After the season of wild strikes, violent marches, threats to bosses and terrorism in the second half of the 35s, the 1980 days of the Fiat dispute in XNUMX, culminating in the march of forty thousand, marked the defeat of trade union maximalism and allowed the company to re-establish the rules of civilized life within the factories.
Having overcome the company crisis, in the following years Fiat renewed the product range (Uno, Croma, Thema), recovered labor productivity, invested in highly automated plants, returned to net profit, which in 1988 would reach a record 4.000 billion lire of lire. These were the years in which he challenged Volkswagen as the European market leader with a share that fluctuated between 16% and 18%.
The positive corporate performance also ensures margins for giving new content to the relationship between workers and the company with a participatory approach. On the contrary, the trade unions emerge rather exhausted from the restructuring of the company which began after 1980, both because their movementist power has been greatly reduced, and because, with the dissolution of the unitary federation, the metalworkers' unions will be divided by bitter controversies which in Fiat still today they are not recomposed.
In fact, Fiat will no longer recognize to the union the exclusive representation of its workers, in particular of their archetype, the third category mass worker on the assembly line, but will claim its own space of autonomy in the direct relationship with the workers, without intermediation trade union: which did not mean thinking of governing the factories regardless of the relationship with the union, but that there was room for both internal relations and trade union relations.
The emblematic passage occurs when, after years of union struggles for the "equal wage for all", Fiat extends the meritocratic increases to workers, not only to those in high professional categories but also to assembly workers, i.e. the majority , through the one-off form, which rewards the worker's performance but does not differentiate his remuneration in a stable way from that of another worker with the same job.
Moreover, Fiat was perfectly aware that if this line had been taken to the extreme consequences, with wages managed completely by the company, it would have entered a definitive collision course with the union. It was necessary to search for a new model of industrial relations that broke out of the logic of power relations, with the pendulum of power swinging in favor of one side or the other, according to the historical moments: in the seventies in favor of the union, in the eighties in favor of the company.
A need felt not only by the company but also by the union which led, in the mid-eighties, to a series of "fireplace" meetings between a group made up of managers of industrial relations from Fiat and the Industrial Union of Turin, trade unionists, labor lawyers and sociologists with the aim of overcoming the model of industrial relations based on the centrality of bargaining as a tool for settling the conflict with a participatory model in which spheres, areas and common objectives between company and union could be identified.
It was not a question of replacing participation in negotiation, but of acknowledging that it was possible to give new content to the relationship between company and workers and that such content would require a participatory approach. The fact then that the evolution of a participatory context could also derive "advantages" for the parties on the more general level of union relations would have been completely natural.
Indeed, it would have been inevitable that the strengthening of the fabric of trade union relations in the company, through the development of participatory moments, would also have increased the contractual potential of the union, just as the company's aspiration to create the conditions for a more trade union culture would have been legitimate. collaborative aimed at the comparison-contribution for the non-conflictual solution of the problems concerning the living and working conditions in the factory.
On these assumptions, in April 1988, the metalworkers' unions presented Fiat with the platform of claims for the renewal of the company contract which had been inactive for eleven years. Many of the trade union requests will be accepted by Fiat, from the model of trade union relations, to the establishment of study commissions on matters of professional training, working environment, social security and assistance, working hours and flexibility, but the company will not give up on one point .
The salary increases would have been given only on the basis of company trends in terms of profitability, productivity and quality, correlating workers' remuneration with company performance. It is a Copernican revolution: for the first time at a trade union table in an Italian company one no longer has to discuss fixed salary increases, as still requested by the unions, but a variable salary linked to the achievement of company objectives.
On the subject of wage variability, a trade union dispute will open which perhaps only today was closed between the metalworkers' unions with the latest renewal of the CCNL, but not yet in Fiat given the ongoing controversy by Fiom. While Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil seem to accept the innovation proposed by the company at the negotiating table, the Fiom-Cgil delegation, conditioned by the "hard" federations of Milan, Brescia and Bologna, rejects any idea of salary variable.
In those years, Fiom was still the majority trade union in the Fiat factories (in the Mirafiori Factory Council elections in the spring of 1988 it obtained 54% of the votes) and is convinced that the confrontation with the company over wages will ultimately will pay. A clash will ensue which will end up becoming more acute between the unions than with the company. In the CGIL itself, a debate will open in the secretariat between the maximalist position of the then general secretary, of communist extraction, and his deputy, a socialist.
Precisely the text of the agreement remains the most symptomatic document of the affair: on the night of 18 July 1988 the head of the Fiom delegation, after having signed the "normative" chapters previously dismissed by Fim and Uilm, had to abandon, under pressure from his own delegation , the negotiating table when it comes to addressing and concluding the agreement on the variable salary. The agreement will only be signed by Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil and will be the first in a series of separate agreements and contracts that will follow in subsequent years. One of the issues that aroused then, but is still topical, the debate on the separate agreement was that of trade union representativeness and representation. Was a trade union agreement signed by only two trade union organizations valid and effective, moreover a minority compared to Fiom?
The answer could only be positive, as it can only be today, regardless of the numerical ratios, which have also changed in favor of Fim and Uilm. In fact, while the legal criteria of trade union representation are still lacking, Fim-Cisl, Fiom-Cgil and Uilm-Uil are par excellence more representative and therefore all three, together or separately, are able to stipulate valid agreements in a legal framework of union pluralism.
As happened, for example, in 2010 with the separate agreement of Fiat in Pomigliano, where some of the protagonists of the 1988 agreement, including the writer, found themselves, with different roles and responsibilities at company and union level, at handle that matter.
