Fiom, after two years of an unprecedented judicial offensive unleashed against the companies of the Fiat group for the complained compression of its trade union rights, and supported by a mass-media campaign aided by the propaganda of some media and by partisan complacency of some labor judges, has finally found its side in the Constitutional Court, managing to have the “political” unconstitutionality of Article 19 of the Workers' Statute regarding the appointment of company union representatives.
The provision of the Articles of Association is (or, better said, was) clearly literal: company union representatives can only be established within union associations that have signed collective labor agreements applied in the production unit.
The de facto situation is equally clear: since January 2012, after its exit from the Confindustria system, the only collective labor agreement applied in Fiat companies has been, in place of the metalworkers' agreement, a specific national agreement, the Fiat Contract, signed by all the national metalworkers' unions with the exception of Fiom.
As is well known, Fiom did not want to share either the agreements reached between Fiat and all the other major unions for the production relaunch of the Italian plants, nor the new Fiat Contract, adopting Aventine-like behavior, withdrawing from the negotiating table, if not even blatantly hostile against Fiat and the other unions.
Of this free choice - even if not shared by the large majority of workers - Fiom has not intended to accept the consequences foreseen by the legal system. The art. 19 of the Workers' Statute, as already highlighted, obliges companies to recognize union representation in the company and to guarantee a series of union rights (particularly onerous and vulnerable to the production process) only in favor of the unions that have entered into the collective agreements applied in agency.
The legislator of the Statute therefore intended to impose on companies an anomalous obligation to cooperate in the activities of trade union organizations only if the latter are included in the contractual game. The non-recognition of Fiom's trade union rights by the Fiat companies is therefore not the result of an anti-fire company choice, but rather from an unequivocal legislative will expressed in an absolutely clear way in the "referendee" text of Article 19 of the Articles of Association.
In this regard, it should be remembered that the wording of Article 19 is the result of a repeal referendum, supported among others by Fiom itself, in which the sovereign will of the people (sic!) circumscribed the recognition of company union representation and related rights only to the unions that agree to "get involved" in contractual dynamics, helping to write the rules governing workers' rights and duties, as well as factory life and the organization of work. Fiom deliberately avoided this logic, asking the judges to order Fiat to violate a precise regulatory provision.
Fiom's request, after alternating judicial pronouncements, has now been accepted by the Constitutional Court which, not wanting to "politically" oppose what is presumed to be the most powerful and representative Italian trade union, has overturned the direction that the same Court had expressed in previous numerous decisions on the subject, when the question of legitimacy concerned other unions and according to the principle that the laws are not always the same for everyone.
The ruling of the Consulta (issued, with suspicious speed, the day after the discussion) now links the right to appoint company union representatives to participation in the negotiation of collective agreements then applied to workers in the company, but not necessarily to their signing and to the consequent assumption of responsibility. In other words, antagonism and ungovernability in the factories are encouraged, the opposite of what the founding fathers had hoped for with the articles 39 and 40 of the Constitution, which were never implemented.
The sentence is therefore yet another example of that "uncertainty of the law", not only destined to have political repercussions on industrial relations and in the relations between the trade union organizations themselves, but above all harmful for the economic operators present and a disincentive for foreign investments . It will now be up to the legislator to define a more solid and more aware criterion of representativeness of the delicate dynamics in industrial relations which gives certainty of application of the agreements signed and guarantees freedom of bargaining and the freedom to do business, as happens in countries with normal democracy in relations industrial.
Without compliance with the defined rules, the country will not only continue to be unable to attract foreign investments to start new businesses, but it risks seeing even those few opportunities on which the production system can still count evaporate: this is the notice that Sergio Marchionne sent to Italy a few days ago from Sevel of Val di Sangro, presenting the investment plan in the plant of over 700 million euros (after the equally significant ones in the last two years of Pomigliano, Grugliasco and Melfi ) who risk being the last, if Fiat is forced to continue operating in our country in a framework of total regulatory uncertainty.
