The news that comes to our table when we read the newspapers is disarming. The same will be true for those who are by now immersed in the world of the web and read everything and connect everything through the liquid crystals of a fractal world like that of the web. The substance remains: the world has become flat. History is truly finished as a memory of being there in the world. An example for everyone? A dramatic one. What has happened and is happening in the case of the negotiations for the agreement between the social partners on the subject of productivity. An issue that from the point of view of internal company relations is addressed by deciding whether or not to invest on the basis of the forecast of being able to expand the degree of solvency of the demand or not.
But productivity also involves the use of labor power and therefore in a civilized way – which engages the company in and with pluralism – requires an agreement between the employers' and workers' representatives. It becomes a problem of union relations par excellence because productivity, in addition to the cardinal principle of investments, recalls the no less essential and mandatory principles of working hours and the extension and flexibility of working hours and work performance. Well: the essence of all this is to shift the level of union negotiation from the national or sectoral level of bargaining to the company level where the forces are measured and put together in that nexus of power relations and strategies which is called articulated or local bargaining. Naturally governments, which are the third point of any negotiation that aspires to become a process of change in the mechanisms of accumulation, the government can play a role of moral suasion or even be central if it accompanies these processes with the use of the fiscal lever, monetary incentives, etc.
The tools are many. In Italy this element of productivity is essential due to the fact that it must grow not only as total factory productivity, i.e. of the country-system, but also in the immense and highly articulated world of very small and small enterprises and not only of medium and large ones. The theme of articulated negotiation would also help the rooting of the trade union forces also in the world of small businesses because with the negotiation scheme recently proposed by the parties in dialogue, above all on the initiative of the federal trade unions of the CISL and also by its national secretariat, as well as by the government, this process of negotiation articulation would help the recognition of trade unions by entrepreneurs even in small businesses. It is therefore surprising that the CGIL decidedly refused to sign the agreement after the uncertainties of the UIL and the first and decisive signatures of the CISL and UGL were overcome, which is increasingly revealing itself to be a true, autonomous union with a wealth of negotiating skills.
Dr. Camusso is young but not too young not to know the history of trade unions and first of all of the CGIL, a glorious union that in the sixties starting from Milan, with the leadership of unsurpassed trade unionists such as Aldo Bonacini and Lucio De Carlini together with the FIM CISL then led by Pierre Carniti, it took the lead in a tough confrontation within the union to move bargaining from the purely national and inter-confederal and federal level to the articulated or corporate level. But it was not the internal union discussions that gave the decisive blow to favor the change, but rather the Milanese metalworkers with the strikes of 1962 which developed not only spontaneously, but also thanks to that work of ideological and contractual revision of which was placed at the head of the CISL and which had also deeply invested the Milanese CGIL.
But also in Turin, a stronghold of intransigence due to the harsh and blatantly discriminatory union culture of the FIAT management, also, or even in Turin, the new union leaders CGIL and FIOM, Garavini and Pugno in the lead, unsurpassed masters of my very early youth, they took charge of the contract renewal. My father, a typographical-photoengraver trade union manager, he too was an advocate, as trade unionist of the CGIL (our free confrontation was tough when he discovered that I had become, despite those teachers, Cislino!) also my father, in your category, he was at the head of this renewal and paid a heavy price to the bosses: he was unemployed for two years due to trade union reprisals, proving how little the bosses of that time liked (today how many things have changed…) that contractual reform which forced them to negotiate every aspect of work and performance, because this is the other side of articulated bargaining, in addition to the possible increase in labor productivity: the expansion of the potential role of contractual negotiation especially in small businesses, where often the national contract does not regulate anything.
Recently, for his part, Gianfranco Borghini she recounted on FIRSTonline the question of Di Vittorio's self-criticism after the FIOM defeat at FIAT in the 1962s. It went in the same direction as the Milanese metalworkers' strikes of XNUMX. For this reason it is saddening but, alas, no longer surprising, that the CGIL is increasingly transformed not only into an aggregate of highly politicized anarcho-syndicalist forces and is increasingly losing its of contractual wisdom, but who doesn't even know its history anymore. It was all the more glorious when it was able to renew itself. It is sad that Dr. Camusso, who has a rare humanistic education to be found in today's world, does not know her or does not want to remember her. And today there is a need for memory and history more than ever to make work regain dignity and respect.
