On 21 September 1979 at 8 in the morning a terrorist commando assassinated in the doorstep, while he was on his way to work in Mirafiori, the engineer Carlo Ghiglieno, director of strategic planning for the automotive sector Fiat.
Terrorism hits Fiat
The far-left terrorist organization claimed responsibility for the murder on the same morning First line, of which one of the leaders, the "Commander Alberto", was Marco Donat Cattin, son of several times Minister of the Republic and Christian Democrat boss Carlo Donat Cattin, as emerged in the following years from the revelations of a pentito.
We didn't know all this on that tragic morning. We were faced with yet another bloody attack that in those tragic seventies struck Turin and its men, shot in the legs or murdered: policemen and carabinieri, lawyers, journalists, university professors, local administrators, but above allor managers and bosses of Fiat (three killed and seventeen wounded in the legs, in addition to kidnappings).
Those were years in which union conflict it was raging in all sectors of the country, in factories, in public transport (urban, railway and air), in schools, in healthcare, everywhere.
Relations between companies and trade unions (metalworkers, chemicals, textiles) were difficult. It had been of no avail the Confindustria agreement on the single point of contingency, desired by its President, the lawyer Gianni Agnelli and by Luciano Lama, general secretary of the CGIL, who had deluded themselves that they could prevent wage conflicts with recourse to the enhanced instrument of the escalator. Moreover, the agreement would have triggered the wage-price spiral which would have led to double-digit annual inflation for a decade.
The difficult relationship between Fiat and the unions
At Fiat the criticality of union relations had already begun at the end of the sixties, with the youthful protest of sixty-eight and the hot autumn of sixty-nine, with all that derived from them, such as the abatement of merit and love for a job well done, aspects that had always distinguished the old Fiat workers, known for knowing how to do, as they said, the barbis (moustache) also to flies.
On the contrary, permanent conflict and antagonism were the values which inspired the union.
In that decade, not a national and corporate contractual season passes that is not a harbinger of internal strikes with "sweeper" marches through the workshops and offices, with unruly bosses and employees, forced, sometimes by kicking their asses, to parade with the union's red flags in hand, or by harsh "persuasion" picketing at the entrances in the total strikes of 8 hours per shift.
And then, to press on the closure of the contractual dispute, the rite of the "final shoulder" with the blockade of the establishments even for a week.
A hell that for a long time is underestimated or not perceived by public opinion and by political and social forces. The union leaders themselves have lost control of the situation in the factory.
After the hot autumn of sixty-nine, and in spite of the procedures for constituting the company union representatives as envisaged by the Workers Statute of 1970, the trade union representation system in the Fiat factories does not take place through the co-optation of the best prepared but is based on the principles of direct democracy with the delegates gathered in "works councils".
The delegates are elected by the workers of their own homogeneous group, with non-formalized and very approximate procedures, regardless of union militancy: the union then provides them with the cover of union representatives in order to be able to use the union permits and the guarantees provided for by the Statute of Workers.
So they come embarked the worst elements, those who manage to coagulate antagonism and aggressiveness in a working population, mostly on the assembly lines, of recent immigration from the south, which pours all its social unease into the factory in the transition from a peasant culture to an industrial culture not yet assimilated.
Into this situation of permanent conflict and difficult governance of the factories, terrorists insinuate themselves with tactical skill.
The terrorists enter the factory
The first terrorists enter the factory thanks to the start-up mechanisms in force at the time with the so-called "numeric call" to the Employment Office, without any possibility of personnel selection and evaluation, confused among the thousands of workers hired every year to make up for the losses in production efficiency and compensate for a very high turnover.
For example, you can remember the case of a brigadier, convicted as an armourer of a terrorist group, sent to work with compulsory placement as an invalid having lost a leg for "medical" reasons. Only after being hired, he himself tells his bosses, after having threatened them, that he had lost his leg in an attack. The bosses didn't have the courage to speak up at the time and he wasn't fired.
As the subsequent investigations carried out by the anti-terrorism carabinieri and the judiciary will show, the Red Brigades concentrated in the bodywork departments of Mirafiori, Rivalta and Lancia di Chivasso, while Prima Linea and other subversive groups to mechanics and presses.
The members of the Red Brigades were able to operate under cover, mainly infiltrating the self-managed groups of Autonomia Operaia, which counted many adherents to the logic of theviolent proletarian antagonism.
The Red Brigade members came into contact with the self-employed in the factory making proselytes to carry out the boss intimidation actions, inside and outside the establishments, with threats, attacks, stalking, assassinations.
If they made use of the opposing groups for the labourers, the Red Brigades "commanders" themselves tried to infiltrate the factory union structures, also participating, as company union representatives, in negotiations with the plant managements, always however in a secluded and silent position.
For all, the union representative of Mirafiori killed in a firefight with the carabinieri applies, who was considered a moderate by the company managers at the union negotiating table in the factory.
The brigadier's diary
In the spring of 1979, the carabinieri broke into a "cold" Red Brigades hideout right in front of the Mirafiori, and seized a whole series of documents, including lists of names of possible targets.
Among the documents is also found some kind of Brigadier's diary, where the salient facts of factory life, the unrest, the clashes with the bosses, the union meetings and the negotiations in which the infiltrated Red Brigade member participated are noted day by day.
Once, for example, the director of Mirafiori went to the body shop to check with the department heads the nature of a technical problem that had arisen; since the plant is at a standstill, the workers and trade union delegates of the line also approach, including the unknown Red Brigade member who keeps the diary, where he diligently reports the director's words by opening a window on the same. A detail if you will, but it tells how terrorism was now part of everyday life.
In all of this, the factory unionists are at best in disarray: they demonstrate a mixture of weakness, uncertainty, fear, and in some of them a proximity to terrorism, as will emerge from subsequent investigations.
Between brushing and bolting
The "brushing” of the leaders (pulled out of the offices and forced to parade in procession) and the “bolting” (shooting the head of the foreman or department head with marbles and iron bolts as he passes the workshop) are now rituals, consolidated practices which, according to trade unionists, the workers who practice them know they must or cannot go any further; unless resorting immediately to a strike and to the protection, even legal, of the perpetrators of the acts of violence, identified and fired by the company.
The complaint document of the Fiat executives
It will be a document issued by the professional association of Fiat executives, later the killing of Eng. Ghiglieno, to hit hard on the union and make the mass media and public opinion aware of the violence in the factory.
The document denounced "the climate that has been established for some time in the factory with cowardly roofing and fertile ground for criminal actions" and concluded that "injuries and killings are the most painful and impressive aspect of that campaign which involves sabotage of production, intimidating phone calls, acts of violence against bosses, all facts that contribute to developing that climate of insecurity in which terrorism has developed".
It wasn't a real union call, but it was a heartfelt request to the shareholder to intervene to return to respect for the rules of civilized life at the factory.
A few days later, on October 4, he came another manager was shot in the legs by the Red Brigades, the union relations manager at Mirafiori.
The layoffs of 61
After the last two episodes of terrorist violence, the "hard" line carried out by the Personnel Department with the famous "layoffs of the 61” carried out five days later.
Above all, those layoffs made the workers understand that Fiat intended to react. The vast majority of the workers themselves sided with him and understood and shared the company's reasons, so much so that no spontaneous strike was organised. The answer to the journalists who interviewed the workers as they exited the Mirafiori gates was always the same "But it's about time!".
In February 1980 the men of the General of the Church arrested in Turin the military leader of the Mirafiori brigade column, who, as a repentant, allowed the capture of almost all of its components (few managed to go into hiding in France or Central America)), including some company union representatives or members of the provincial executives of the same unions.
In April of the same year, the anti-terrorism carabinieri arrested one of the participants in the assassination of the engineer Ghiglieno. Even the latter, repenting, allowed the identification and the arrest of all members of Prima Linea.
Thus ended the season of terrorism in Fiat.
The union was reconstituted on reformist and participatory positions after the "march of the forty thousand”, which marked the defeat of the opposing union that had raged in the factories for a decade.
