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WEEKEND INTERVIEWS - Marco Bentivogli (Fim-Cisl): "This union needs to be re-founded"

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INTERVIEW WITH MARCO BENTIVOGLI, secretary general of the metalworkers of the Cisl and new man of the union – “It infuriates me to see that the union is no longer at the head of the battle for reforms. We cannot leave the banner of modernization to Renzi and Marchionne: we will never play defense with them but we want to challenge them on change”.

WEEKEND INTERVIEWS - Marco Bentivogli (Fim-Cisl): "This union needs to be re-founded"

“It infuriates me to see that the union is no longer leading the battle for reforms. We cannot leave the banner of modernization to Renzi and Marchionne: we at the FIM-Cisl will never play defensively with them and we want to challenge them in terms of change. But self-criticism is not enough to open a new trade union spring: a true and proper re-foundation of the union is needed”. Who speaks is Marco Bentivogli, 45 years old, secretary general of the metalworkers of the Cisl and son of Franco, who succeeded Pierre Carniti at the head, forty years ago, of the most belligerent category of the second largest Italian trade union. "But I didn't register with the national secretariat of the Fim" explains Bentivogli, who today is the new man in the union and certainly a discordant voice, as revealed in the interview with FIRSTonline which he granted during the negotiations for the renewal of the contract of metalworkers. Bentivogli is the youngest category secretary of the CISL, he doesn't like talk shows but prefers to be at the forefront of the toughest disputes of recent years, negotiating even the most difficult and important agreements with a pragmatic spirit.

FIRSTonline – Bentivogli, your case is somewhat reminiscent of Paolo Maldini in Milan: forty years later you are in your father's place at the head of the metalworkers of the Cisl. At the beginning they gave Maldini a recommendation, have they never held it against you?

BENTIVOGLI – Truly, if there was one who advised me against becoming a trade unionist it was my father Franco: he always told me that with the surname I carry I would have had to work 6 times more than the others and I would have had to demonstrate 6 times more than the others that I was all 'height. But in the end the union passion, which I have lived since I was a child, prevailed over everything. However, allow me to clarify that I certainly didn't join the national secretariat of the FIM-Cisl, but that before getting there I worked my way through the ranks, suitcase in hand, in the basic union structures, for 10 years away from my home. In Fim, which has a whopping 225 members and continues to grow, you don't become general secretary by appointment or co-optation, but on the field you win the trust and esteem of thousands of delegates and members and of the entire management team of our first line. I have followed the toughest disputes in my sector, I have always been at the front in the most demanding marches and negotiations, but always looking for new solutions. I have to confess, for me to work for metalworkers was a dream and I try every day to live up to it. I think it's the best thing to spend your best energy on.

FIRSTonline – The fourth meeting with Federmeccanica was held last Thursday and the negotiations on the renewal of the metalworkers' contract immediately seemed to be uphill, but the reason is not understood: Federmeccanica wants to shift the center of gravity of wage negotiation from the national contract to the company one for better reward productivity and offer more welfare, which is less tax-driven than wage increases. Why are you against?

BENTIVOGLI – We are not at all prejudicially opposed to shifting the barycentre of bargaining from the national level to the corporate level and even less to the offer of more welfare, to which we want to add more spaces for participation in companies, but in the Federmeccanica platform there are two major contradictions: 1 ) the industrialists' proposal restricts wage increases to just 5% of metalworkers, i.e. those who are below the minimum and below the inflationary recovery, ending up by offloading higher burdens precisely on the companies that are in the greatest difficulty; 2) the Federmeccanica proposal also risks unleashing wage tensions in the remaining 95% of workers by reopening company contracts that have already been closed or pushing towards the giving of individual superminims, the exact opposite of meritocracy which must provide for a new classification with transparency of wages and professionalism. It would also be a boomerang for companies to follow Federmeccanica's path.

FIRSTonline – Is it a prelude to breaking the contract?

BENTIVOGLI – Not from us. If after the fourth meeting, not due to us yet held in a large plenary meeting, it breaks down, some nostalgic people can applaud but the workers would bring us back to negotiating, or rather to carrying out our job. I'm not hiding that the gaps between Federmeccanica and us are very deep today, but there is a method to get out of the confrontation and that is to start looking for shared objectives (which for us are a national agreement that defends wages from inflation and which enhances productivity through company and territorial bargaining and the expansion towards new forms of welfare and participation in organized work) to then find common solutions together.

FIRSTonline – In truth, you don't only have a problem with Federmeccanica but you also have it at home with Fiom, whose antagonism risks causing its secretary Maurizio Landini to attain the sad record of first secretary of the metalworkers of the CGIL who has he ever managed to sign a national contract: has he not?

BENTIVOGLI – We presented ourselves to the contractual negotiations with two platforms (one from FIM and UILM and another from FIOM), but now is the time to seek the greatest possible unity and I remain convinced that the method of preliminary identification of possible common objectives can on the one hand, promoting unity within the union and on the other, facilitating dialogue with the industrialists, even if it won't be a walk in the park. If Fiom abandons the pre-political gastro-media movementism, unity will be at hand. I hope they are not caressed by the idea of ​​giving the government a shove, because every time they try, Renzi rises in the polls. We need to take care of the metalworkers and focus on the contract which can represent a real turning point.

FIRSTonline – Beyond the guidelines of Federmeccanica, how much does the CGIL, CISL and UIL platform weigh on the negotiation which, despite voting for it, you were the first to criticize because it claims to reconcile a greater weight of wage bargaining at national level with the development of company bargaining, which do not understand how it could develop?

BENTIVOGLI – True reformism, the one Federico Caffè was talking about always starts in solitude: when instead paths are proposed that immediately garner unanimity in a conservative country, something does not add up and perhaps the paths proposed are not so new and demanding. I have already said what I think about the platform and I believe that to reach an agreement it will be necessary to focus, unequivocally, on only one road at a time. I care about my consistency but also about the organization and, once a decision has been made, I stand where the flag is planted and for this reason I will support the platform so that negotiations can be opened and an agreement reached.

FIRSTonline – In the 70s the union fought for reforms, today it is almost always against it, to the point of going on strike against any reform: how do you explain this conservative regression of the union and how can it be stemmed?

BENTIVOGLI – The union is by its nature reformist: it must not dream of an impossible revolution but extract the best possible agreement for the workers under the given conditions. A union that limits itself to defining "counter-reforms" without proposing new and practicable paths is not credible. The antagonism from which other union organizations suffer has not produced any improvement for the workers and has caused those unions to lose membership and credibility, unlike what happened to us who continue to draw inspiration from the values ​​of the best Italian and international trade union tradition, innovating them with the pragmatism that the continuous change of reality requires. The cultural and political regression that afflicts other union organizations and the inability to say not only No but also Yes to the Government and to the entrepreneurs challenging them on the contents of the change is a problem not only for the union but for the whole country. But one thing is certain: we at the FIM-Cisl will never leave the banner of modernization in the hands of others and not even the Renzi government.

FIRSTonline – In truth, the trade union history of recent years will be remembered for two colossal blunders about Renzi and Marchionne: like it or not, no government in the last 20 years has made as many reforms as the current one but the union is mostly against it, while Marchionne inherited a technically bankrupt company like Fiat and made it the seventh largest automotive group in the world by defending all jobs in Italy. Wouldn't it be appropriate for the union to make a nice self-criticism?

BENTIVOGLI – It takes much more than self-criticism: if we don't want to condemn ourselves to political decline and irrelevance and instead want to shake up the country, we need to re-found the union and rediscover the driving force that animated the best union seasons. Let's start with relations with the government. Given that Renzi is wrong to generalize and to make all the elements of the union a single bundle in which he confuses the antagonistic soul with the courageous and reformist soul, there is no doubt that the union has played against a government that wants to make reforms too often on defense. When I hear Camusso compare Renzi to Thatcher I am reminded of the sad and glorious story of the pitched battle between the miners of the maximalist Scargill and the Iron Lady, a battle that brought the English miners to their knees but led Scargill to become a baronet and a parliamentarian. Even in Italy it is time to retire radicalism and political populism disguised as inconclusive trade union maximalism and give battle, challenging Renzi on the terrain of change. We at the FIM-Cisl are neither for nor against the Renzi government but we want to face it without prejudice and with great determination on the merits of the reforms.

FIRSTonline – The political prejudices that complicate the relationship between the government and the union have also been recurred for a long time against Sergio Marchionne's Fiat: what is your opinion of the CEO of FCA?

BENTIVOGLI – Actions matter more than words. Certainly Marchionne, especially in his initial phase, made communication and trade union line errors, but with him the FIM-Cisl made fine agreements with which we saved the Pomigliano plant and then those of Melfi and Cassino and we placed the conditions for restarting Mirafiori. We have shattered the two false myths which predict that to defend the localization of manufacturing in a mature economy, it is necessary to reduce wages and deteriorate working conditions. Wages have increased and working conditions still have margins but they have improved, as confirmed by our research on the Wcm carried out together with the Milan and Turin Polytechnics. It must be acknowledged to Marchionne that he had the courage and did very well to break with the Italy of rent, of the salons of Mediobanca and Confindustria. We can clash hard with him but he is a serious interlocutor and demonizing him, as part of the union has done, only benefits the more conservative part of Italian entrepreneurship which in fact has never loved Marchionne.

FIRSTonline – You are considered a trade unionist outside the box: Would you like to be able to do in the union what Renzi did in politics and Marchionne in industry, that is to innovate, innovate, innovate and scrap old ideas and old management groups?

BENTIVOGLI – I don't like the word "scrapping", we need to bring the generations together but certainly also in the union we need to be more daring, as Pierre Carniti once said, and we need to throw away the cultural laziness and lack of curiosity of those who have not yet understood that today the world changes at the speed of sound. It infuriates me that a force like that of the union, which represents working Italy, is not at the forefront of change and that its self-reform is so behind the times. This is why the Fim-Cisl has launched the challenge of the three "Rs".

FIRSTonline – What are his three “Rs”?

BENTIVOGLI – We need radical, refounding, regenerative choices. This also means reducing the number of unions, federations, contracts and employing more trade unionists to support the front line in the workplace rather than in the apparatus. We need to simplify the organizational levels, we need a lighter and more participatory organization. We are doing it and we continue to grow and last year's figures show the most dynamic trend in our membership base under 35 and under 25. Our young people will never be pure showcases or supporters but protagonists. It is no coincidence that the CISL has a cadre school in Fiesole and the Fim has one of its own in Amelia. In Fim full-time assignments are assumed only after a lot of basic training and 8 weeks in Amelia with economists, researchers, scholars, writers. The best Italian intellectual world often comes to us for little more than free to train the future Fim engineering cadres. We study, we work on important research on work organization and we were the first to tackle smart-working and industry 4.0, when others still spoke of post-Fordism and gave us futurists. The trade union office must offer instrumentation available remotely anywhere on a data cloud and we have been launching a project for some time now to use our big data systematically and effectively.

FIRSTonline – But the CISL doesn't seem to be going exactly in this direction. It's true that it doesn't follow the pan-syndicalism and populism of the CGIL and Fiom and the degradation of the UIL, but sometimes it flattens out along the line of Camusso and has a wavering line towards the Renzi government: isn't it?

BENTIVOGLI – It seems to me an ungenerous representation of today's Cisl, which is not a barracks but a free organization that gives its best when it values ​​the internal dialectic, which has always rejected maximalist sirens, has defended and still defends its autonomy from Governments and by companies as one of its founding values ​​and does not give up its battle on the merits of the problems for a possible change in the conditions of workers and of the country here and now. That said, I make my own the old motto of Carniti who never stopped inciting the CISL to be more daring. Decisions today must be the result of culturally lively and courageous debates on the merits.

FIRSTonline – Forty years ago Carniti was sitting right in his chair as general secretary of the metalworkers who he led in the hot autumn together with Trentin and Benvenuto before conquering the CISL and completing the reformist revolution of the union which led to the agreement on the escalator: c 'Some say that history sometimes repeats itself and that the renovating drive that you embody today in the Fim could try to infect the Cisl as well as the public sector and pensioners, as happened then. What do you think?

BENTIVOGLI – I live my union commitment as a great opportunity, a collective battle and not as a personal catwalk, for this reason, I don't need further assignments to do my part for a new union springtime. As Carniti himself said, we need to be more daring but innovators must also have memory. Let us not forget that the union and the Cisl represent an enormous reservoir of energy, which certainly needs to be better and more valued, but which also exists in spite of certain caricatured representations, by the media, with respect to what is happening in the categories of public employment, and of retirees, who are no longer what they used to be. To open a new trade union cycle, it takes courage and a far-sighted vision, but difficult challenges are in the DNA of the Cisl.

FIRSTonline – Bentivogli, what idea does the general secretary of the CISL metalworkers have of Italy today? In politics as in the economy, does he or not see any signs that finally give hope for a turning point?

BENTIVOGLI – In Italy the recovery of the economy is fragile and lower than that of other European countries but it is true that there is more confidence, even if the country is blocked by too many encrustations and too many positions of income and privilege. We are the country that on the one hand does not make ends meet and on the other continues to increase and immobilize assets: we are at 1500 billion euros, between families and businesses, which also grew last year. The doomsayers, among whom we number many entertainment trade unionists, have had this great success: blocking the country further. For this reason, it must be recognized that the Government is trying to give Italy a jolt but much more needs to be done and focus on healthy growth that leverages investments and consumption with a long-term vision that places the reform of the State at the center of the battle for change. Woe to letting one's guard down and slowing down the reform policy, of which the union must know how to be a fundamental ingredient and not the ballast. We at Fim-Cisl are and will be there on this frontier.

FIRSTonline – One last curiosity: in the union's vocabulary there are two words – meritocracy and competitiveness – which are considered blasphemy. What role do they play in your vocabulary?

WELCOME – They have a very important one. Merit is the only tool that the less well-off classes have to get on the social elevator of a more just society and it is incomprehensible that such a simple concept and value does not have the place it deserves in a trade union that claims to want to overcome relational capitalism. As for competitiveness, in a market economy like ours, it is an aspect of sustainability, an important value for workers at least as much as for entrepreneurs and every time we have forgotten it we have certainly made a mistake.

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