The 17th March 2011 celebrated the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy. It is not the occasion for Carduccian rhetoric or nationalistic nostalgia. Instead, it is a date that requires serious meditation on the state of Italy as a politically united nation and as center of cultural values which are an integral part, or rather, are the basis of the European conscience.
A detached observation, not clouded by emotion, presents a curious, perhaps unique contradiction: as a Nation, Italy is certainly a recent construction, if one thinks that the “new world”, the United States of American, celebrated their bicentenary in 1976. Not only; it is a unitary construction today traversed by tremors and needs of decentralization in the federal sense, which does not want either separatists or secessionists, but wants that which reflects an extraordinarily vibrant and picturesque variety of traditions and customs so as to justify the definition of Italy as “archipelago of culture”, which the law of 1859, tending to uniform the Peninsula almost to a photocopy of the old, glorious Piedmont, failed to flatten. But as a society, Italy is, albeit in a summary calculation, very ancient, present on the world scene since time immemorial, to the extent of covering a time span of thirty centuries.
In this reality, rugged and yet aware of a common destiny, the function of the workers’ movement and of its trade union organizations was decisive in guaranteeing the balance, the development, the modernization and the progress of the Country as a fundamental unitary reality.
Unlike other union movements (clarified further ahead) the Italian ones, beginning from the founding of the General Confederation of Labour at the end of the 19^th Century – in the same period in which the large people’s parties were organized, in particular, the Socialist Party – were, from the very beginning, firmly anchored to the territory, through original organizations like the Chamber of Labour (Labour Exchange), open to all the professional categories and to all the arts and crafts federations.
Furthermore, the union action, in a Country poor in raw materials and rich in mouths to feed, which up to the end of the 2nd World War had exported manpower all over the world, had set as its primary objective – above all, bearing in mind the rural problem – the approval and the strict application of the Law which obliges employers to assume the number of workers proportional to the dimension of their business, in this case in the agriculture.
In this sense, the Italian trade union movement historically came about, working in close contact with the territorial communities and starting the subscription system, which protected against the formation of elitist positions of relative advantage and of more or less veiled parasitism.
In the Italian situation the unionism business has never really taken root. The origin of unionism is tied to an act of social solidarity, beyond and often against the “the laws of the market”. This act is not doctrinaire. It is the answer, also naïve, to the needs of the working classes: the house, the food, a regular salary and medical care. It can assume incongruous forms, expressions not of class interests, but of general good will.
It seems historically certain that before being a union organization in the proper sense, that is to say, an organization with a structure which is continuous in time, with a managing group clearly defined in its functions and its declared objectives, the workers’ movement is an act of human solidarity, always authentic and suffered, experienced before theorized. See, for example, the Societies of Mutual Aid.
The workers’ movement, in Italian, is written using the singular form, but the plural would be more correct. The historical variability should, in fact, be taken into careful consideration.
In fact, the specific historical context weighs on the singular worker movements and on the union forms which originated from them, determining nature, organizational structure and orientation of ideals.
For example, the American union is non-ideological, vertically structured according to the professional categories; accepted as members only those who can regularly pay the membership fee. It was, in fact, founded by Samuel Gompers, Secretary General of the Cigar-Makers Union, and only in 1936, the merger took place with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, inspired by Walter Renther. The Congress gathers together the unions, above all, those of the automobile, which will always be the most advanced point, The United Automobile Workers, with headquarters in Detroit, Michigan.
The situation is radically different in Europe. Here the workers’ movement is not non-ideological. It moves on the guidelines that affect all of the society and appears, therefore, imbued by a strong political awareness and by a specific class consciousness with precise ideological and political implications. As I observed elsewhere, finished the trade corporations and the Mediaeval craft guilds, which, through a complicated system of regulations and controls, assured a sufficiently harmonious relationship between producers and consumers, now it is up to the market to carry out this integrative function.
But the nexus that the capitalist market furnishes is no longer the personal nexus, directly between artisan and client and, within the productive process, between master of the workshop and day labourer; instead, it is configured in the abstract, impersonal, automatically balancing the ratio between supply and demand.
Considered globally, both as a professional organization and a political movement in its proper sense, the workers’ movement configured as a systematic braking action with respect to the mechanical function of the capitalist market and as an articulated response to the pure employment of the law of supply and demand.
This is, naturally, an interpretative generalization. In the historical reality, the things are considerably more complex and the same stands taken by the workers’ movement are not to be seen as dictated by abstract ideological principles, but as variously effective “answers” to specific circumstances in determined cultural and historical contexts. A “non dynastic” history of the workers’ movement, that is, not concerned about saving, a priori, a given orthodoxy, able to see the development in relation to the initiatives of the entrepreneurial counterparts in the framework of available economic resources and of the legally encoded institutional structures, in touch with specific technical equipment and with a particular historical heritage, a particular political regime and a particular geographical position, is yet to be written.
Thus, in Italy, in a situation in which, given the delayed industrial development in the modern sense, also the organization of the workers’ movement is late in starting, we find the typographers in the front row in the difficult transition from the generic societies of Mutual Aid to the constitution of “coalition workers” determined to oppose, with clear and systematic resistance, the master-(owner)-counterpart.
The textile industries are certainly the oldest, and also the most famous as regards to working hours and intense exploitation, but to have the first permanent association of union resistance, we must wait for the initiative of that working élite which are gathered in the “federation of the book”. Very soon imitated by their companions of Genoa and Milan, and then by those of the most important Italian cities, the 7^th May 1848 forty workers in Turin, constitute the “Society of the Typesetters”. The “Society” do not propose revolutionary intentions and neither do they found their activity on ideological platforms. It proposes and concerns itself – with a minimalism which will be characteristic of the unionism business – with an important tendency of the world workers’ movement, to defend a “working rate of pay”, which had been recently obtained from the owners. It is difficult to understand and correctly evaluate the deliberated practicality and limitation of the objectives of the very first Italian workers’ organizations without bearing in mind their historical background.
With regard to the position of the worker, one can, however, assert that in Italy, as indeed, in other Countries of Continental Europe, in particular, in France and Germany, Marxism had appeared at the beginning of that century as a realistic interpretation, and an explanation, if not exactly scientific, psychologically plausible, of the problems which faced the subordinate working classes.
The Marxist interpretation, ultimately, substantially victorious compared to the others, was to very soon offer the doctrinal basis for the creation of parties of the working class and, in particular, to justify the different position and function attributed to the union and to the political party –the first, defender of the interests at short notice and subordinate with respect to the party, interpreter, this last, of the historical situation of the power relations between the classes and guide in the practical struggle to overthrow such relations – the status quo – to bring exploitation to an end, i.e. to the prehistory of humanity, finally, to begin a new human condition optimistically striving towards a Saturnian Age in which the free development of each one is the condition for the development of each one and is the condition for the development of everyone.
Historically, the decline of the Mutual Aid societies corresponds to the always more vigorous establishment of the Leagues of Resistance (organizations in defence of the economic and professional interests of the workers of the agricultural industry) and the development, after 1891 (the year of the foundation of the Socialist Party of the Italian Workers), of the Labour Exchanges, which the socialists were creating in the principal cities of North Italy.
The Labour Exchanges were institutions in imitation of the Bourses du Travail Francesi (French Labour Exchanges) and had the goal of implementing more effective and more ample forms of worker protection. It included as many section as there were the trades, the crafts and the professions of the members of the Societies of Mutual Aid and if the members of Cooperatives. The principal function of the Labour Exchanges was, undoubtedly that of job placement, but they represented also particularly effective instruments of diffusion of the socialist ideas for broad strata of workers, for whom the professional economic defence of their interests end up by representing only the immediate aspect of a class consciousness which tended to perceive the resolution of the “labour question” through the overcoming of the capitalist society.
Benefiting from the historical experience of the last half century or so, today, we know that capitalism is unsurpassable because) it is surpassed by itself. Protean, dynamic, capitalism creates wealth and, at the same time, dedicates itself to that which, with an oxymoron of dubious elegance, it has been defined the “creative destruction”. Capitalism has shown not to have need of a representative democracy. It lives and thrives with any political regime because it is relatively independent and, as a matter of fact, indifferent to governments provided they leave it with a free hand in the so-called “free market”. It happens that latecomer social analysts, martyrs of the pay-roll and of the consulting gold are condemned to discover the umbrella. One hundred years after Thorstein Veblen and the Marxist Austrians, they discover the financial capitalism and its diabolic, uncontrollable speculations. In my opinion, the real problem consists in having adopted a instrumental value – the technical innovation – as the final value.
From this point of view, it is hardly necessary to observe that the social function, in terms of the overall sustained durability of the economic and political system, it was and is still fundamental. With the unions the popular masses find and efficient instrument of participation, even though indirect and, at times, manipulative, in a State which from mono-class, above all, commencing from the phase of Giolitti to the First World War, was becoming multi-class, in concomitance with the modernization of the economy which, from rural was headed towards industrialization, beginning with textile mills to the workers in the engineering, chemical and steel industries.
With fascism, freedom of association was suppressed. Particularly hit and eliminated were the internal commissions of the trade unions, guarantors of the presence of the worker representatives in the work place and, therefore, able to capture, understand and express the needs outside of ideological filters. With the end of the Second World War, the resumption of the union is rapid and helps in a direct and, sometimes, original way, especially with the Boards of Management, like those of the German Mitbestimmung, the democratic reconstruction of Italy. Only with the advent of the Cold War, the trade union unity enters into crisis. In addition to the CGIL, the CCGIL comes into existence, then the CISL with a Christian democratic orientation, and the UIL, Social-democratic.
The risk for the unions was that of being reduced to mere “transmission belts” of the demands of the political parties and, therefore loose their autonomy.
The “Cold War”, bitter confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, lasting almost half a century, from the end the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, had to, inevitably, break the unity of the unions and weaken their capacity to resist and eventually change the owners’ initiatives.
Nevertheless, what remains important are the actions of containment, channeling and defence of the instances of subordinate employment on the part of the unions. I do not completely agree with the definition of the union initiatives as a sort of “industrial counter-revolution”. However, it is certain that the presence of the union constituted an effective barrier against the possible privatization of public concerns, speculations of various kinds on the part of employers in certain historical phases, who clearly afflicted by delusions of omnipotence.
The consequences of ideological sectarianism were serious for the unions. They forced them to share, at least in part, the end of the ascendant ideologies of 19^th Century, which had become tedious and deceiving megaphones of officialdom. Unfortunately, together with the collapse of the ideologies also the ideals became liquefied. The emergence of the technological innovations as a driving factor of the economy had and still has a contradictory consequence: on the one side, there are the groups of workers stably established in the work market with permanent contracts, but, on the other side and to the extreme opposite, are found the huge mass of young people waiting to enter the work market and, in general, are hired only with term contracts. Two positions, therefore, contrary and symmetric, a sort of fracture between the generations: the hyper-protection of the unions, on the one hand, and the diffused precariousness, on the other.
As I have observed at other times, it is the technological innovation that calls the tune: condemn the old products, create new markets. But the technology is a perfection without scope. An instrumental value is venerated as the final value. It has the power to shake up and smash the old professional categories, job profiles, the directly muscular work and at the limit, the same presence of the worker-operator, no longer in blue overalls, but in a white shirt, giving rise to that nonsense which is the jobless growth, the productive growth without jobs and, accordingly, the contradictory short-circuit over-production–under-consumption.
It is in this short-circuit that the youth is caught, imprisoned in the insecurity of the precariousness. If production grows, but the secure jobs disappear and the regular salary fails to arrive because the robotization eliminates the subordinate manpower, which is, however, made up of consumers, the over-production–under-consumption short circuit is inevitable.
Not only: the top-management, having to reckon with a technology in continual and rapid change, and amortization times of the investments always shorter, cannot afford to sign permanent contracts. In short, they need a labour force which is not only docile, but malleable, movable, precarious and fungible.
It is the new slavery of the technically advanced society. With regard to the youth of today, the social exclusion, the economic precariousness, the political irrelevance are objective facts, empirically verifiable. To give a psychological or purely cultural interpretation is hazardous. If one loses the deeper meaning, the determining trenchancy, the character of “hardness”, which Emile Durkheim, at the beginning of the last century, acknowledged to the social facts and led him to study them “as things”, comme des choses.
The emotionality prevalent today, means sliding towards the labile states of mind. I would not subscribe to the elimination of psychology from the list of social sciences decreed by Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim. But a research on the youth of today, dramatically struggling with their elementary means of autonomous subsistence, in which social analysts, until proven otherwise responsible, do not hesitate to flaunt a psychoanalytical paraphernalia as cryptic as it is futile, all provoke a certain dose of legitimate astonishment.
Expressions such as repression, chronic depression, apathy, immediate and unlimited enjoyment, desiring exploitation, refusal to dream, castration of desire and so on, presuppose a crowd of patients, candidates for the psychiatric hospitals, rather than young people in search of employment, preferably not precarious, to obtain a mortgage, create a family, to guarantee for themselves their own vital space.
Is it too much to ask?
Does this mean giving in to “immediate and unlimited enjoyment” as certain analysts say, today, on the crest of the wave?
It is to this massive problem that the unions, today, must respond and give the full measure of their historical function.
To this target, the declarations of good will, recognition of the unease of the young, the need to reform the work market, will not be sufficient. The technology, today recognized as the imperative of the economic and social progress, changes continually and rapidly in such a way that the times of amortization of the investments are dramatically shortened. Not only: the rapidly changing technology has assailed, undermined and often rendered the old professional categories obsolete, which are the mainstay of the organizational structure of the unions.
Thus, we find ourselves facing employers who, not for deliberate bad will, but for objective reasons, are becoming more and more employers of precariousness. They say they cannot hire the young people with the traditional contract, which means a permanent contract, because they do not know and are not able to foresee how long a given productive technical phase will last. They no longer need, as once, compliant manpower. They need a subordinate manpower which is malleable, flexible and fungible, which is satisfied with work contracts that are renewable, or not, every three months. Otherwise, they state with the accounting books of the firm close at hand, the accounts do not add up and the spectre of company bankruptcy acquires, very shortly, its fearsome consistency.
But what happens to the young people, in this precarious situation, even when they have been fortunate enough to obtain fixed-term employment? Is it possible to live from three months to three months without being able to: take out a mortgage for the home; to make a medium-term project to set-up a family; to leave the home of the parents in order to increase their own autonomy and, therefore, their own sense of responsibility? They seem rhetorical questions. They are, instead, real aspects of everyday life, to say the least, dramatic, which weighs, by now, on an entire generation, especially in Italy, where the dynamism of the economy does not even guarantee to those who lose a precarious job to find another equivalent.
In my recent book, “The slaughter of the innocent” (Rome, Armando, 2011) I record the testimony of a young temporary worker with regard to “A day at the call center”. I cite a part of this sober, not painful, but simply realistic testimony: “When I recount the work I do, I don’t think they understand what it means – in the end you just sit next to a phone; you have no responsibilities; you of the call center, I’d like to meet you face to face: you always hang up and let me wait for hours; who do you work for? Can you get a promotion for me? – they’re just some of the remarks they make, it’s not spitefulness, it’s that they don’t understand.
The call centers are very widespread in Italy: I believe, in fact, almost everyone has in the family or among friends someone who has worked in one of them – maybe only once, but they don’t understand the sense of alienation of this work.
Alienation because the client changes, but the work is always the same, someone may thank me, but there’s no satisfaction and it’s never the company that recognizes the value of an employee, even if I do more, the money will always be the same and that’s not much. There’s no project, only six hours that have to pass every day and it‘s always difficult.
I have the December shifts, I work on the 24th from 4:00p.m to 10:00p.m and also the 31st until 10:00p.m. My wife will be angry for sure, but what can I do?
It’s 10:00 p.m., finally I finish and go home. I’ve done my work well, I’ve been cordial and correct with everyone, also with those who are rude to me. Everyone asks me how I can remain so calm, how’s it possible that in the end, even the most enraged client finishes by thanking me. When I put on those headphones, I represent the company, they offend the company, not me, they have nothing personally against me. I begin to be myself again when I get out of here. I do a job for which I am non-existent. For 10 hours a day, I am a shadow of a man, without qualities – an animated machine”.
This testimony is a confirmation, not strictly necessary, of the new problems determined by a technological devolution in rapid development. This evolution constitutes a challenge, perhaps decisive, for the unions, which will impose, in a relatively short time, the organizational restructuring and the re-definition of the goals.
On the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy emerges, nevertheless, in full evidence and must be recognized, the great original contribution given by the workers’ movement and its unions to the conscious, effective humanitarian cohesion of Italy of today, beyond any ideological mirage or unrealistic revolutionary dream.
In this perspective, the union initiatives that organize and guide the subordinate employment cannot be presented or interpreted as purely negative “counter-industrial” initiatives. On the contrary, it is a form of representation of the great majority of the citizens that guarantees the social cohesion and, therefore, sets itself as a valid factor of national unity and political democracy.