American Labor History, 1973-1983: Italian Perspectives

Abstract

The definition of history, as used here, is one general field of research encompassing, first, working conditions and organization of production; second, workers' social life inside and outside the workplace; and third, ideologies, structures, and accomplishments of trade union and political organizations striving to improve or radically change the workers' economic and social conditions. Only recently in Italy, under the influence of American, English, and French labor-social historians, has there emerged a tendency toward such an integrated and comprehensive approach. This approach combines what for a long time has been the core of labor studies in Italy (that is, the intellectual history of Socialist thought and the institutional history of trade unions' and labor parties' vicissitudes) with areas and topics that traditionally were not deemed worth studying by our labor historians, or were left to such separate disciplines as economics or sociology.' This paper refers to the main publications dealing with one or more of the aspects mentioned above with regard to U.S. labor. The year 1973 was chosen as a starting point because it witnessed the appearance of the first scholarly articles and papers concerning these topics written by Italian historians on the basis of original research carried out in American archives. Such studies have flourished since that time. For example, in a paper presented by Giorgio Spini at a national conference in 1967 describing the extent of American studies in Italy there was no mention of research regarding labor. But only fourteen years later, in a review essay by the same author on the state of the art of such studies, most of the books under review specifically dealt, in some way or another, with labor.2 The evolution of this interest, and the cultural and social thrusts which have nurtured it, is the main subject of this paper. To this end an overview on what happened in the field during the two decades preceding the period under consideration is a necessary starting point. Why was so little published on the subject in Italian historical magazines and journals during the 1950s? Three articles appearing in Movimento operaio and Societa, Marxist or left-wing journals, and Movimento operaio e contadino in Liguria, served as vehicles for the development of Italian labor studies. But in the years immediately following the Second World War, given