Defeat at Fiat

Abstract

This article originally appeared under the title The Workers of Turin and the Others in Primo Maggio No. 14 (Winter 1980/81). It was written in the immediate aftermath of what has since proved to be the historic defeat of the five week strike against mass redundancy at the FIAT plant in Turin during October 1980. Central to the outcome of this struggle was the impact of a demonstration by some 20, 000 middle managers, foremen and moderate workers under the slogan ’work is defended by working’. Up to that point the strike had seemed solid. It had been called by the FLM (the engineering workers section of the three union confederations) with the overwhelming support of shopfloor delegates and all three confederation secretaries pledging total support. Berlinguer, the Communist Party General Secretary, had also visited Turin in support, and the news from Poland had led to the call ’Do as in Gdansk - Occupy!’. But immediately after being faced with middle management's unprecedented show of support for the company both union and party leaderships surrendered the struggle. The confederation secretaries, above the heads of the FLM, concluded an agreement with FIAT that both accepted the redundancies and allowed it to fire whomever it chose. As Italy's largest private manufacturing concern, FIAT has always acted as a barometer not only of the fortunes of the economy but also to a large extent of trends in the struggle between capital and labour throughout Italian industry. And since the events of autumn 1980 the list of major industrial companies declaring, and succeeding in achieving, massive lay-offs and redundancies has been virtually a roll call of the commanding heights of Italian manufacturing. Alfa Romeo, which laid off a third of its workforce at the beginning ofl 982, is but the most recent example of an enterprise following FIA Ts robust assertion of ’management's right to manage’ and restructure on its own terms. In Italy, as in the UK, manufacturing, and particularly engineering, employment has sharply declined in the last two years and productivity among the remaining workforce has equally sharply increased; at FIAT it has risen by 20% since the beginning of 1981. Revelli's analysis does not deal with the tactics or direct consequences of the strike - rather he addresses a more general question: ’have we reached a turning point, the end of a certain working class culture and identity in the face of a qualitative, and historical alteration in the relations of production?’. In other words does the new management offensive amount to a modem version of Fordism in which the ’mass worker’ will now suffer the same fate as the craftsman? In explaining the FIA T defeat Revelli stresses the way in which the introduction of new technologies - carefully pursued by management during a period of apparent defensiveness during the seventies - has transformed the labour process. As editor of Primo Maggio he writes from within the ’operaisf tradition that has developed on Panzieri's insights into capital's use of machinery in attaining the real subsumption of labour power. Some may feel that this account lacks an analysis of the world outside the sphere of production and that it is too narrowly wedded to a vision that assumes the primacy of the relations of production (in the narrow sense of relations within the factory) in determining social and political behaviour. However, Revelli's analysis is not mechanistic and he introduces several concepts new to the ’operaist’ tradition which allow greater space for subjectivity (stressing generational differences among the strikers, for example). Questions of subjectivity and culture are more fully explored in relation to the shopfloor workforce than the middle layers, whose actions are explained entirely in terms of their political and economic subordination to FIAT. Nevertheless, Revelli makes extremely important points in relation to those he dubs ’the others’. In particular, he suggests that - in the climate of planned insecurity promoted by capital - the middle layers will be increasingly inclined to offer loyalty in exchange for security; and that, in its own wider interests, capital may hold back from technological innovation that could eradicate many such jobs.