On May 20, 1970, law 300, known as the Workers' Statute, was approved.
Fifty-five years after that date, it is useful to remember the exacttitle of that law to fully understand the meaning that the legislator
wanted to assign to it. The title read verbatim "Rules on the
protection of the freedom and dignity of workers, of trade union freedom
and of trade union activity in the workplace and rules on placement."
Before seeing what remains today of the original system, it is
necessary, in order to understand the importance of this law in the
recent history of the workers' movement in Italy, to retrace some of the
steps that led to those choices. In 1970 the war had been behind us for
twenty-five years, the country had passed from monarchy and fascism to a
parliamentary republic, the new legal bases that were placed at the base
of the new democracy were innervated in its fundamental law, the
Constitution of 1948 to which both the popular and liberal parties and
the socialist and communist parties contributed.
The society that was born from the ashes of the war was placed in the
western fold of bourgeois democracies, but both because of the massive
presence of social and political forces that expressly referred to the
socialist and communist tradition, and because the reconstruction of the
country required a spirit of constructive collaboration, the
Constitution was characterized by a set of values aimed not only at the
affirmation of the "so-called bourgeois freedoms", but also with a
strong propensity for social justice. These "progressive"
characteristics of the Charter must deal with the fact that its rules
are not binding, but are simply prescriptive, have a programmatic
character, and above all are subject to the power relations in society.
A society that in the State apparatus has kept almost intact the entire
bureaucratic apparatus of fascism, with, instead, heavy discrimination
in the 1950s towards those partisans who had fought that regime in arms.
And it is a civil society where the factory owners and the landowners
managed the workplace with oppression, abuse and exploitation. The years
preceding 1970 have these characteristics. The idea of a Statute of
workers' rights that took shape in the early 1950s thanks to Giuseppe Di
Vittorio's CGIL, starts precisely from the observation that the rights
enshrined in the Constitution stop at the factory gates. Giving rights
to workers means bringing the Constitution into the factory. As often
happens and as history teaches us, beautiful concepts and beautiful
words almost never manage to change the course of events. The ones who
gave a powerful jolt to this society that had quickly mothballed the
dreams of freedom and equality that the resistance had generated were
the new generations of workers who, in a biblical migration from the
south to the north, found themselves clashing with unacceptable working
conditions; workers who had not experienced the fascist regime
first-hand and who were not subjected to the blackmail of reconstruction
that characterized the unity of the anti-fascist forces in the immediate
post-war period. Alongside these, that world of youth was agitated that,
thanks also to international influences, professed perhaps for the first
time in the history of Italy ideas of rebellion, tired of having to
subjugate to a hypocritical Catholic-Communist morality made up of
private vices and public virtues. Those preceding 1970 were the years of
youth protest, workers' and peasants' struggles, and of the protest
against forms of domination in the most varied sectors of society. In
Italy in particular, workers' struggles went well beyond the traditional
channels managed by the confederal unions. The struggles developed with
the unions only when they made their own the demands that workers'
assemblies autonomously decided. This was the case for the right to
assembly, for equal wage increases for all, for the right to health, for
uncompromising opposition to layoffs. The rights that politicians, trade
unionists, jurists and labor lawyers wanted to assert in the factory by
asking for the application of the Constitution, a conscious movement of
people, male and female workers, imposed them in fact without
compromise, with the reason and determination of the struggle.
This movement gave strength to the trade unions, but it was also
decisive for the managers of large companies who saw with growing
concern the development of a struggle front that did not cease to grow
and that, according to the motto that appetite comes with eating, always
set new objectives. For them it was important, even in a context of
conflict, to have certain counterparts who to some extent acted as
guarantors of the agreements. As they said in those times, the choice
was made to "unionize the protest". Gino Giugni, «L'autunno "caldo"
sindacale», II Mulino, January-February 1970, pag. 24. In telling
this story of struggles, of requests and affirmations of rights we
cannot forget that in those years there were also forces hostile to the
workers' movement and its values of freedom and equality, but also
hostile to the democratic order of the republic. These were the years of
the attempted coup "Piano Solo" orchestrated by the president of the
republic Antonio Segni in cahoots with General De Lorenzo, former
general of the SIFAR (military secret services) and later chief of staff
of the army, of clandestine structures such as Gladio at the service of
the CIA, of the strategy of tension with dynamite attacks by
neo-fascists protected by state apparatuses and attributed to anarchists
or communist groups, these were the years preceding the mother of all
massacres, that of Piazza Fontana in Milan blamed on Valpreda and
Pinelli, but which will remain in history as the state massacre. The
ground for the approval of the Workers' Statute was then ploughed to the
right point.
The Statute crystallizes the balance of power between capital and labour
and this in the following decades will be an element if not of strength
then certainly of resistance of the union and the workers. The
expansionary economic cycle that together with all the other
circumstances had contributed to giving strength to the workers'
movement, already from the early 70s gave signs of crisis and the
employers' forces began a long and tenacious erosion of the workers'
gains. The retreat that began to manifest itself in those years did not
translate into a hasty defeat thanks also to the statute that allowed a
defence also on the legal level often more effective than the
traditional instruments of union struggle. Some articles proved
essential to counter the renewed arrogance of the employers.
The ban on remote video surveillance, demotion, the discipline on
dismissals, the sanction of anti-union conduct, the rules on placement.
Numbers that for every conscious worker represented an indispensable
toolbox. Articles 4, 13, 18, 28, 33 and 34. A work of methodical
demolition of these articles has been carried out in the last twenty
years and piece by piece, both with center-right governments, both with
technical governments and with center-left governments, of these
articles nothing remains or an empty simulacrum. Article 28
itself, although unchanged, has lost much of its dissuasive value for
the bosses, both due to the emptying of the other rules and due to the
changed conditions in the balance of power that even allow the employers
to fire the union representatives themselves. Today, in a phase in which
the economic crisis dramatically negatively affects the outlook for the
coming years, thinking of climbing back up the slope with the proposal
of a new social pact, of workers' participation in the management of
companies and in the re-proposal of a new labor statute, means handing
oneself over with hands and feet tied to capital, it means signing one's
own disappearance as a class and definitively archiving any hope of
liberation from and of work.
The history of these fifty-five years has taught us, conflict is the
tool to acquire a role and dignity, the transformation of union
delegates into "legulei" has disarmed the class and contributed to
endorsing the current situation.
To worthily claim the anniversary of the Statute, it is necessary to
inscribe the word conflict in the logos of our unions and organize
workers and delegates so that it can be effectively exercised.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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