By now one thing was obvious in these meetings: all the workers understood that it was an important phase in the fight between us and the bosses, a decisive phase. You could feel the consciousness in the air. And the word revolution was said often in meetings. You saw comrades who were in their forties, who had families, who’d worked in Germany, who’d worked on building sites. People who’d had every kind of job, who already said that by sixty they’d be dead from work.
It’s not fair, living this shitty life, the workers said in meetings, in groups at the gates. All the stuff, all the wealth that we make is ours. Enough. We can’t stand it any more, we can’t just be stuff too, goods to be sold. Vogliamo tutto — We want everything. All the wealth, all the power, and no work. What does work mean to us. They’d had it up to here, they wanted to fight not because of work, not because the boss is bad, but because the boss and work exist. In a word, the desire for power started to grow. It started for everyone, for workers with three or four children, unmarried workers, workers who had kids to put through school, workers who didn’t have their own apartment. All our unbounded needs came out in concrete aims during the meetings. So the struggle wasn’t just a struggle in the factory. Because Fiat has one hundred and fifty thousand workers. It was a huge struggle not just because it involved this great mass of workers.
Because the content of these struggles, the things the workers wanted, weren’t the things that the unions said: the work rates are too high, let’s lower the rates. Work is harmful, let’s try to remove the harm, all this bullshit. They didn’t want to be part of it any more. They discovered, the workers, that they wanted power outside. OK, in the factory we manage to fight, to hold up production when we want. But outside what do we do. Outside we have to pay rent, we have to eat. We have all of these needs. They discovered that they didn’t have any power, the State fucked them over at every level. Outside the factory they didn’t become citizens like all the other workers when they took off their overalls. They were another race. In this system of continuous exploitation they were workers outside as well. To live as workers outside too, to be exploited as workers outside too.
These leaflets that were made, which came out of the meetings, the workers took these leaflets home. Showed them to friends who worked on building sites or other places, and so they ended up all over the place. They often went to distribute them in the neighbourhoods, too, like at Nichelino: in fact, at Nichelino there was an occupation of the town hall over housing that went on for quite a few days. They said the rents were too high, they couldn’t afford them. A leaflet was made that said: Rent — theft of salary. And they didn’t pay any more. Some comrades from the PCI took part in the occupation, and then they left, after which the PCI did everything it could to disrupt the occupation of the town hall.
Nichelino is a working-class dormitory on the outskirts of Torino. Out of 15,000 people, 12,000 are workers, of whom 1700 work in Nichelino, 5500 at Fiat in the various plants at Carmagnola, Rivalta, Mirafiori, Airasca, Spa Stura and so on, the others in factories spread mostly throughout the Fiat cycle, for example Aspera Frigo, Carello and lots of others spread all over.
Around there a family’s budget was the following: wages at a factory in Nichelino for 8 hours work varied between 60,000 and 80,000 a month. Rent — don’t even think about 10,000 — varies from 20,000 to 35,000, plus 2,000, maybe 4,000 costs and central heating. That leaves between 30,000 and 50,000 for living, so that working hours have to rise to 10 or 14. Someone who works at Fiat will never get ahead at all. The cost of travel and the unpaid commuting time, at least two hours a day, uses up the rest.
Characteristics of the dwellings at Nichelino: More or less complete absence of services. Rents continually rising. Constant blackmail by the landlords, with the threat of eviction. Real difficulty for big families, particularly from the south, finding housing. During the 13-day occupation of the town hall, flyers posted on the walls told day by day of the development of the struggle at Fiat and brought the whole population into the discussion at the occupied town hall. Committees of struggle were formed in more factories with claims the same as at Mirafiori. The problems of the factory were connected to the problems outside the factory, the objectives unified the struggles.
These concrete material objectives of the struggle got right around the city, because they were things that concerned everybody, that touched everyone directly. This is what caused the explosion on July 3, the huge battle between the proletariat and the State and its police gangs. That great battle, July 3, is easily explained, because everybody on the streets and in the neighbourhoods understood immediately why those workers were demonstrating, why they were fighting the police. They weren’t demonstrating just because they were radicals and had to have a demonstration. No, it was a fight for proletarian aims, the same as they’d been fighting for weeks inside Mirafiori and now it had spilled out onto Corso Traiano. For objectives that everyone had known about for weeks. Education, books, transport, housing, all of these things. The things that always fucked up the money you earned in the factory.
And they knew it would never be because of union strikes, because of the reforms that the unions asked for, that the State would graciously concede. And even if it did concede it would be all on its own terms. Never, with these strikes, with these reforms. Things always had to be taken, by force. Because they’d had it up to here with the State that always fucked them up and they wanted to attack it, because that was the real enemy, the one to destroy. Because they knew that they could have somewhere to live, that their needs could be satisfied, only if they swept away the State, that republic founded on forced labour, once and for all. That’s how the great battle can be explained, not because people were pissed off by the heat on July 3.
Eighth chapter Autonomy
Thursday 5 June: At Mirafiori, while the lines stuttered back to work, the Foundry workers joined the struggle. Workers from workshop 2 continued to strike for 8 hours each shift. The struggle spread to workshops 3 and 4. The workers from those workshops decided to join the struggle with the same claims as workshop 2: 200 lire increase in base pay, promotion to the metalworker category. The management offered between 3 and 21 lire on the position allowance. The workers refused this offer. As long as we don’t get everything we’ve asked for, the struggle will continue. On the lines the unions called a strike of 2 hours per shift. It was only partly successful. The line workers had been moving since Thursday against the work rates and for pay increases and category advancement, fighting independently of the unions.
The unions’ request for the line delegate didn’t mean these problems would be solved. The current struggle can’t be reduced to the election of a delegate. On the engine and transmission assembly lines the workers strike for two hours per shift since Tuesday. They decided to fight for advancement to second category for everyone. Some of the preparation workers joined in. In the Presses the unions end the strike with laughable results. The workers were against it and production didn’t return to normal. The workers don’t want to return to the previous work rates and the bosses are worried. Fiat management is trying to get back to normal production at any cost because it has lost tens of millions in production precisely at the time when there’s greatest demand in the market.
The unions try to start the struggles one at a time, one finishing and another starting, to avoid the struggle widening and to stop the workers organising themselves in the factories from expressing their will autonomously. But the working-class struggle won’t be controlled this way. Almost every day a new struggle starts, and it’s the workers who start it. This is a big test of the working class’s strength. But it’s not enough. There’s a risk that while new struggles are started, others end with unsatisfactory results which will impede the formation of a strong and permanent organisation of workers who know how to oppose day by day the working conditions imposed by the bosses. If workers end up divided and disorganised after the struggle, this is a defeat, even if something
has been gained. If workers come out of the struggle more united and organised, this is a victory, even if some demands remain unmet.
Friday 6 June: 8 hour strike each shift, not only in workshops 2 and 3 but also in the South Foundries. The struggle also continues in workshop 4. Saturday 7 June: Management suspends a worker from workshop 13 for three days. Monday 9 June: 8 hour strike in both shifts at workshop 13. The causes: no reason on the part of the management for the suspension of the worker and no response from the union to the workers’ requests over: promotion to second category for all. Equal insurance for all. Workers’ control over work rates. Equal bonuses for all. Increased downtime. Changes to the work environment. Wage increases that won’t be absorbed into the national contracts.
North and South Foundries, 8 hour strike on both shifts. To divide the workers management offers a 67 lire increase to the press operators. Only 100 out of 890 accept. Body lines: First shift, spontaneous strike at 10 o’clock by the painting and polishing workers. Claims: wages, categories, work rates. The internal commission said it would reply by 8 o’clock, but was neither seen nor heard. Now they say they will reply next Monday. The supervisors came by on the second shift trying to divide the workers by giving second category to some of them. Fiat is cornered. Hardly any vehicles coming out, shortage of supplies for Rivalta and the organisation of work disrupted. This is the first result of our struggle. A decisive week starts now.
What does the boss do? In opposition to our struggle, the boss, with the complicity of the union, tries to make us participate in and consent to our exploitation. This is, in substance, what the line delegate is about. Against the workers’ interests in widening the struggle at this point, they want to: either separate us from the rest of the Italian working class with a separate Fiat contract, like in ’62, or fence us in with an advance on the future contract, which is the same thing. What does the union do? Attempts to halt the strikes in the individual workshops, comes into the factories to tell us what the boss proposes, takes its own proposals to the boss, negotiates them on our hides and ignores our will and our aims.
What do we workers want? At the Mirafiori North and South Foundries we’ve said it and said it again, with all-out strikes. We want: a 200 lire increase now on the base rate, or wage parity with the steelworkers. Which means 30,000 lire a month more on our base pay, and not the pittance the bosses have offered. On the assembly lines we want 50 lire more on the base rate. Second category for all workers after six months’ work in the factory. We want this all right away. None of this is negotiable. None of this is an advance on the contracts. We don’t want the boss’s work rhythms. We say to the boss and the unions: The line delegate is no use to us. We want section meetings and workshop committees, which we’ll use to organise a permanent struggle against the boss, his work rhythms, his servants. We’ll organise ourselves, we’ll all become delegates. Workers, when we fight the boss is weak, this is the moment to attack. We need to organise and widen our struggle, workshop by workshop.
Tuesday 10 June: The union’s politics of dividing the workers by allowing category advancement to some and giving differentiated wage increases gets its first results. The struggle in the Foundries ends and the workers go back to work. The mechanical lines continue the strike for two hours. Some workers from the body workshop in workshop 54 are reorganising themselves and ask the comrades to intervene and prepare a leaflet listing their claims to distribute the next day. The workers from workshop 25, hot work, ovens, also request a leaflet for the next day.
Wednesday 11 June: The workers from the afternoon shift at workshop 54 have decided that if they don’t get an answer to their claims by Friday they’ll strike. The tendency to organise autonomously, renouncing union mediation for bargaining with the bosses, is spreading. In fact there are requests for leaflets from the workers of workshop 13, workshop 85, new sections of workshop 14 and the lines of the body workshops, and workers from the Foundries. As a result, Fiat’s repressive politics gets worse. Two sackings at workshop 13 yesterday. Today the workers got six thousand lire less in their pay packets, deducted for time on strike.
Foundry workers: The boss is in crisis. Production, reduced by half, is further disrupted by initiatives of the workers who are fed up with waiting for the contract negotiations, which the boss is preparing to confront. If the struggle at the Foundries had lasted another few days, production in whole sections of Fiat would have stopped: Mechanics, Rivalta. But this time the boss had enough stock to allow production elsewhere at a reduced rate, and so was able to hold out longer than the workers. But anyway our struggle, leaving aside the limited results, has shown the boss our strength. We must use this strength to break the boss once and for all. It’s a fact that here in the Foundries, where the struggle was harder and the workers, united, had resisted for longer, the boss resigned himself to conceding increases, even if they were differentiated and much lower than our claims. But this didn’t happen on the lines, where the workers had also made wage claims.
But what raises did the boss concede? Our claims were: 200 lire more on the base wage or wage and conditions parity with the steelworkers, that is, 30,000 more a month in the pay packet. Because the work is hard and dangerous and we’re not animals who work gratis. The union refused to put this claim, at the same time that it occurred to them to trumpet the management’s offers. The increases offered by the bosses aren’t on base pay but on the allowance for positions. This means that a transfer would lose you this advantage, and we know how easily the bosses can transfer you from one position to another. The 200 lire is the same for everyone because it unites the workers in the struggle and takes away the ability to discriminate that the boss uses against us.
Rather, the management offers that the union had outlined so well in their latest leaflet were divided by category, precisely to make the workers who would gain the most abandon the struggle one by one. So there is no point arguing among ourselves over it, because that is what the boss wants, to discourage our attempts at organisation. Because, comrades, this is the biggest victory in this struggle, apart from the boss’s few miserable lire. For the first time we have succeeded in organising and conducting the struggle with our own aims, in the decisive moment for us. But that’s not enough; the isolation of our struggle that the union wanted forced the Foundry workers to bear the full weight of the strike, when all the workers of Mirafiori wanted to fight.
Now we get it: the organisation we have created has allowed us to carry out the struggle in the factory, but it hasn’t allowed us to overcome the isolation forced on us by the internal commission and the union. Refusing to carry our claims forward. Dividing the struggle of North Foundry from South Foundry. Not informing workers in Fiat’s other sections. But the reasons we acted still hold. Just as we were able to organise ourselves in the workshop, we need to be able to organise all of Mirafiori. How? Only by cooperating with the workers of the other workshops will we be able to organise struggles that cause the least harm to us and the most harm to the boss. Only by making our full organised force felt will we force the boss to surrender.
Thursday 12 June: At Mirafiori the autolimitation of production by workers in workshop 13 continues. On the lines, on the 850, on the 124, on the 125, shortage of doors. At this point the management is too scared to carry out widespread reprisals. But they try to hit individual workers in the most advanced points of the struggle, sacking them or transferring them. They hope this will scare the rest. But this move mustn’t go unchallenged. We need to respond blow by blow, stopping work as soon as a comrade is hit. The most effective weapon against this repression is unity and the workers’ cooperation among themselves. The Fiat workers’ struggle is spreading from Mirafiori to other firms. Grandi Motori, at Settimo, crane drivers and riggers. Grandi Motori Centro, sections P and B. Sima, lathe operators. Spa Centro, section 3.
All the Fiat Mirafiori workers who have been on strike in recent days have asked for the same thing: wage increases. Even the requests
for category advancement mean: higher wages. And the same goes for increases in other components of the wage. But all of these claims had one common characteristic: the increases were claimed equally for everyone with automatic category advancement for everyone. Even the points on other matters tended to be the same for everyone. This means one fundamental thing: We want to get to an equal wage for everyone. In fact the workers have become aware that differences in wages, bonuses, categories, allowances and so on are one of the boss’s tools for dividing workers.
In fact the boss, to avoid losing millions more in production, made use of the differential increases to bring an end to the struggle. He conceded category advancement to some workers but not others; for example, concession to leading hand on the lines, advancement for Maintenance. He conceded differential wage increases: for example, machine controllers and press operators in the Foundries. And in general on that part of the wage that encourages greater productivity or acceptance of danger: piece rates in the Presses, position allowances in the Foundries. The union delegates refused to be the spokesmen for the workers’ claims for immediate equal wage increases for everyone.
They remain faithful to the principle that you request increases in the base wage only every three years when the contracts are up. They accept a series of divisive elements that the boss introduces regarding wages, categories, differentiation between various workshops and sections. Because of this they split the workers’ general claims, dividing the struggle and creating confusion among the workers. But the workers want to get to an equal wage for everyone, because it eliminates divisions and unifies the struggle. Because then everybody inside the factory is indispensable, the technician as much as the worker, a machine or line specialist or a manual worker. Because now we can all do everything. Because living costs are the same for everyone.
We Want Everything Page 11