XXIII National Congress

Document Summary

THE TRADE UNION'S ARGUMENTS

(Signatories: Riccardo Nencini, Fausto Durante, Riccardo Bartolini, Giancarlo Bertozzi, Maurizio Canepari, Valentina Cappelletti, Corrado Cavanna, Emiliano Cerquetani, Roberto Contardi, Camillo Costanzo, Cosimo Dimonte, Gianfranco Fattorini, Mauro Fuso, Salvatore Giglio, Oliviero Girelli, Francesco Lacava, Elena Lattuada, Gianni Leonetti, Francesca Lisandri, Fabrizio Natale, Ermes Riva, Ernesto Rocchi, Luca Saponaro, Maurizio Stampini, Giulia Stella, Piero Vargiu)

Introduction

Fiom's Congress must address the concrete working and living conditions of Italian metalworkers. From this starting point, we must tackle the crisis that is affecting and jeopardising the effectiveness of European and Western unionism.

In recent years, we have seen societies drift away from the Fordist model and the free-trade policies that underpin globalisation gain ground. Fiom itself, which through mobilisation and conflict is striving to win back the national agreement and rights, is faced with the issue of its own ability to bring about progress and concrete results.

Globalisation transforms the fundamental conflict between capital and labour.

Within such a conflict, in order to be viable, each individual dispute must necessarily deal with the issue of how to reunify and generalise its specific arguments.

In the past few years, wealth distribution in Italy has been unfair and unfavourable to wage income and pensions. It is therefore necessary to strive to win back a mechanism for regulating wealth distribution which, by increasing the purchasing power of wages, makes the use of taxation and the control of prices and tariffs consistent and reintroduces the rights of the welfare state as a source of income support.

In order to make these expectations plausible, industrial unionism must move on, introduce new practices suitable to the current phase, and strive for a new pluralistic, democratic and unitary trade union.

1. A time of globalisation

The globalisation of the economy and markets worsens the ills of the world, rather than ease them. Fundamental rights (health, nutrition, education, labour) are but a daydream for the majority of human beings. Globalisation therefore needs to be steered in a different direction.

° In addition to reforming the international organisations that govern the economy (the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank), it is necessary to assert a new industrial culture that is aware of the limits to growth and production, within a framework of sustainability and fairness.

° Fiom is part of the social movement that demands a radical change in the current globalisation processes. Within this movement, Fiom must emphasise its own identity as a labour representation body.

2. War and peace

° The viable future of the next generations depends on asserting the value of peace in the world. Today, such a value is trampled on and denied in Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Middle East and in many parts of the world where poverty and injustice prevail.

° The need to fight terrorism cannot justify preventive war and the imperial policy of the most powerful nations, the United States first and foremost. War and terrorism feed on each other. This spiral must be broken in order to assert a new world order based on peace.

° Peace also means a different and fairer distribution of wealth in the world, defeating current inequalities, a world with more rights and opportunities for all.

3. Europe

° Europe must overcome its divisions and present itself as a peaceful power, capable of asserting the principle of peaceful conflict resolution.

° The European Constitution must speak to peoples' hearts; therefore, it must reject war and be founded on the values of labour and rights. 

° It is necessary to defend and promote the European social model: bargaining over people's working conditions, extensive and structured industrial relations systems, welfare and social security, free access to education and vocational training, universal and quality public services.

4. European unions

° In order to build the European dimension of bargaining, it is necessary for European unions to go beyond their current co-ordination functions and have actual bargaining powers vis à vis EU institutions and global companies.

° It is necessary to set up European trade union representation bodies within multinationals capable of carrying out bargaining activities and participating in restructuring processes. In order to fight the unilateralism and authoritarianism of firms, it is necessary to go beyond the mere information and consultation phase that currently exists in EWCs and promote shared principles of economic democracy.

° It is necessary to balance powers and allow workers to participate directly in multinationals. It is therefore necessary to face up to the challenge of allowing workers to participate in company processes through the presence of their representatives - having control and surveillance functions - within the supervisory bodies, in accordance with the Statute for European Companies.

5. The Italian industry

° The decline of the Italian industry is now evident. In the new international division of labour, Italy is losing ground. Quality and highly technological manufacturing activities in strategic sectors, which are at the centre of globalisation, have disappeared. The industry has slowed down, making room for corporate financing and diversification processes that are conducted in a superficial manner.

° The Italian industry plays a marginal role in secondary sectors, which are more exposed to downward competition and to the risk of delocalization.  Basically, the country imports quality goods and services.

° It is necessary to reverse these trends through a new and modern industrial policy aimed to increase production in terms of quantity and quality and to assert the need for Italian companies to grow in size.

° It is necessary to promote the idea of public intervention playing a new role in the economy in order to favour research, quality, innovation, competition, and industrial solidity. The workplaces and the contribution of individual workers are crucial to the welfare of the community and to the national economy.

6. The Mezzogiorno

° Although the situation is difficult throughout the country, it is especially dramatic in the Mezzogiorno regions. The Mezzogiorno registers among the lowest industrial development rates and highest unemployment levels in Europe.

° The main limits of the industry in the Mezzogiorno are still the fact that it specialises in low value added sectors and that it does not cover the entire value chain, so that the planning, financing and marketing phases of business are dislocated elsewhere.

° The Mezzogiorno can take off if a great innovative leap is made in terms of overcoming the notion that competition is linked only to the cost of labour. Such a leap is necessary in order for the Mezzogiorno not to be penalised by a notion of federalism that is hostile to it and by the enlargement of Europe to the East.

° The new industrial policy for the Mezzogiorno must envisage measures that take into account its differences, favour the integrated growth of the sectors and industries, allow for the development of innovative activities, reassert the culture that promotes legality and fights the tendency to evade laws and agreements, especially as regards contracting and subcontracting activities.

° Fiom's commitment for the Mezzogiorno also involves reasserting the value of the national agreement at both levels of bargaining, to prevent workers from having to bear the brunt of the difficulties of the Mezzogiorno.

7. Metalworkers, the agreement, rights

° The condition of metalworkers today is affected by a strong company leadership and by the growing precariousness of employment. Wages have lost and continue to lose purchasing power in favour of financial yields. Health and safety conditions are worsening and certainties and freedoms on the workplace diminish. Strong attempts are being made to tamper with the pension system.

° The White paper, legislative decree no.  30, laws on part-time work and working hours, the division of trade unions, separate agreements, the attack on rights: these are the cornerstones of the strategy carried out by the centre-left alliance and the Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria) in recent years.

° Within this framework, the wage policy has grown weaker, as a result of unrealistic inflation rate forecasts, the abandonment of price and tariff control policies, the use of the tax lever in favour of the concentration of wealth.

° the Italian Engineering Union Federation (Federmeccanica) and Confindustria have launched an unprecedented attack on the national collective bargaining agreement and on the very notion of collective bargaining. This attack has involved the division of trade unions and separate agreements, for which also the Italian Metal-Mechanical Federation (Federazione italiana metalmeccanici, Fim) and the Union of Italian Metal-Mechanical Workers (Unione italiana lavoratori metalmeccanici, Uilm) are responsible.

° Fiom, which enjoys a profitable relationship with the General Federation of Italian Trade Unions (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, Cgil), has responded through mobilisation, preventing separate agreements on the national collective bargaining agreement from turning into final defeats. Thanks to our initiative and to the challenge of pre-agreements, the awareness of the right to national and company-level collective bargaining is still alive in the sector. The hundreds of pre-agreements signed prove that the accords against the leading metal-mechanical workers trade union do not solve conflicts.

° The map of pre-agreements, however, presents us with elements for reflection that must be expressed clearly. We have offered protection to the most substantial part of Fiom's membership, which is in medium-sized companies. The pre-agreements strategy is not equally effective throughout the country; it does not find adequate support in large groups and in the weak areas of the industry.

° We must therefore reflect on the limits of this initiative and on other choices we have made. For instance, we believe that it was counterproductive to demand equal pay rises for all in our platform to renew the national collective bargaining agreement.  This choice did not help to broaden the front of the fight against precarious labour and has partly changed the expectations of a significant part of workers. Furthermore, it was not useful for Fiom to avoid discussion on the outcome of the referendum on article 18. The ten million «yes» votes were not enough; the broad alliance was not forged which was indispensable to carry forward the battle on rights, which thus came to a standstill.

8. The new wage policy and the agreement structure

° In order to win back the national agreement, a strategic vision is necessary. The national collective bargaining agreement must envisage the redistribution of labour and must serve as an instrument for the reunification of rights and regulations. There must be two parts to the agreement, a national one and a corporate and decentralised one. As regards recovering purchasing power, considering also the loss caused by the last two separate agreements, the accord must lead to a full recovery. The idea of going beyond such a full recovery would be illusory and misleading. 

° Expected inflation is not a reliable indicator. It is necessary to identify a more convincing indicator linked to the actual trend of inflation also when making forecasts, clearly defining the ways to make up for the variances that may have occurred. In view of the next agreement, the conditions are in place to demand wage shares linked to the increases in productivity gains exceeding the recovery of inflation.

° Second level bargaining is still fundamental and must be extended. We must go beyond results-based bonuses linked only to the budget performance of companies: this is necessary in order to re-establish the link between company wages, investments, the manufacturing process and work performance, and to counter the discretionary disbursements of companies. Wage indicators of results-based bonuses must therefore regard shared corporate strategies and specific work programs. It is necessary to pursue the objective of results-based bonus consolidation.

° In order to fight precariousness and legislative decree no.  30, it is necessary to step up bargaining on working conditions and to stress the role of unitary trade union representation bodies (Rsu) in the management of employment dynamics. That is what is being done by means of the pre-agreements and platforms of important groups, in order to confirm that the trade union plays an indispensable role in bargaining to change working conditions and hours and to transform precarious labour into stable employment.

° It is necessary to set new demands, starting with a different relationship between job classification and labour and enterprise organisation, in order to emphasise the role and responsibility of individual workers as well as of the trade union organisation and the labour group. It is also necessary to tackle the issues of overcoming fragmentation and recomposing the production cycle.

° An agreement model like the one we propose, which can also be renewed according to a different timeframe, holds if it is anchored to a system of social relations regulation. As Cgil upholds, a new wage policy is necessary which takes on board the choice of redistribution in favour of dependent work. The improvement of labour must become the general objective of Italian society.

° Our ideas must be implemented based on the general choices in favour of wage redistribution and agreement renewals. It is wrong to think that the pay issue can be solved just through a direct relationship with companies. Taxation, the welfare state, the control over inflation and prices and tariffs are all crucial elements in view of a fairer wealth distribution and the improvement of labour.

° The centre-left government and Confindustria have a radically different point of view on all these matters. A strong mobilisation is therefore necessary on our part, starting with a unitary strike against measures detrimental to pensions and in support of the proposal on welfare and on the quality of development.

9. Autonomy, democracy, representation 

° A trade union that intends to keep an autonomous and non-subordinated profile, within a system governed by relations with the counterparts, must avoid the temptation of self-sufficiency and remain strongly anchored to the relationship with workers.

° It is necessary to obtain a law that guarantees the right to social representation. However, it does not seem that such a law can be attained at once. As an intermediate stage, it is useful to propose a preliminary agreement, in the relationship between confederal trade unions, to guarantee the vote on the bargaining platforms and on the settlement of disputes. Such an agreement must be truly viable.

° Without ruling out other possible forms, in the bargaining history of metalworkers the most suitable instrument for certifying the will of workers is the referendum, as opposed to platforms and agreements.

° The experience involving Rsus must be reconsidered, making representation more aligned with the choices of workers-constituents through the full respect of the criterion of proportionality of list votes. Moreover, the bargaining role of Rsus must be stepped up.

° A more advanced trade union democracy can favour unity at a time of competition among confederal unions.

10. The prospect of unity 

° The experience of the past few years has revealed that there are significant differences between Fiom and other metalworkers' unions. However, in order to face up to the new difficult challenges, a united trade union is necessary.

° That is why an incisive political fight against trade union moderatism is required. This moderatism does not belong to us and has nothing to do with the programmatic and reformist profile of the Italian trade union left, which builds its autonomy precisely on social criticism. 

° Fiom, the trade union that has tied its history to winning the national agreement, has always been in favour of the social unity of workers and of confederal unionism. It is necessary for individual organisations not to surrender to the temptation of self-assertion that inevitably leads to isolation and to lose the ability to achieve concrete results.

° In the light of the failure of the unitary approaches adopted thus far, it is necessary to test new ground. Starting with the renewal and enhancement of the Rsu experience, it is necessary to set the objective of establishing a new pluralistic, unitary and democratic union.

11. The industry union

° The limits of union representation are uncovered by the fragmentation of companies, their shrinking size, the outsourcing of activities in the manufacturing cycle, the many forms of precarious labour. Therefore, bargaining policies for the reunification of labour and of the manufacturing sector are necessary; such policies may serve as a point of reference for organisational choices on trade union representation.

° We have in mind site representatives wherever a company's structure, by virtue of its distribution, requires larger venues to deal with the overall condition of workers. We have in mind representatives for all forms of precarious labour scattered within the individual company.

° It is necessary to update the search for more adequate industrial labour union representation tools, which should be undertaken with Cgil's programmatic conference. We propose to the Confederation that it begin discussing a new trade union that may represent all workers employed in the industry and in the services that are linked to it.

12. Fiom

For three years, our organisation has been involved in extraordinary mobilisation efforts, which have drained our finances. We believe that the strategy to re-establish the budget on a sound footing, which was recently introduced, should be supported with determination. A sounder financial situation guarantees autonomy and independence.

In consideration of the decisions made in this regard, Fiom's Congress shall have to take a closer look at the resistance fund and discuss what its role is and how it works.

It is necessary to promote a turnover and bring new generations into the management groups, tapping into the energies that were unleashed in the struggles of recent years and that have brought to the forefront workers and shop stewards driven by enthusiasm and determination, which are crucial to Fiom's plans. Also to this end, it is necessary to introduce an adequate policy for the training of managers and shop stewards capable of producing the necessary innovations in terms of political culture and bargaining practice. Fiom must also develop specific initiatives involving women and migrants, who have been the most dynamic protagonists of the recent mobilisation efforts and whose needs for protection and representation cannot be disregarded. In order to face these new demands, Fiom must enhance and promote their presence, from lists for the election of Rsus to management bodies at all levels.

An organisation like Fiom needs to avoid sectarian or, even worse, authoritarian attitudes, motivating itself instead through an extended and open democratic and participatory spirit, with the aim to build a significant collective approach capable of facing the complex issues that stand before us. 

The pluralism of ideas is one of Fiom's longstanding and consolidated assets. Our Congress creates opportunities for a productive political debate, setting the objective of achieving the unitary management of Fiom itself. For these reasons, a Congress based on antagonism and pride would not be useful. Instead, the Congress must be seen as an opportunity to make up for the shortcomings and mistakes that we cannot ascribe to external causes or to the action of our opponents, both within and without. Likewise, we must avoid that Fiom's Congress (which is not part of a similar confederal plan) lead us to isolate and detach ourselves from Cgil's choices.

Fiom is the oldest and strongest union of Cgil. This early Congress must serve to gather up the threads of a long history at the service of metalworkers and of democracy.

March 2004