Alessandra Mecozzi

The 28th of January 2011 was a beautiful day for Italian metalworkers: 70% participated in the national strike and in 17 demonstrations called by FIOM (the metalworkers union affiliated to CGIL, Italy’s largest union confederation). This was a response to the aggressive strategy adopted by Fiat in several of its factories.
Only a few years ago, Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s CEO, declared that as labour cost accounted only for 7% of the company’s total costs, there should be no reason to squeeze workers and put pressure on working conditions (interview in La Repubblica, 21/9/2006). He used the context of the global crisis to launch a direct attack on workers’ rights and conditions, with the aim of dismantling the Italian labour relations system.

Francesco Garibaldo

Pomigliano, situated in the economically depressed region of Campania, is the second largest Fiat plant in Italy. An experiment aimed at redefining the Italian system of industrial relations is taking place at this plant. It started with an agreement designed out of the Italian labour relations law. According to Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s CEO, this is a necessary step to fight the war posed by global competition.

The Pomigliano agreement, signed by three of the four metalworkers’ unions (FIM, UILM and FISMIC), with the exclusion of the most representative (FIOM), gave a strong impetus to the process, started in 2009, of the deconstruction of the social pact set up in July 1993.[1] The pact, similar to the European tripartite incomes negotiation system, was based on a dual system of bargaining: on one hand, a national contract for each sector with an upper limit to wage increases, defined by the government and dependent on national macroeconomic conditions; and on the other, the possibility of the bargaining company’s agreements to redistribute the firm’s specific productivity gain. The core of the system was the national collective agreement regulating the main features of the employment relation. The company-level bargaining was only designed to fine-tune secondary aspects, not to allow local actors to depart from the national contract’s clauses. The system was ineffective in defending wages from inflation; as a result, in the past 10 years, there has been a shift of five points in the ratio of wages to profits in GDP.

Richard Hyman

“There can be no return to business as usual”: this was the unanimous trade union response to the global crisis. For a time in early 2009, the legitimacy of capitalism was itself questioned in unexpected quarters. In May 2009 the German union confederation, the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, organised a ‘Capitalism Congress’ – using language which for decades would have been taboo – and its president warned of unrest on the streets unless jobs were more effectively safeguarded. One of its leaders, Claus Matecki, insisted that it was important to talk of capitalism rather than using the conventional but bland term soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy), since only thus could trade unionists make clear that the existing economic order was historically contingent and founded on a fundamental inequality between workers and employers.[1] Yet there was no follow-up.

Chen Weiguang interviewed by Boy Lüthje[1]

Boy Lüthje

Chen Weiguang

BL: How do you assess the labour conflicts in the auto supply industry in South China in the spring and summer of 2010?

CW: The strike at Honda Nanhai and other auto components factories in the Pearl River delta in June and July 2010 triggered a strike wave that involved several tens of thousands of workers. In the city of Guangzhou alone, more than 60 factories had strikes, including Honda Dongfeng and other major auto suppliers.

The basic cause of the strikes was low wages and poor working conditions, but the low wages were the main factor. The Guangdong provincial government basically did not view these strikes negatively. We as a trade union found the workers’ demands just and reasonable. Honda and Toyota in Guangzhou are both foreign–Chinese joint ventures, and workers’ wages in these companies were between 2,500 and 3,000[2] RMB  per month. But in Honda Nanhai and many other comparable companies, the wages were much lower, around 1,200 RMB. These companies are profitable ... but their basic wages were about the legal minimum, around 900 RMB.