Between Marx and Polanyi: New labour mobilisations in the Italian crisis

Introduction

The crisis of class conflict in western countries is one of the key political events of the last thirty years. Class conflict has been innervating modern politics since the second half of the 18^th century, up until the 1970s (Bartolini 2000). It is largely on this basis that the distinctions between right and left have been built, that politics has become mass politics, and that modern ideologies have received their basic features. Therefore the weakening of class cleavage is one of the key factors that makes these dimensions of politics lose visibility and strength.

The class conflict that innervated the political struggle in the 18^th and 19^th century is that of the subordinate classes against the ruling elites, and this is the part of the conflict that is in crisis. On the other hand, there is also the conflict of the ruling classes against the subordinate classes. As Gallino recently wrote (2011), this second line of the conflict is particularly active today: the ability of the elite to reduce the wages, legal guarantees and political and symbolic power of the lower classes has grown significantly since the 1970s. This process has been described as a rematch of capital over labour (Harvey 2010), as capital managed to position in its favour the balance of power that in the first three post-war decades had shifted in favour of work.

The crisis of the bottom-up line of class conflict is due to various phenomena. The first is what in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s was called a ‘gentrified worker’. The growth in workers’ income, their entry into the market of mass consumption, their exposure to mass media, the reduction of fatigue in factory work, the increase of qualitative work, the political achievements of labour – all these factors reduce, from those decades onwards, the material and symbolic gap between classes (Goldthorpe et al. 1968-69). The younger workforce, working in companies with advanced technologies and labour relations, begins to change the self-representation of workers’ labour, which acquires an instrumental dimension and is perceived as a means to achieve functional purposes unrelated to work. At the same time, from the 1970s on, it develops an erosion in the two essential areas of workers’ solidarity: the large factory, which was the centre of solidarity within the work process, and the working-class neighbourhood, which was the centre of everyday solidarity, mostly with a communitarian origin, and which had the highest importance in the construction of the sense of separateness that substantiated the identity of the workers’ movement (Hobsbawm 1984). The deconstruction of these two places is not simply the result of the ‘natural’ evolution of technological and urban systems. Instead, it also has a political nature, consisting in the intention to weaken the solidarities on which the labour movement has built its ability to take collective action. Outsourcing, lean production, the automation of production, the transition from the big integrated factory to the so-called network-factory and to the world factory, were also forms of momentum in the class conflict.

In the same years, the integration of the European socialist parties also took place in the sphere of government. This phenomenon favours the gradual programmatic moderation of these parties and their abandonment of the political investment on class cleavage, leading to the current separation between the sphere of representation and the demands coming from the workers.

Globalisation of production and finance is considered to be another decisive factor in the crisis of labour movements, as evidenced by such phenomena as the decline in strikes and other forms of militancy (Shalev 1992), the decline in trade union membership (Western 1995), the lowering of wages, and the growth of precarious employment – phenomena that Silver (2003) links to the mechanism of the ‘race to the bottom’. That is, the mobility of capital and production increases international competition among workers, dividing unionised workers and non-unionised workers, weakening their bargaining power and resulting in a race to the bottom in wages and guarantees. The key element of this process is the limitation of the regulatory power of the states in the face of international mobile capital, which is free to move in and out of the most convenient places, pitting them against each other in terms of wages, legal guarantees and levels of taxation, and reducing their ability (and willingness) to protect workers’ living standards and rights. The replacement of the integrated factory with ‘global value chains’ based on subcontracting networks also disorganised and fragmented the working class, leading workers in an attitude that Hyman (1992) has called the ‘politics of resentment’, an anger oriented not towards the elites, but towards their peers or to the marginal sections of society, what leads to the delegitimisation of trade unions and left-wing politics, perceived as powerless in the face of current changes.

Wright (2000) traces the bargaining strength of labour in two types of power: structural power and associative power. The structural power, in turn, is composed of a bargaining power tied to the market and by a power bound to the workplace. The first increases with the rigidity of the labour market, the skills of workers, high levels of employment and of non-wage sources of income. The second comes from the placement of workers in a prime industrial sector and the degree of integration of production processes, which increases the effects of strikes. The associative power depends on the formation of collective organisations of workers; that is, trade unions and political movements and parties.

Globalisation erodes structural power, because it places on the world market a large ‘industrial reserve army’. The post-Fordist transformations of production, with the vertical disintegration of the production process, weakened the bargaining power linked to the workplace. Neoliberal policies have led to a significant reduction of non-waged sources of income (welfare). These three phenomena affect associative power, making it more difficult to build collective workers action, just as, as is the case since the early 1980s, neoliberal policies pursued a decrease in the political weight of unions, largely de-institutionalising labour policies, stripping unions of their capacity to intervene in the definition of these policies through neo-corporative paths and collective bargaining. Finally, global competition among workers promotes protection requirements based on alternative identities to those of class, such as ethnic and communitarian.

Not all interpretations of the relationship between globalisation and labour movements converge, however, to decree their irreversible crisis. This crisis has been announced many times. When Fordism arrived, the weakening of the role of skilled workers, the ability of capital to tap into new sources of culturally diverse workforces and the development of technologies fragmenting and alienating labour were all seen as factors in the decline of the labour movement. Furthermore, manufacturing jobs have always been characterised by a high heterogeneity and plurality of professionals, contract types, tasks, technologies and processes (Musso 2011). The image of a naturally compact working class was built only ex-post, as a consequence of the affirmation of trade unions and left-wing mass parties.

The effects of the ‘race to the bottom’ may be impaired, it is argued, by the fact that global production will help to create a world working class, subject to similar conditions of work and life (Robinson & Harris 2000). Production by multinational companies on a global scale makes possible, theoretically, the defence of common interests between workers of the same company. Second, the cultural fragmentation of workers in the world would not be greater than that of the 20^th century between the workers of the same nation. The current spread of global culture, especially due to the influence of the media and the diffusion of communication technology, would make cultural distances even smaller than under the old intra-national differences (Evans 2010). If one of the arguments with which the crisis of labour conflicts is declared is the reduction of state power, it is argued that the nation-state has been a useful means for improving the life condition of workers only in limited moments of contemporary history, and always as a result of the emergence of sharp conflicts. State policies on employment and economy are also reaching high levels of international homogeneity, and this makes it possible to identify the political demands of work concerted at a supranational level. With regard to structural power, just-in-time production can increase the vulnerability of capital to possible interruptions of the flow of production, and the mobility of productive capital is limited to relatively few products and services, while many of these are still strongly tied to the place (Evans 2010). It also points out that globally, the number of employed persons has never been as high as today (3 billion), as well as the number of workers enrolled in unions participating in international trade union federations, which is 150 million (Munck 2010).

According to Silver, in the history of industrial capitalism, the working class has been cyclically constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. At the core of this process is an oscillatory mechanism. The expansion of production tends to strengthen workers and leads capital and states to make concessions to the demands of labour movements. These concessions lead to a profit crisis of capital. The resulting efforts to raise capital profits by breaking the earlier social pacts and by a greater commodification of labour, in turn, determine a crisis of legitimacy of capitalism (which can also be guided to single social subsystems, as in this phase, where it is addressed to a large extent against political systems), and therefore new workers’ resistances. The place of the cyclical conflict reconstruction of the labour movement is that of the driving industrial sectors, as in the textile industry in the 19^th century and that of the automobile in the 20^th. Silver predicts that the crisis of labour movements that began in the late 20^th century is temporary, and that new movements will be established in what will become the leading sectors of global production. As always, this trend has not only economic variables, but also depends on the national and international political processes.

With regard to the unions, in the advanced capitalist countries, there has been a decline in unionisation rates – in countries such as France, at levels close to 10 per cent (Visser 2006) – and in their concentration in the most traditional sectors (manufacturing, transport, public sector). Over the past three decades, the content of bargaining has also changed. If until the 1970s it had an acquisitive character, now it has a primarily defensive nature, aimed more at limiting damage than at obtaining new rights. The strategies of unions to adapt to the new situation are threefold. The first is to move unions’ action from conflict to cooperation with firms and institutions. The second is to focus, more than on the construction of collective claims, on the supply of selective incentives and individual services for the members (Waddington & Hoffman 2000). In countries in which there is a greater institutional weakness of unions (the Anglo-Saxon countries and the countries of the global South), however, there arose the model of ‘social movement unionism’ (SMU). The fact that in European countries, unions are experiencing difficulties – in particular because of the de-institutionalisation of industrial relations – has made the discussion on SMU also relevant in these countries (Turner 2007; Clawson 2003).

The innovative elements of SMU reside in the relationship between activism and organisation, and in the repertoires of collective action (Clawson 2008; Upchurch, Taylor & Mathers 2009). The unionising campaigns aim at a strong mobilisation of the base, to strengthen the capacity for the self-organisation of work, the involvement of workers in bargaining and in the policies of the union; seeking, in particular, the unionisation of groups that are achieved with difficulty by traditional syndicalism: low-skilled and low-income workers in the informal economy, migrants, youth, precarious workers. As for the repertoires, those that are typical of social movements are used: campaigns, direct action, boycotts, appeals to public opinion, the identification of weak points in the production network, the construction of large social coalitions that go beyond the workplace, involving social movements, consumers, citizens, local communities, and users of public services. The struggles transcend the working dimension and bring class identity closer to other identities. This form of militant trade unionism echoes the forms of action of the origins of European trade unionism. The analogy can be traced back to the historical fluctuations, typical of unions as of other forms of collective action, between movement and institution: from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, the strength of the trade unions allowed them to acquire institutional centrality. The subsequent erosion of this central role tends to lead them back to recruitment and mobilisation strategies typical of the previous phases. Also typical of the transition between the 19^th and 20^th centuries is the radical heterogeneity of professionals, widespread social insecurity, the lack of collective guarantees and the lack of institutionalisation of industrial relations. Two similar economic policies (liberalism between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and current neoliberalism) tend to produce similar forms of union mobilisation.

These innovations have been analysed in recent literature comparing the Marxian and Polanyian approaches to capitalist conflict. The ‘Marxian root’ of conflict is based on the conflict between classes within the production relationships. It is a conflict that defines work as exploitation and is expressed in the dialectic between business strategies and the resistances of workers. In Polanyi’s perspective, however, the fundamental nature of capitalism does not lie in exploitation, but in commodification, particularly that of goods – such as money, land and labour – that can be considered commodities only by causing a crisis of reproducibility of both of these goods and of social bonds. The history of capitalism is for Polanyi the story of a double movement, a dialectic between historical movements of commodification (now focused on goods such as knowledge and health), and counter-movements of social resistance to commodification; that is, of the ‘defense of society’. According to Polanyi, labour exploitation is a moment of commodification, while for Marx, commodification is founded on the exploitation of labour; that is, in the need for capital to extract surplus value from work containing wages, extending and intensifying the work time (the absolute and relative surplus value) and deregulating the labour performance. From Marx to Polanyi, the place of conflict moves from production to the market, from classes to society. The emphasis is no longer on the conflicts that are internal to the production relationships, but on building wide social movements inclusive of plural orientations, focused on de-commodification and on the democratisation of social life. Recent perspectives on labour analysis (Buroway 2010; Borghi and Dorigatti 2011) indicate in the interweaving between the Marxian and the Polanyian roots of modern conflicts a possible way of rebuilding the defense of labour.

The current scenario in western countries is therefore characterised by a crisis of class conflict over the past thirty years (but only along the bottom-up line); by the mainly negative consequences of globalisation, and of the transformations of production processes and of de-industrialisation on the mobilising strength of work; by the cancellation of the relationship between labour and political representation, the difficulties of the traditional trade unionism and the emergence of the SMU paradigm.

In this article, these phenomena will be analysed from the point of view of a new type of labour dispute: workers struggles against the closure of factories. I will try to identify and analyse the mobilisation factors on which the struggle rests; the presence or the absence, in workers representations, of references to class conflict; the major proximity of these mobilisations to the paradigm of traditional syndicalism, or to that of SMU; and the prevalence within them of the Marxist or Polanyian root of conflict. This analysis will be based on an empirical study carried out in an engineering company in the province of Milan, Italy.

Labour disputes in the Italian crisis

Before analysing the Italian protests against company closures, let us illustrate some aspects concerning the Italian context as regards industrial relations and unemployment benefits – important issues in contextualising the mobilisation of labour in Italy.

The case of Global Business

Before turning to the empirical case at the centre of this paper, we first explore the dynamics and characteristics of one of the conflicts mentioned above, which is the object of one of the very few qualitative studies currently available on these forms of protest in Italy. Sara Curci (2012) carried out an ethnographic study on Global Business in Grugliasco (Turin). The company, founded in 1997, employed 48 workers and assembled tyres and wheel-rims for FIAT. In 2004, following a reduction in Fiat orders, the company began to put workers into cassa integrazione.

In April 2010, the company announced its intention to close the factory. The very next day, the workers found the factory gates closed. Production did not actually cease, but was entirely shifted to Gsiplant in Volvera, a few kilometres away. The next day, workers began a permanent encampment with the support of FIOM-CGIL (FIOM is the metallurgic branch of CGIL). Most of the workers participated including, especially in the first few days, even those who do not usually take part in union activities. The encampment lasted for 52 days, managing to stop the machinery being moved to the plant in Volvera. It also resulted in an agreement with the company conceding the payment of cassa integrazione until October 2012; 18 relocations; and professional training courses and severance pay for those not relocated. This can therefore be considered a participative and effective conflict.

Let us see how Curci reconstructs the dynamics and mobilisation factors which led to the success of collective action. First, the significant and repeated use of cassa integrazione in previous years had already made several workers perceive themselves to be in a situation that might be risky, from a professional perspective. Over time, a lack of confidence in the company grew, with owners and managers considered poorly able to manage the company and production. Various events since 2004 had led many workers to shift from a feeling of stability and security to a feeling of insecurity. The long periods of cassa integrazione, involving radical uncertainty, represented an important incubator for the future collective mobilisation.

Second, at Global Business there was a significant traditional conflict even during periods of normal production. Workers who were members of FIOM, and who formed the most active core of the permanent encampment, were a compact group, able to set up and manage the conflict with the company. Ordinary conflict could also take ‘invisible’ forms such as slowing down the production line, and voluntary errors in production.

Not all Global Business workers, however, are close to the union. Rather, a polarisation between union workers and those close to the company occurs, a division between an inner group (the ‘We’ that will form the basis of the protest) and an outer group (the ‘Other’, which includes management and workers that the unionised group called ‘the boss’s gang’). This polarisation is always an important mobilising factor, because it strengthens the identity and unity of the most active actors. The FIOM group of workers also underwent a long series of abuses and arbitrary treatment by management, which they interpreted as a reaction to their union activism.

The manner in which the closure of the factory came about constituted a further mobilisation factor. The company announced the plant closure without any discussion with workers and trade unions, and the following day it actually closed. This was an illegal action, since the closure was not preceded by notice of layoffs, and since there was a concomitant opening of a new productive site. The manner in which the closure was accomplished transformed the anger and uncertainty accumulated over the years into an immediate reaction, which brought even those considered to be part of the ‘boss’s gang’ into the protest. Also contributing to further stimulate the workers’ anger was the discovery that production was going on in another plant, and that the decision to close the Grugliasco site was to be classified as a political ‘revenge’ against a conflicting factory. It is precisely the formally illegal closure, on the other hand, that was the decisive element enabling workers and trade unions to force the property into an agreement.

According to Curci, from the point of view of collective representations there are two key elements in this experience. First, the permanent garrison became a community, a place of re-appropriation of the workspace – a moment of deconstruction of ordinary roles, hierarchies and representations, and the possibility of trying new forms of social relations. On the other hand, Curci emphasises a radical difference between mobilisations like these and workers’ actions of the past. The struggle in this case is not ‘future-oriented’, meaning that actors do not think in terms of a future society to be built. There are no long-term visions, nor a political horizon. Both are overwhelmed by emergency, insecurity and uncertainty. Despite this, many of these workers speak of the mobilisation as one of the most important experiences of their lives, and both the demobilisation of the encampment and the subsequent dispersion of the group are spoken of with regret.

The case of Jabil

The Jabil workers’ occupation is in Cassina de’ Pecchi, on the outskirts of Milan. This company specialised in the production of radio links. It was founded in 1964 and originally owned by Marelli, a big Italian company. Since then, different owners have followed: GTE, Siemens, Italtel, and Siemens once again. In 2007, the company was acquired by Nokia Siemens Networks. At that time, the site employed about 1,300 people and it held the entire production chain: R&D, industrialisation, production, installation and technical assistance. In 2007, Nokia Siemens reduced its operations in Italy to 2,000 units. Nokia sold the radio links production site in Cassina to Jabil Circuit, keeping for itself only the non-productive functions. Jabil is a manufacturing company that produces for third parties. In 2008, Jabil closed the site in Mapello (next to Bergamo), which employed 322 workers, and 107 of them were shifted to the site in Cassina: 128 of the 322 were manual workers (96 women, 32 men), while 194 were office workers (30 women, 162 men).

Despite the change of ownership, Jabil is basically a mono-commissioning company for Nokia Siemens. In March 2009, the company started a procedure for 13 weeks of cassa integrazione and in July an agreement was signed for the mobility of 35 workers. In September, the company proceeded to a second cycle of 13 weeks of cassa integrazione. In April 2010, Jabil announced that the Italian and French sites were going to be closed, and that the company was selling 75 per cent to the US private equity fund, Mercatech. The Jabil site in Cassina de’ Pecchi became Competence Italy. Mercatech has never made investments of any industrial kind in the USA, where it is limited to the sale and purchase of shares. The information on the fund showed a history of industrial failures and criminal proceedings.

Competence was compromised just a few weeks in, when difficulties in paying suppliers and service providers halted, de facto, production. The wages were also at risk. In February 2011, Jabil announced that it had reacquired from Mercatech ownership of the Italian and French firms, two days before the date on which a court in Milan would have to decide about the commissioning of the company. As Competence, in a few months the company accumulated more than €80 million of debt. In June 2011, while 50 per cent of the workers were in cassa integrazione, there were no new orders on the horizon and Jabil tried to transfer part of the machinery to its factory in Hungary. FIOM-CIGL decided to establish a permanent encampment in front of the factory gates. In December, letters of dismissal were sent to all the workers. The factory was occupied the same day in order to prevent the machinery from being taken away from the property, eliminating the hypothesis of a new production project in the area.

The relationship of the workers and FIOM-CIGL with the institutions has been controversial. Workers and FIOM have constantly sought institutional support to address their situation, with insignificant results. The levels of government that can intervene in these situations are usually three: the city council, the regional and the national government (in particular the Ministry of Productive Activities). As regards the first, in the years in which the case developed, the political majority and the mayor were centre-right, then traditionally relatively insensitive to the mobilisations of labour. However, there has been a good relationship between the mobilised workers and the mayor (who is also a national parliamentary). The mayor has encouraged the establishment of a negotiating table, still in progress, consisting of FIOM, Jabil, the City of Cassina de’ Pecchi, the public Agency Invitalia (a government agency with the goal of seeking new investment for firms are in crisis), and economics experts in the telecommunications sector. The Jabil employees have constantly sought support from the Region Lombardia (centre-right wing), but they have never received it, and have continuously struggled even to get appointments with officials in the regional Labour Department. Finally, the ministry did not provide any support around the problem of the acquisition of Jabil by new investors.

Jabil is located in the east of the province of Milan, an area called Martesana. This area includes 28 municipalities and has a population of approximately 300,000 inhabitants. The unemployment rate has gone, between 2011 and 2012, from 5.8 per cent to 7.8 per cent (the unemployment rate in Italy was 12 per cent in 2012). In 2012, the dismissals in this area were 12 per cent higher than the intakes. Only 27 per cent of new hires have been long-term contracts. Long-term unemployment has grown significantly. At the end of 2011, there were 20,335 firms in the area. Of these, about 50 per cent are individual firms. The most important sectors are trade (25 per cent), construction (17 per cent), and manufacturing (13 per cent).

The difference between closing firms and opening firms is positive: in 2012, 1,513 firms were closed and 1,606 were born, but this difference is decreasing over the years (+0.5 per cent in 2010; +0.3 per cent in 2011), and is insufficient to curb the rise in unemployment. The closures are distributed between 27.7 per cent in commerce (391 cases) and 38.2 per cent in other services (540 cases), while the shares of industry and construction are respectively −11.6 per cent (164 cases) and −20.5 per cent (289 cases).

The manufacturing sector (−2.2 per cent in 2012), logistics and transport (−2.2 per cent) and construction (−0.7 per cent) definitely drop. Also artisan firms are frail (−0.5 per cent in 2012, –5 per cent from 2008 to 2012). There is a slight increase in the tertiary sector, but almost exclusively in low-value functions: +5.3 in unskilled services to businesses, +4 per cent in catering, + 1.6 per cent in personal services, +0.7 per cent in trade. Among the activities with innovative content, only the number of activities in the field of information and communication grew (+4 per cent), while the mortality rate of firms remains high. ²

Conflict dynamics

The workers’ permanent encampment in front of Jabil has been active for 30 months. Dozens of workers have participated in it, and its main objectives have been achieved: its presence has prevented any change in the area’s use from industrial to real estate – a change it appeared the city council wanted to make in order to satisfy the cash needs of the property and potential real estate interests in the area. Also, the workers have prevented – the last time in July 2012, with their physical opposition – the transfer of machinery away from the site; negotiations between FIOM-CIGL and local and national institutions to identify new investors are still active. This mobilisation, therefore, is lasting, participated in (although, of course, in descending proportion with the passage of months) and effective, even if its final outcome is still uncertain. The first question I will try to answer is: which conditions have allowed this struggle to achieve these goals? I will try to identify, first, the mobilisation factors at the basis of collective action. ³

There was a tradition of solidarity and mobilisation in this factory, clearly perceived by the workers who began to work in the company:

I arrived in 1985. There were 800 of us in production. I immediately felt the union tradition which was communicated by colleagues. There was a lot of oral passing of this history. [INTERVIEWER:] Were people talking about the history of the traditions? The factory was very unionised, which, in the beginning I absolutely was not; but I have assimilated unionism whilst here. The first thing that I assimilated was a sense of solidarity, which became very useful at the end. (OC1, age 47)

The reality of the site in Cassina is perceived as such by the workers coming from the site in Mapello:

At first I did not like it very much: [the workers in Cassina] were aggressive, strike here, strike there, they exaggerated. Either you were with them or you had a bad life. If you did not participate in their strikes, you were almost afraid … We said, we have to work together with them, otherwise we will be at war with one another and it will become impossible to come to work, so we had to choose a side, because here colleagues were strong. (OM1, age 38)

The finding of a strong union, however, is to be relativised. According to a union historical delegate of the factory:

We, compared to other companies in the area, did not have high levels of unionisation, in fact we were below the area average, 120 members in about 300 workers. Many have always been unmindful of union issues and became more active only when it was clear that the factory was closing. Our protests and strikes, however, have always worked, because we were able to keep everybody out of the factory with our pickets. (OC5, age 59)

More than a high degree of unionisation, we can speak of an active minority able to mobilise and to be effective in achieving its objectives. The workers think they have worked in a factory that guaranteed, thanks to the union mobilisations, good working conditions and high collective guarantees. Everything changes when the factory becomes Jabil:

I did feel that you were underneath them, that they were rude, full of themselves. My boss was terrifying, I immediately hated her, she spoke as one speaks to a cockroach or a mouse. They hassled us a lot more than the previous bosses, for the most trivial things, such as coffee breaks, chatting with colleagues, and any and every mistake you made was a good excuse to reprimand you in front of everyone. At that time they used to produce everything, for us it was a great professional regression, to make very poor products, productions that were disqualifying? For us compared to what we used to do before. Graduates who had always been employed in the production tests, qualified work, had to produce this stuff? Like street lamps, whereas before in our factory there was specialisation, rewarding work, high quality technology. (OC3, age 51)

The words of this worker, which are representative of the thoughts of the workers interviewed, highlight important elements in the construction of mobilisation: between Jabil and the more experienced workers, a remarkable conflict regarding the form and the content of work immediately arose. The internal change in climate and the professional disqualification caused by the change in ownership are both decisive. All respondents prove to be proud of their personal work skills acquired over time and of the quality of the production. Identity linked to the type of work, professional subcultures and the awareness of performing important productive functions have always been key elements in building a working-class culture, and in this mobilisation these aspects were significantly affected by the entry of Jabil.

The workers and executives from the Mapello site were perceived by the Cassina’s workers as ‘anthropologically’ other than themselves. For the Cassina workers, the Mapello workers always said yes to the bosses, did not create conflict and did not claim their rights, and Mapello’s managers, as well as being authoritarian, spoke a foreign language that some workers ironically defined as ‘Jabilian’, referring to a kind of business dialect full of Anglo-Saxon neologisms. This created an Us v. Them opposition that reinforced the Cassina workers’ identity, underpinning their propensity to conflict.

A major clash came in 2010. The property decided on a change in working shifts, adapting them to match those applied at the site in Mapello. ⁴ FIOM and ex-Nokia workers refused the new shift programme. The property then shifted the request to the workers from Mapello, who were theoretically willing to accept a shift regime which was not unusual for them, but at the same time felt that they were being used against the other workers. This error by the management brought the two groups of workers closer for the first time:

We weren’t bothered that the company came to us because the Cassina colleagues did not accept the new shifts, as we were accustomed to those shifts, and I even liked them. The problem was: they wanted something, so they said ‘we’ll go to them at Mapello who always say yes’. It was there that we got closer to colleagues from Cassina and to their more conflictual approach. (OM2, age 37)

The RSU ⁵ declared a strike to the bitter end: the factory was blocked for two days by the workers, supported by political and social forces in the area, until the proposal was withdrawn. The union was thus able to send a strong signal that communicated to the less unionised workers a feeling of effectiveness of collective action.

The shop stewards and the more expert workers soon understood that the sale of Nokia to Jabil was an invitation to close the production branch of the company. They had four years in which to make workers aware of this risk and to create the conditions for the mobilisation. Jabil once again applied layoffs, and failed to work to get new orders. Subsequently, the company was sold to Competence, then returned to Jabil. This last step also served to convince the less conscious workers that the existence of the company was at risk, elevating the willingness of a broader group of workers to carry out collective action:

When we realised that they wanted to cheat us, we started to raise our voice with the supervisors, which is something that had never happened before for us in Mapello, and to participate in the union events. You see someone who has been your colleague for 15 years defending the boss and denying you everything that we could see. It is crucial to understand that the company wants to cheat you, to throw you out. (OM1, age 38)

I was not close to the unions until the end, I’ve always been a bit suspicious, I enjoyed working but I also had fun, I have always delegated the fight and the reasoning about rights, because as a salary I was fine. This was until recently. I joined FIOM two years ago. With Jabil I felt like a tightening noose, that once everything had been squeezed out they would have thrown it all away. There was the feeling of being trapped in a Russian doll, in a system of empty boxes. (IC2, age 49)

A call for of a permanent assembly of workers and the construction of the encampment occurred when Jabil tried to transfer part of the machinery in its site in Hungary:

The encampment began in July 2011. Jabil said, ‘we have to take away part of the machinery that is used to test the plates, because the ones in Hungary are broken.’ We said no, because the direction they were taking was clear. The permanent assembly in the RSU room began shortly after we built the encampment. We used to sleep in the factory to ensure that nothing left. The transfer to Competence and the return of Jabil had already taken place, so the situation was very delicate. In September, Jabil declared its intention to close the factory. The same day that the factory closed in December, we occupied it. (IC1, age 46)

These, then, are the mobilisation factors that enabled the workers to undertake a lasting, participatory and effective action: the structure of a ‘Fordist’ factory in which there was a tradition of trade union mobilisation and the presence of working identity based on skills and knowledge; the clash between that work tradition and Jabil since the arrival of the new ownership and management, strengthened by a sense of ‘anthropological diversity’; the long time that elapsed between the awareness of the risk of closure and the closure of the factory; the existence of a model such as Insse; and the strong presence in support of these workers of FIOM-CGIL, as well as by some workers who had participated in the Insse struggle.

It is interesting to compare these elements with the Global Business case. We can find some mobilisation factors shared by these two mobilisations: a conflict tradition, supported by an active minority, cohesive and able to involve workers; the long period that passed between the first signs of the crisis and the factory closure; the presence of an internal polarisation, which in the case of Global Competence was that between unionised workers and the ‘boss’s gang’; and the support of FIOM, a union organisation considered credible and useful by workers. The presence of mobilisation factors common to the two cases confirms their importance for the effectiveness of these mobilisations.

As regards the repertoires of action and the choice between traditional unionism and SMU, in this conflict, both were present. The encampment at Jabil was a FIOM encampment – it would not have been accomplished or would have not lasted without the contribution of this union, in which workers have great confidence. However, the mobilisation also used techniques and repertoires typical of social movements: the occupation, the permanent encampment, the appeal to public opinion, the attempt to build networks with similar groups. This initiative, like others in Italy, seems to bring the two models of union action closer. The hybridisation of the two models can be considered one of the reasons for the effectiveness of this struggle, because it allows the joining of the organisation and stability of the union structure and the spread of the capacity for initiative and decision-making by the workers.

A class conflict?

The reaction of the workers to the closure of the company is certainly a conflict. At stake is the possibility that new industrial projects may emerge in the area, and that the land may not be used as a simple source of income by the company. The symbolic stakes concern the property itself: the land, the factory, the machinery, the production that has been done and can be done on this site, the skills and professional histories identified with this place. Are all these ‘goods’ completely available to the company and to potential projects of a commercial or real estate nature, or do they also belong to a certain extent to the workers who have spent most of their professional lives at the plant? This seems to be the symbolic challenge launched by workers, and the basis of the legitimacy of their action.

It is, therefore, a conflict. But what kind of conflict is it? Do the workers perceive it as a conflict that divides the members of two social groups, or as a conflict between the contingent property of that company and those workers? Do they perceive it, that is, as a class conflict? Mann (1973) has identified four basic elements of class consciousness: (1) identity, namely self-definition as working class; (2) opposition, namely the identification of the capitalists and their allies as antagonists. (3) Totality: that is, taking the first two elements as the base for defining the characteristics of workers’ social position. And finally (4), the overall design of an alternative society. At the base of ‘class culture’ there is a shared feeling of social otherness, a We/Them division (Bulmer 1975) which is built around identification with the work, and a sense of belonging to a united group. Touraine (1969) identified three stages in the construction of this ‘consciousness’: a principle of work-related identity; the principle of opposition, linked to the politicisation of identity as antagonistic identity; and the principle of totality: that is, a global vision of social relations.

Let’s see what light the empirical research sheds on these points. As we have seen, workers demonstrate a strong identification with their jobs. This element, however, rarely becomes the basis of an identification wider than the one with the occupying group. Only one interviewee used the term ‘class’. For the rest, the wider identification was similar to this:

The word ‘Metalworker’ is part of my identity, with a capital M. I mean for all workers in the sector, who draw and who make, it is a varied and symbiotic world. It has a lot to do with the manual work, but there is just this, it means my life, it is my identity. Metalworker to me means firmness in being, simply a term with a person and you suddenly understand each other. (OC1, age 47)

The same worker, however, adds:

Class … what does it mean? Metalworkers are not a class, I should invent the definition of class right now … what do I have in common with a metalworker from another factory, such as Italsider? The fact of being metalworkers, of having fought for the same contract, metalworker is synonymous with serious work. Working class instead … it is an understatement, it’s like fencing people in who work to live, how can you fence everyone inside the label ‘working class’?

One of the FIOM stewards, whose leadership is strongly recognised within the occupation, has the following to say on this subject:

I have to make decisions for 170 FIOM members. I am responsible for concrete solutions, I have to be down-to-earth. I can hardly think of general discussions such as capitalism, class, class struggle, I cling to reality, to every little thing that happens in our favour. We are doing what we are able to do, and I have to be proud of this, not cling to ideologies or discourses on capitalism. I go into the concrete, here I am, all that I can bring to bear on this situation is good to me. Without the encampment, so many would get depressed. Instead they come here and they know that if you have any problems they can resolve them, and I have to think about this. (IC1, age 46)

This passage is very important in emphasising a central aspect in struggles like this one. The dismissed workers experience their personal situations as potentially catastrophic, and just as catastrophic is the fact that they think it is the general situation in the country. It is not a coincidence that most of the activists in the garrison are at least 45 years old, and that they are part of that segment of workers for whom it will be very difficult to find a new job when the unemployment subsidies have finished. Their situation includes urgent and decisive problems concerning the maintenance of themselves and their families – the possibility of having an income on which to live. Several workers interviewed describe their condition using expressions such as ‘I became zero’ (OC3, aged 52); ‘I feel humiliated: that which gave me the confidence to face life threw me out onto the street’ (OM1); or, on the general situation in Italy, ‘We are all on the brink of the ravine, it is useless to get one’s mouth full of projects’ (OC1). One of the observations arising from research on collective mobilisation is that participation makes people’s point of view more radical, and defines collective identities as being larger than the individuals. This research, however, shows that in a situation of radical emergence there is low interest in political and cultural generalisations and abstractions, or in approaching vast identities such as that of ‘class’, especially if these generalisations, as now, have very low social legitimacy and a ‘structure of symbolic opportunities’ that is almost non-existent. What matters for these activists is to reach a goal that unites people even when they do not have a common political point of view, and one that is crucial for their lives.

The weakness of class identity is evident where workers define their level of antagonism towards entrepreneurs and economic actors. In general, this antagonism is weak or absent. Instead, the idea prevails of an alliance between employers and workers to try and keep open or reopen factories, consistent with the messages and normative models diffused about the crisis by the media:

Now the issue is especially to reopen factories – it is better to earn just €1000 per month, but to have a job. We have to solve one problem at a time. Marchionne, ⁶ for example: as a skilled man, I cannot see all this exploitation they talk about. I would be proud to work in Fiat and if this gives me a chance to do 10 hours of work, overtime whenever I want, then lucky for them. (OM1)

The feeling of non-opposition to the upper classes, however, is multifaceted, as is exemplified by this passage:

If the division between workers and employers were overcome, things would be better. Now I do not feel part of anything larger than this situation I’m fighting for, I live in my little way, I do not pretend who knows what, I’m linked just to people I know personally and who I see here in the encampment. This deployment ‘us the ordinary people/them the rich’ – if we were to help each other, we would go forward better. But they don’t lower themselves. I do not consider entrepreneurs as my opponents, but they are so very different from us. (OC3, age 48)

The workers still have a feeling of otherness in relation to social elites, but this attitude rarely assumes a political dimension and becomes, as defined by Touraine, a ‘principle of opposition’. Indeed, in some cases, workers seem to have internalised the frames of business ideology:

In this crisis situation, salaries can be lowered, and you should raise the free creativity of the people without the obsessive bureaucracy and taxes for everything. A company in the first years of its life should not pay taxes. During this period there will be many conflicts, then it is to be hoped that these negative emotions, such as the recession, do not create a social explosion that could make things degenerate. (IC2)

It is the state that has reduced us all in this way – so many companies have left Italy because of the excessively high taxes. If the state gave incentives … Companies are not wrong: if I were an entrepreneur with such high taxes I would go where taxes were not so high. Were it also possible to lower wages, I would have accepted that. (OC4)

A feeling of social otherness is present as ‘anthropological difference’, as a set of habits, lifestyles and languages and as belonging to a social world built around specific work activities. Thanks to the struggle in which workers are engaged, the sense of solidarity can be extended to workers engaged in similar disputes. However, this identity and the feeling of otherness don’t become, except in a limited component of the activists in the encampment, elements strong enough to define the social identity of the actors and a ‘partisan’ vision on society and the conflicts that innervate it.This weakness of the identity and of the feeling of otherness is visible even when workers are asked to identify those responsible for the situation in which they find themselves, and for the recession. The unanimous response of workers is: it is the politicians’ fault. Thus their opponents are not, in the first and often not even in the second place, the economic elite at the national and supranational level; but a political class described, in line with common sense and with the message the media has spread in recent years, as parasitic, corrupt and dedicated exclusively to pursuing personal or partial interests. According to the respondents, the fundamental problem Italy faces is corruption. However, the workers offer a range of statements that are useful in investigating the origin of the current crisis of authority in the political sphere. Politicians are considered corrupt and parasitic, but they are also considered to be guilty of: (1) failing to protect workers from the effects of globalisation and to provide mechanisms that hamper the transfer of production abroad; (2) allowing entire industrial sectors to disappear from the national industrial system; (3) being subordinate to the interests of economic actor, and sharing these interests; and (4) being completely unaware of the conditions of life, and uninterested in the needs of lower classes. If the stern attitude to politics is mainly expressed on the moral level of the cleavage between legality and illegality, the interviews bring out, under that surface, a background in which the criticism is substantiated by the economic and social policies of the last decades. The co-presence of the two levels, and the fact that the second determines to a large extent the first, is exemplified by these two interview extracts:

The fundamental lack of politicians is cleanliness. The only things you need in order to change the situation are honesty, cleanliness, ethics, good will. But be careful: if you make a cauldron in which it is said that they are all the same, I might write a recipe on ethics and honesty, but then maybe one, even if he is honest, may vote for a law that would affect me as a worker. So this thought is not sufficient and can even be dangerous. (OC1)

At one time, they used to steal at least with intelligence, and you survived. These [politicians] do not have the intelligence to steal while allowing the working class to survive. If they did, they could go on as before, stealing for a further 30 years. Now, however, they steal and more for their interests they have brought a whole nation … they have sunk it … we used to be a productive nation and they have sunk it completely, just for their own interests. (OC2)

It is assumed that entrepreneurs and economic actors act only to gain profits, and that it is not important to them if the workers’ situation is affected. Politics is blamed, instead, because it did not prevent these interests from becoming the only criterion of social regulation. It is as if politicians occupy the place of an antagonist class, a global social opponent, which includes in itself the aspects of economic elites that are considered most dangerous to workers’ interests and needs. Criticism of the profit-based society and the commodification of labour does not disappear, but it is reabsorbed in criticism of the political system, which also encompasses much of the feeling of otherness and of social opposition between the ‘High’ and the ‘Low’ that was once directed at the main economic actors.

A similar ambivalence is observed with respect to the fourth element that Mann identifies as a constituent of class consciousness: a global vision of society and of its potential transformation. This view is generally absent amongst these workers, just as the request for a radical social transformation is substantially absent. We have observed the same phenomenon in the Global Business case. The workers’ aspirations are of course related to once again having work that would permit them to live in dignity and peace. Aspirations towards society are limited in most cases to minimum objectives, consistent with the recovery of a personal ‘normal’ condition. However, an ambivalence emerges: this minimalism hides a tendency to more radical changes, in some cases almost ‘palingenetic’, relating to both politics and society:

It would be enough to make things work. Red, white, yellow, it is enough to know how to frame well, to get us to work well, because everything is in a shambles, all the sectors. They have to move on the country as it should be, we’re muddying, layoffs will end, we will all be fired in Italy. I do not trust anyone in politics. We the citizens must do it, alone, from the bottom. I am not able to because of shyness … but I would follow you anywhere if you were a citizen who was committed to building something truly new. (OC3, age 55)

Enunciation of the minimalist and non-partisan ‘It would be enough to make things work’ is followed by the statement that representative politics has exhausted every function, and that it is now the citizens’ turn to organise directly in order to rebuild a country otherwise destined to collapse. Also prevalent among the workers is the idea of a global reconstruction of democratic politics; aspirations to lifestyles radically alternative to the dominant ones; and hopes that their diffuse sufferings will turn into widespread extensive and significant conflicts:

Unfortunately, sometimes to change the mind of those who manage power it takes a large mass that moves: a popular force. My ideal is a society that is more just, fair and pure. Going on like this is not sustainable economically and psychologically – they are destroying values such as friendship and family, they’re just teaching that the big snake eats the little one; but a society that destroys itself is not a civil society. It lacks a global vision of society, of solidarity and prosperity. There is too much consumerism, the values we see on TV are to make money, for young people to buy a nice car – everything is based on competition, on cheating others. You see it in politics. We have little positive imagination. To me, the value of the environment is fundamental: we must develop alternative energy, electric cars, hydrogen fuel-cells. We need to return to a natural life, to talk, instead of being afraid of our neighbour. (IC2)

I have learned that we can achieve something if we are united in the same goal. If there were something in which everyone was engaged, it would win a lot more – if everyone did what we are doing for our workplace. ‘Everyone’ in the sense of people in all sectors, workers who do not accept the closure of their factory; but also more generally. For the situation that you are experiencing, you have to say that we are all on the ground, pushing even those who are a bit curbed. It would need to be a general block of the lower level of the society … a general thing by everyone, regardless of right and left. (OM2)

Do we have to shoot? In the 1970s, we were shooting for political ideology, now we don’t have this anymore, must we shoot for hunger? Look, it’s even worse, you also kill your neighbour. (OC2)

It must convey the message that these experiences and personal qualities that we have developed in all these years of work are ‘common goods’, such as water, telecommunications, agriculture, a lot of other things. If you disperse these things, you can’t pass the skills and the love of doing things to the younger generation. This concept of common goods – I’d like that to be affirmed. I share a lot with the struggles for water, for common goods, but not as a metalworker, as myself. The struggles share this: the dismantling of both the territory and of the ability to work. (OC1)

Conclusions

The workers of Jabil do not experience their conflict as a class conflict. None of the four elements identified by Mann is significantly present: identity rarely leads to a self-definition as a class; and the principle of antagonism, when present, is directed at the political elite rather than at the economic and financial ones. With the first two elements being weak, one cannot speak of ‘totality’; that is, the definition of social identity as class identity. Even the shared vision of an alternative society is generally absent.

However, the picture is not entirely linear. There are elements that can be related to a collective identity, regarding not only work performance: the belonging to an industrial sector and to a trade union. There is also a sense of belonging, if not to a social class to a social ‘position’, which is the lower part of society, the part of those who feel excluded – economically and politically – from wealth and privilege, within whom these workers hope that the capacity to join mobilisations addressed can grow and also to significant changes in the social life. The protagonists of this story certainly feel and define themselves as workers, and base a substantial portion of their claims upon this definition; but on a political level, when they trace their own situation back to wider political dynamics, they tend to refer more to the symbolic figure of the citizen than to that of the worker. The conflict they imagine is expressed in terms of a people-against-power clash, rather than class-against-class, and it is on the basis of this cleavage line that they imagine the features of social change. The figure of the citizen becomes more suitable than that of the worker, enabling these actors to unify political exclusion (the distance they feel from the representative system and parties) and exclusion from economic well-being.

There is strong opposition to the economic policies of the last decades, and the emergence of hopes for radical changes in both the economy and politics. While these hopes do not show up in a uniform way and with unique characteristics, the workers describe themselves as being available for general conflict mobilisation, if it were indicated by unions and social and political actors – existing actors and, perhaps more so, newly constituted actors – able to gain their trust, as long as it did not appear overly minority and ideological.

This type of conflict is closer to the Polanyian paradigm than to the Marxian. Its symbolic frame seems to be, rather than the issue of exploitation, that of commodification: that is, the fact that the workplace, the substance of the work, the professional stories that have been experienced in the factory, and the factory itself can be bought, sold, devalued and consumed as commodities which are subject only to market mechanisms, rather than assuming a political dimension that considers them as elements of the social contract that the state has to regulate and protect. Workers often imagine, as a reaction to economic and social crisis, a vast movement made up of people who, for various reasons, are placed on the lower layers of the social scale – by those who do not participate in the dynamics of power and do not have the resources to influence it, and by the already existing movements that defend goods recognised as belonging to the entire community (water, territory, etc.). They do not primarily conceive of it, therefore, as a class conflict. It should be added however that the success of the mobilisation in Jabil was derived from a mixture of the Polanyian and the Marxian roots of modern conflicts. If the first expresses the prevailing cultural orientation among these workers, we have seen that the mobilisation factors are largely due to the presence, in the factory, of a tradition of conflict internal to the production process that had as its main goal the struggle against labour exploitation, such as the mobilisation against the shifts proposed by Jabil.