Precarious Workers: History of Debates, Political Mobilization, and Labor Reforms in Italy 9789633864388

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PRECARIOUS WORKERS

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Volume IV. Series Editors: Eszter Bartha Adrian Grama Don Kalb David Ost Susan Zimmermann

Published in the Series: Eloisa Betti, Leda Papastefanaki, Marica Tolomelli, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women, Work, and Activism: Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century (2022) Goran Musić, Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: The Story of Two Self-Managed Factories (2021) Marsha Siefert, ed., Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989: Contributions to a History of Work (2020)

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Precarious Workers History of Debates, Political Mobilization, and Labor Reforms in Italy

Eloisa Betti

Central European University Press Budapest–Vienna–New York

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Copyright © by Eloisa Betti 2022 Published in 2022 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 11, H–1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-437-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-963-386-438-8 (ebook) ISSN: 2732-1118 Translation is based on Eloisa Betti, Precari e precarie: una storia dell’Italia repubblicana (Rome: Carocci editore, 2019). Translated and published in English with the permission of Carocci editore. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Betti, Eloisa, author. Title: Precarious workers : history of debates, political mobilization, and labor reforms in Italy / Eloisa Betti. Description: Budapest, Hungary ; New York, NY : Central European University Press, 2022. | Series: Work and labor – transdisciplinary studies for the 21st century, 2732-1118 ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022048157 (print) | LCCN 2022048158 (ebook) ISBN 9789633864371 (hardback) | ISBN 9789633864388 (adobe pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Temporary employment–Italy. | Labor market–Italy. Work–Social aspects–Italy. | Italy–History–1945-1976. | Italy–History–1976. Classification: LCC HD5854.2.I8 B488 2022 (print) | LCC HD5854.2.I8 (ebook) | DDC 331.25/7290945–dc23/eng/20221125 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048157 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048158

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Contents

Acknowledgments and Note to the English Edition .............................................   Acronyms .........................................................................................................................  

ix xi

Introduction ..................................................................................................................   I. Labor precarity as a historical phenomenon .............................................   II. Historicizing precarious work in the Italian Republic ...........................   III. Precarious workers: A readers’ guide ........................................................  

1 1 6 9

CHAPTER 1. THE OTHER FACE OF THE BOOM: THE DISCOVERY OF PRECARITY ........................................................................................................ 15 1.1 The invention of precarity: Paolo Sylos Labini’s contribution ............. 1.1.1 The inquiry into conditions in Sicily ................................................... 1.1.2 The Fuà–Sylos Labini proposal for economic planning ................ 1.1.3 Reception of Sylos Labini between Rome and Geneva ..................

15 16 19 21

1.2 Precarity thy name is woman: Genesis of a debate ................................... 1.2.1 The CGIL’s female trade-unionists ...................................................... 1.2.2 The Union of Italian Women ................................................................. 1.2.3 Communist Women ................................................................................ 1.2.4 The National Commission for Women Workers ..............................

22 25 28 30 34

1.3 Against precarity: The fight for “job stability” .......................................... 1.3.1 Invisible precarity: Industrial home-based workers ......................... 1.3.2 Precarity in the fields: The dream of becoming employees ........... 1.3.3 Against bogus seasonal work: The food industry workers ............. 1.3.4 For a secure annual wage: Construction workers ............................. 1.3.5 Precarity on the ward: The hospital doctors’ dispute ......................

35 36 38 40 41 42

CHAPTER 2. THE CONSTRUCTION OF STABLE WORK BETWEEN PARLIAMENT AND LABOR LAW .................................................................. 45 2.1 The parliamentary inquiry into the conditions of workers in Italy .......... 2.1.1 A political alliance for the improvement of the working-class condition ..................................................................................................... 2.1.2 “Precarity” in the documentation of the parliamentary inquiry ........ 2.1.3 The parliamentary inquiry and the new labor law ............................

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Contents

2.2 Legislation on “particular labor relationships” during the boom years ....... 2.2.1 Home-based industrial work ................................................................. 2.2.2 Sub-contracted work ............................................................................... 2.2.3 The fixed-term contract ...........................................................................

56 57 60 64

2.3 New regulations on dismissals in the nineteen-sixties ............................ 2.3.1 Dismissal for marriage ............................................................................. 2.3.2 Individual dismissals ...............................................................................

68 69 73

CHAPTER 3. STABILITY OR PRECARITY? THE TWO FACES OF THE LONG SEVENTIES........................................................................................

79

3.1 The achievement of stability ............................................................................

81

3.1.1 The Statute of Workers’ Rights and Article 18 .................................. 3.1.2 The new home-based industrial work law ..........................................

81 83

3.2 In the shadow of the crisis: Industrial restructuring and precarity .......... 3.2.1 Precarious work in the studies of the seventies ................................. 3.2.2 The decentralization of production and precarity: The metalworking and textile-clothing industries ...............................................................

87 87 92

3.3 Intellectual precarity and intellectual elaboration on precarity ............... 98 3.3.1 Precarity and the woman question ....................................................... 98 3.3.2 Precarity and the 1977 movement .......................................................   101 3.3.3 Intellectual precarity between schools and universities ..................   104 CHAPTER 4. THE MYTH OF FLEXIBILITY DURING THE ROARING EIGHTIES ....................................................................................................................   111 4.1 The flexibility paradigm in economic-sociological thinking ................   114 4.1.1 Flexibility and precarity in the international debate ......................   114 4.1.2 The flexibility myth and the eclipse of precarity in the Italian debate ......   117 4.2 Labor policies and legislative changes in the shade of flexibility .............   120 4.2.1 Flexibility in Parliament: The Craxi government’s reforms ...........   120 4.2.2 Labor legislation and the flexibility challenge: Atypical contracts .......   128 4.2.3 Bargained flexibility in the trade-union debate and collective agreements of the eighties .......................................................................   133 4.3 The utopia of flexibility between freedom and liberation from work .....   135 4.3.1 Post-Fordism, flexibility, and freedom ................................................   135 4.3.2 The femininization and flexibilization of work ................................   136 CHAPTER 5. THE NEW EXPLOSION OF PRECARIOUS WORK BETWEEN THE NINETIES AND THE AUGHTS .....................................   141 5.1 Legislative changes and labor policy between the old and new millennia ....   143 5.1.1 The European Employment Strategy and the flexicurity myth ........   144

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5.1.2 From the 1992 Protocol to the Treu Reform (1997) ........................   148 5.1.3 The White Paper and the Biagi Law (2003) .....................................   151 5.1.4 The Inquiry into Precariat (2006) and the missed reform of the Prodi government ......................................................................................   156 5.1.5 The “Statute of Works”: From the idea to the bill (1997–2006) .......   161 5.2 Precarious subjectivity and new forms of self-organization in the aughts .................................................................................................................  164 5.2.1 A “new” social class? Forms, dimensions, and definitions of precariat ....   164 5.2.2 From Mayday to Euro Mayday: A European movement against precarity .....................................................................................................  167 5.2.3 Precarity thy name is (also) women: Feminist subjectivities in the new millennium ......................................................................................  170 5.3 Precarity between artistic-cultural portrayals and political-trade union reflections .............................................................................................................   173 5.3.1 The culture of precarity ...........................................................................   173 5.3.2 From invisible to social emergency: The precarians in the public debate ...........................................................................................................   175 5.3.3 Representing the precarians: The birth and development of the atypical workers’ trade unions ...............................................................   177 CHAPTER 6. THE NORMALIZATION OF PRECARITY DURING THE YEARS OF THE GLOBAL CRISIS ...........................................................   183 6.1 Precarity and global crisis: A necessary periodization ............................   183 6.1.1 New frontiers of precarity amid exploitation, unemployment, and unpaid work ..............................................................................................   187 6.1.2 The normalization of precarity: The public debate and the labor market ........................................................................................................  191 6.1.3 Italy seen from abroad: Precarity and emigration.............................   194 6.2 Precarity and legislative reforms during the crisis years: An assessment ......   196 6.2.1 The Fornero Law (2012) .........................................................................   198 6.2.2 The Jobs Act (2014) ................................................................................   200 6.2.3 The debate on the reform of Article 18 ..............................................   203 6.3 Against Precarity: Mobilization, campaigns, and forms of resistance ......   205 6.3.1 Precarity and gender discrimination: Against blank resignations ......   207 6.3.2 Precarity and new slavery: Against illegal labor brokerage ...........   211 6.3.3 Precarity and research: The mobilization of the universities .........   214 6.3.4 Beyond precarity: A charter of universal labor rights? ...................   218 Epilogue ........................................................................................................................   221 References ....................................................................................................................   227 Index ..............................................................................................................................   251

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Acknowledgments and Note to the English Edition

This book, originally published in Italian in spring 2019 with the title Precari e precarie, has been conceived of as a broad history of labor precarity in Italy from World War II to the present. The book covers up to March 2018, right before the Five Star Movement won the Italian election with the support of the right-wing party Lega, a serious political rupture in which a ruling government formed for the first time through a coalition of political parties that had not existed prior to 1989. Developments since then, including the Covid-19 pandemic, have confirmed the relevance of historical inquiry into the making and remaking of precarious work and the political mobilization of precarians. This volume would never have seen the light if a number of colleagues and friends had not encouraged me, for many years now, to continue my studies on labor precarity from a historical point of view. My work began with my MA thesis and continued, not without some difficulty, during the research I carried out for my PhD. The findings of the latter were published initially as essays and articles in national and international journals. I wish to thank in particular Christian De Vito, Gilda Zazzara, and Manfredi Alberti, with whom I shared preliminary reflections and writings, and Maria Pia Casalena and Augusto De Benedetti, who encouraged me in my efforts to pin down an elusive and complex research project. I am grateful to the readers of the various drafts of the volume, particularly Francesca Sofia, Mirco Dondi, Giorgio Tassinari, and Francesco Garibaldo, for the precious suggestions and questions they gave, not all of which I solved. A special thanks to Federico Martelloni and Carlo De Maria, who patiently helped highlight the criticality and potential of the volume, providing me with suggestions that I attempted to implement to the best of my ability. I would also like to thank Liliosa Azara, with whom I compared notes over and over again during the production of this volume. This book has also benefitted greatly from my time on research fellowship at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna, made available to me by the European Institute of Advanced Study Fellowship Programme, which enhanced and extended my understanding of precarity beyond national and disciplinary

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x

Acknowledgments and Note to the English Edition

boundaries. I am truly grateful for the fruitful discussions I had during those months in Vienna with Shalini Randeria, János M. Kovács, Luisa Bialasiewicz, and Steven Lukes. I am grateful also to colleagues both local and foreign who, in various capacities, helped me broaden my scientific horizons, in particular David Mayer, Eileen Boris, Susan Zimmermann, Silke Neusinger, Aad Blok, and Marcel van der Linden, whose writings have proven particularly stimulating. My thanks go also to Volker Telljohann and Cesare Minghini, who were stimulating sources of fruitful dialogue during our collaboration at Ires Emilia-Romagna. No less important have been the frequent scholarly exchanges with colleagues belonging to the Italian Society for the History of Labor, especially Andrea Caracausi, Pietro Causarano, Michele Nani, Giulio Ongaro, Giulia Bonazza, Stefano Musso, Maria Grazia Meriggi, Debora Migliucci, and Marica Tolomelli. Alice Mattoni, Annalisa Murgia, and Paola Rudan were also helpful in urging me to consider the relationship between research and activism by looking at the social movements against precarity, which proved to be a tessera of no small importance in piecing together this historical mosaic. I also wish to thank the staff of the archives I consulted and who supported my work: Vittoria Tola and Ilaria Scalmani of UDI’s Central Archive, Rome; Ilaria Romeo of the National Archive of the CGIL, Rome; Valeria Capucci of the FLAI Archive, Rome; Maria Chiara Sbiroli of the Gramsci Foundation Emilia-Romagna; Elisabetta Perazzo of the Paolo Pedrelli Historical Archives, Bologna; and Tommaso Cerusici of the FLC National Archive of Reggio Emilia. My thanks also to Rome’s Fondazione Pietro Nenni and Milan’s Humanitarian Society for their great competence and accomodation in assisting me in my research. The continuous support provided to my research by foundations like the Argentina Bonetti Altobelli Foundation, the Claudio Sabattini Foundation, the Bolognese branch of the Union of Women in Italy, and the Clionet Association, was absolutely necessary for a book on the precarity of work be written by someone who has experienced precarity themselves. I would also like to mention the contribution made by Ignazio Masulli, who introduced me to the study of precarity when the topic was still in its early stages, and that of Fiorenza Tarozzi, who supported my post-doctoral research and enlivened it with many vivacious discussions. Finally, I would like to thank the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna for making my research possible. A very special thanks to my family, to Andrea Bacci, as well as to my friends for the many patient ways in which they accompanied and supported my work.

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Acronyms

ACLI (Associazioni Cristiane Lavoratori Italiani): Christian Association of Italian Workers ACUDI (Archivio Centrale UDI): Central Archive of the Union of Italian Women AFLAI (Archivio Federazione Lavoratori Agro-industria): Archives of the Federation of Agro-Industrial Workers ANAAO (Associazione Nazionale Aiuti e Assistenti Ospedalieri): National Association of Hospital Aids and Assistants (today ANAAO-ASSOMED, National Association of Executive Doctors) ANCI (Associazione Nazionale Comuni Italiani): National Association of Italian Municipalities ARAN (Agenzia per la rappresentanza negoziale delle pubbliche amministrazioni): Agency for negotiated representation for public administration CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro): Italian General Confederation of Labour CIF (Centro Italiano Femminile): Italian Female Centre CISL (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori): Italian Worker’s Union Confederation CISNAL (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Nazionali Lavoratori): Italian Confederation of National Workers’ Unions CNEL (Consiglio Nazionale dell’Economia e del Lavoro): National Council for Economics and Labor EFIM (Ente partecipazioni e finanziamento industrie manifatturiere): Shareholding and Funding Authority for Manufacturing Industries FGCI (Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana): Italian Communist Youth Federation FILLEA (Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Legno Edili ed Affini): Italian Federation of Wood, Building, and Allied Workers FILZIAT (Federazione italiana lavoratori dello zucchero, delle industrie alimentari e del tabacco): Italian Federation of Sugar, Food, and Tobacco Workers FIM-CISL (Federazione Italiana Metalmeccanici): Italian Metalworkers Federation

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xii

Acronyms

FIOM-CGIL (Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici): Italian Federation of White and Blue-collar Metalworkers FLAI-CGIL (Federazione Lavoratori Agroindustria): Federation of Agro-Industrial Workers FLC-CGIL (Federazione Lavoratori della Conoscenza): Federation of Knowledge Workers FLM (Federazione Lavoratori Metalmeccanici): Metalworkers’ Federation FULTA (Federazione Unitaria Lavoratori Tessili e dell’Abbigliamento): United Federation of Textile and Garment Workers INCA (Istituto Nazionale Confederale di Assistenza): Confederated National Institute of Assistance INPS (Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale): National Institute for Social Security IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale): Institute for Industrial Reconstruction ISTAT (Istituto nazionale di statistica): Italian National Institute of Statistics MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano): Italian Social Movement ILO: International Labour Organization PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano): Italian Communist Party PSDI (Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano): Italian Social Democratic Party PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano): Italian Socialist Party PSIUP (Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria): Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity SUMI (Società umanitaria di Milano): Archives of the Milan Humanitarian Society UDI (Unione Donne Italiane): Union of Italian Women (from 2013, Unione Donne in Italia: Union of Women from Italy) UDS (Unione degli Studenti): Students’ Union UDU (Unione degli Universitari): Union of University Students UILM-UIL (Unione Italiana Lavoratori Metalmeccanici): Italian Union of Metalworkers

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INTRODUCTION

I. Labor precarity as a historical phenomenon From a historical perspective, the phenomenon of labor precarity appears neither recent nor intrinsically grounded in the nature of the so-called “post-Fordist society” of the past thirty years. It is in fact a long-term phenomenon that has characterized, in different ways and to different degrees, all the phases of industrial capitalism. Therefore, if precarity is inherent to the capitalist system, it is the stability known to the Western world during the third quarter of the twentieth century that is actually the exception. Scholars have acknowledged this exception only recently, thanks to new approaches and disciplinary outlooks, especially those offering a historical perspective (Breman and van der Linden 2014; Betti 2016). The international debate over the precarity of work, which this volume will engage through the history of Italian labor, has undergone important developments since its genesis over thirty years ago and deserves to be recounted briefly. The pioneering book in the field was Precarious Jobs in Labour Market Regulation, edited by Gerry and Janine Rodgers and published in 1989, which first introduced the concepts of “precarity” and “precarious jobs” to explain the changes in labor relations generated by the crisis of the seventies in conjunction with the reorganization of the capitalist system (Masulli 2004; 2014). Their introduction stressed the need not to consider precarity as a phenomenon exclusive to either contemporary society or to Western countries. Sergio Ricca’s chapter also provided an effective outline of the state’s role in both producing and fighting precarity, calling it a “promoter of precarious work,” and a “protector of precarious workers,” and as such either way responsible for the improper use of precarious labor (Ricca 1989). During the eighties and nineties, the discussion on precarity evolved in close connection with the debate on labor flexibility, seen by most scholars as a “positive challenge” to the rigidity of an industrial-relations system considered obsolete and intertwined with the now exhausted economic-productive paradigm known as Fordism (Maruani, Reynaud, and Romani 1990). In the late nineties, studies regarding the individual and social costs of precarity began to increase (Gallino 1998, 2001; Sennet 1998). It was only in the aughts though that the debate on precarity acquired greater autonomy with the proliferation of precarious

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forms of work and public awareness, and thanks in particular to the work of the self-organized social movements and unions set up by precarious workers themselves (Betti 2016). The historical reconstruction of this debate allows us to focus on the close relationship between the transformation of the object of research, precarious work, and the birth of new conceptual paradigms capable of interpreting it, namely the global and gender turns of the aughts. The role of post-colonial and feminist studies has proven decisive in deconstructing a Eurocentric and gender-blind conception of precarious work, previously seen as something “atypical” compared to standard employment, based on full-time, open-ended contracts (Betti 2018b). The normalization of the latter was a historical process, which coincided with the apogee of the Fordist system during the so-called “golden age” of the twentieth century (Hobsbawm 1994). This highly international scholarship on precarity allows us to place its history in Italy within a broader European and global framework, to better understand both the specificity and similarity of the Italian case to the rest of the world. The debate over precarious work in Italy began earlier than in other European countries, even France, which, according to several scholars, was the place where scholars first put forward real conceptualizations of the phenomenon in the late 1970s–early 1980s (Barbier 2002). However, there have been few histories of such discourse on the national level, and the limited nature of the period examined by existing studies does not permit us to determine whether the discussion on precarity in the sixties was “an Italian anomaly.” The study of precarity as a historical phenomenon is still in its early phase. Discussion increased in the aughts, thanks especially to the contribution of global and feminist labor history. Marcel van der Linden was among the first historians to highlight the importance of adopting a longue durée perspective in analyzing job precarity, tracing its origins back to the occasional laboring poor of ancient Greece up to the present day (van der Linden 2014). Similarly Christian De Vito followed precariousness of unfree workers among convicts in the Spanish Americas beginning in the eighteenth century, helping to historicize precarity beyond free wage labor and in non-Western contexts (De Vito 2017). The interweaving of labor history and women and gender history has proven particularly fruitful for historicizing labor precarity. Empirical studies, such as those by Sophie Beau (2004) on department stores in Lyon, by Saffia Elisa Shaukat on Italian seasonal workers in Switzerland (2011), and by Leah Vosko and Erin Hatton on temporary Canadian and US workers known as “Kelly girls” (Vosko 2000; Hatton 2011), have helped historicize labor precarity. They have shown that it existed during and beyond the second half of the twentieth century. Over a decade ago, a special issue of the journal Genesis provided a gender perspective on flexibility and precarity in the modern and contemporary ages (Bellavitis and

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Introduction

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Piccone Stella 2008), an approach later resumed by the volume Di condizione precaria, edited by Ariella Verrocchio and Luca Salmieri (2015). Other studies of a local and regional scope, like Marc Leleux’s research on Northern France during the second half of the nineteenth century (Leleux 2013), and the analysis by Ad Knotter of early twentieth-century Amsterdam (Knotter 2004), examined specific precarians whose lives were defined by unemployment and poverty. The Italian Society for the History of Labor organized a conference in 2018 that promoted a broad, transversal reflection on possible approaches to the historicization of precarity, hosting a variety of case studies from the modern to the contemporary era.1 Analyzing the phenomenon of precarity in a historical perspective raises a series of methodological issues, beginning with definitions of precarity and precarious work that cannot be taken for granted and need to be historicized. Applying these concepts to the historical field implies questioning such terms and comparing them with the definition of the phenomenon provided by both historical actors and scholars in different disciplines (Hudson 2008). In attempting to better understand their meaning historically, this volume adopts a working definition of job precariousness (Betti 2016) that has three main components: (1) precarity refers to the whole system of the labor relationship existing in a specific time and place, (2) the social perception of job precariousness, and (3) male and female workers’ self-perception of their own precarity. At the analytical level, adopting the category of job precariousness allows us to stress the fluidity and interdependence existing in labor relationships. Precariousness itself cannot be defined as a labor relationship (De Vito 2017) as such. Rather precarity can be viewed as a “condition” in which female or male workers can be trapped as a consequence of both subjective and objective factors. On an objective level, job precariousness seems to be linked to three main aspects of work: wage stability, job length and continuity, and the relationship between the labor contract and social/labor rights. While on a subjective level, precariousness should be viewed in a relative manner to its opposite, to so-called stable workers, as well as their self-perception and social perception. For this reason, this volume pays particular attention to the language used by contemporary social actors and critically examines the conceptualizations of precarity from scholars mainly in the social sciences (sociology, economics, law, statistics) and, more recently, by historians. To understand how precarity has been conceptualized, debated, and confronted in the so-called “golden age” of Fordism, we need to consider the parallel affirmation of job stability as a value The conference, entitled Storicizzare la “precarietà”: lavori e altre risorse nelle strategie della sussistenza [Historicising “precarity”: Labor and other resources in subsistence strategies], was held at the University of Bologna, on November 16, 2018.

1

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on both socio-economic and legal levels (Ballestrero 2007; Napoli 1980). Job stability was considered an indispensable prerequisite for the development of the welfare society that, after the initial hardship of the postwar years of reconstruction, characterized the three decades after 1945, described as the “Glorious Thirty.” The achievement of job stability, which never really included the whole workforce, emerged during the so-called “Fordist-Keynesian compromise” and represented an exception unique to that period. This volume investigates the reasons related to the emergence of this exception in Italy, attempting to deconstruct a purely economic vision that inextricably linked labor stability with positive economic cycles. By looking at the evolution of Italian working conditions since the mid-twentieth century, this book will pay specific attention both to changes and continuity in order to recognize and better analyze enduring forms of job precariousness (i.e., piecework, fixed-term contracts, and homeworking), as well as gendered precarity traps, like the precarity-maternity nexus, which has continuously hampered women’s work-life balance in the period analyzed. The agency of social and political actors, investigated at various levels, emerges as a crucial factor for the construction of job stability in the sixties and becomes equally important in fostering a new cycle of precarization in the aughts. Stability and flexibility are examined here as the two opposite theoretical assumptions that shape not only economic theories but also legislation and labor policies. The relationship between labor law, political action, and economic theory, addressed by labor lawyers like Luigi Mariucci (2016a) and Umberto Romagnoli (2016) and legal historians like Paolo Passaniti (2018), is central for understanding the changes in societal values ​​at the end of the golden age of Fordist labor. In our own times, the well-being of the company has come to be considered the main driving-force of job creation (Bavaro 2018) replacing worker’s well-being, the basis of the social labor rights system, as a driver of policy. Within the political debate of the past forty years, the “employment question” has constituted a “permanent state of exception” (Martelloni 2018), justifying the priority attributed to freedom of enterprise over labor rights. In a hypothetical economic history of happiness (Felice 2017), the era characterized by the myth of flexibility generates widespread social insecurity (Castel 2004), increasing inequality (Pikketty 2014); as well as the nexus among work, social, and existential precarity (Murgia 2010; Armano and Murgia 2012; Toscano 2007); and, ultimately, by a return of the social question (Castel 1995) for this new phase of globalization (Giovagnoli 2003). Of particular importance in the present discussion is the interdisciplinary approach—in this case, between history and social sciences—pioneered in the twentieth century by the Annales School and later taken up by Italian economic historians of a new generation, like Emanuele Felice (2017) and Manfredi Alberti (2015). The history of labor as a “total” history, already postulated by Luigi Dal

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Pane (1968), has found new variations in the recent development of global labor history, which has expanded the conceptualization of “work” and the categories of “workers,” no longer seen simply as white males belonging to the North of the world (van der Linden 2008; Bhattacharya and Lucassen 2005). The research discussed here adopts a gender perspective, important if we are to grasp the recurring, pervasive forms of precarity found especially within the realm of women’s work. The gender point of view has proven crucial to retrace the origins of the debate on precarity during the years of the economic boom (1958–1963), to rethink supposedly settled periodizations, including phases of stability and precarity, as well as to highlight continuities and discontinuities existing in working conditions between Fordism and post-Fordism. This allows us to deconstruct the monolithic, pervasive nature of the Fordist paradigm (Sangiovanni 2006), starting with the persistence of precarious and casual forms of work inside and outside of large factories. The relationship between the biographical conditions of the researcher and his or her object of study deserves further attention, as already made clear by Gilda Zazzara (2013) for the recent evolution of labor history as a discipline in particular. The study of precarious work calls into question the subjectivity of the researcher more than in many other fields of research where the temporal and social distance from the phenomenon is greater. In the Italian case, perhaps more than in other countries, many researchers who study job precarity belong to the so-called “precarious generation” and are themselves in many cases precarians (Armano and Murgia 2012). The researcher-activist of the global crisis years has become a recurring and iconic figure of the public debate, somewhat akin to the engagé intellectual of earlier periods. The social condition of the precarious researcher, shared by this author, has generated a specific interest in some sectors, such as schools and education, examined in depth throughout this book. However, the need to retrace the historical origins of a phenomenon considered contemporary has perhaps required a greater detachment in reconstructing events. The decision to deal with a similar topic, so elusive and controversial for a historian, is rooted in the desire to understand the changes that have taken place over the past thirty years, derived from dissatisfaction with the essentially scientific narratives in public discourse, which portray the phenomenon of precarity as contemporary. A first history of precarity in the Italian Republic may provide ideas for a critical re-reading of the political choices of our own time, as well as the role of social actors and their interactions from the fifties to the present. In agreement with Agostino Giovagnoli (2016), regarding the risks of writing the history of the present, I also argue that “closeness involves additional risks compared to those present in all historical work, due to a scarcity of accessible documents, the absence of a consolidated bibliography and, above all, the lack of temporal detachment from the events” (Giovagnoli 2016, xxv). This volume

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intends to contribute to a discussion regarding the importance of historicizing contemporary social phenomena like precarity, which have determined human working conditions not only in the present but also in the past. The interpretations proposed here hopefully will encourage future research.

II. Historicizing precarious work in the Italian Republic Industrial societies, like Italy, have faced several waves of precarity and experienced lasting and recurring forms of precarious work throughout the history of industrial capitalism, and even before. Stefano Musso (2015) made explicit the possibility of comparing today’s working conditions with those of the early stages of industrial capitalism by asserting that “the combination of employment precarity and diminishing welfare benefits might bring closer—although in totally different contexts—the conditions of post-industrial workers to those of early industrialization, by forcing many young people to engage in premature, exhausting forms of pluriactivity, while seeking scattered sources of subsistence” (Musso 2015, 20). Numerous studies have analyzed the development of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. Some emphasize similarities and continuity existing from the pre-twentieth century phase of industrial capitalism to the twenty-first century (Schram 2015; Pikketty 2014). Others reveal the convergence between working conditions in different parts of the world, characterized by a common denominator of precarity (Eckert 2016; Breman and van der Linden 2014). This volume investigates the last sixty years of the Italian Republic by recognizing two distinct waves of precarity: the first during the first twenty years after World War II and the second with the crisis of the seventies that has continued over the past thirty years. Focusing on the whole history of the Italian Republic allows for investigating the alternation of phases of stabilization and precarization, paying particular attention to the roles played by political and social actors in the determination of these phases during economic crisis as well as growth. Secondly, it helps understand the specificity of the period taken into consideration, which during the First Republic (1948–1994) saw the birth of a significant debate on precarity among scholars, politicians, and trade-unionists, and during the Second Republic (1994 to present) saw the spread of an unprecedented social perception of the phenomenon and new forms of subjectivity. The history of precarity, outlined in this volume, relates to and, at the same time, distinguishes itself from the history of unemployment. As pointed out by Manfredi Alberti (2013, 2015), the “discovery of unemployment” during the belle epoque, the liberal age in Italy (1871–1914), gave us better ways to mea-

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sure it at the local, national, and international level. Nowadays, there is no juridical definition or statistical category for “precarians” or “precarity,” so the phenomenon, in itself complex and multiform, is difficult to measure with homogeneous criteria. The debate on unemployment, and the means to eradicate it, has a much longer history in Italy than the debate on precarity. The “discovery of precarity” derives from the second half of the twentieth century, when job stability became a societal value within political and trade-union debates as well as a subject of labor legislation reforms. The periodization adopted here is built upon recent and less recent studies on the history of the Italian Republic with specific attention to economic and social phenomena. In their recent books on Republican Italy, scholars like Agostino Giovagnoli (2016) and Alberto De Bernardi (2014) have proposed two distinct phases of job precarity: the crisis of the seventies and the great recession after 2008. The transformation of the international capitalist system that began in the seventies and its economic-social and political-institutional repercussions in Italy have not only opened up a new phase of globalization, as Giovagnoli claims, but also, according to De Bernardi, generated the distinctive features that were to unfold in the following thirty years. For the history of precarity, the eighties represent a “laboratory decade” during which political and economic-social actors were obliged to deal with a complex phase of transition and transformation. New economic paradigms and new values, like flexibility, soon became pervasive. Paul Ginsborg and a number of other scholars (Colarizi 2004; Asquer, Bernardi, and Fumian 2014) examined the profound economic-social changes that originated in the eighties. The end of the “Italy of the factories” described by Giuseppe Berta (2006) is chief among these, but there were other changes as well. The transition from industrialism to tertiarization, a process that was anything but sudden and homogeneous, overtook the collective imaginary beginning from the huge industrial conflict that occurred in 1980 at the Turin FIAT industrial plant (Musso 2015). In addition, the feminization of employment; changes in patterns of youth behavior; a renewed reflection on work-life balance; and new, diversified consumption are only some of the changes that became evident (Crainz 2012; Gervasoni 2010; Colarizi 2004; Capuzzo 2014). The second great caesura is that of the global crisis or great recession. This economic crisis in Italy, according to some scholars, marked the end of two political models proposed by the Second Republic: the Berlusconian (neo)-liberalist revolution and the “new normality” proposed by the center-left (Mammarella 2012). The three-year period of 2009–2011 represents a watershed in De Bernardi’s analysis too, which—focusing on the economic-social changes of the past thirty-year period—considers this brief but important epoch as the beginning of a possible “third republic.” For Giovagnoli too, 2011 marked the end of

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Berlusconism and the beginning of a new period, which he calls “a new phase of Republican history” (Giovagnoli 2016, xxiv). In intervening in this literature, this book aims to help scholars better periodize both the history of labor precarity and that of the Italian Republic itself, politically and socio-economically. Discussions on the limits and the imbalances of the economic boom (1958–1963) emerged already in the first half of the sixties, thanks to women politicians, trade unionists, and workers. The latter were actually the first to debate the issue of precarious work. Still scarcely investigated by historians, the Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sulle condizioni dei lavoratori in Italia (Parliamentary commission of inquiry into workers’ conditions in Italy) played a central role in promoting a political alliance for improving working conditions and job stability. Italy’s third major parliamentary inquiry was the only one of the three that achieved a real legislative outcome, becoming the basis of the progressive legislation of the early sixties. The problem of precarity, closely associated with that of underdevelopment, emerged in some reflections on economic planning, but it did not become an active part of the political debate of the sixties, perhaps explaining this historiography gap. Likewise, the criticism advanced by women’s associations of economic planning and employment plans bestowed greater significance and complexity on the role of women’s demands. The latter addressed economic and employment policies, justifying the creation of a “National Commission for Women Workers,” established in 1962 within the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. The parliamentary debate on the working conditions of the fifties and sixties were not only more complex and sophisticated than historians had believed but also more cross-organizational. Male and female trade-unionists from CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour), CISL (Italian Confederation of Trade Unions), and ACLI (Christian Associations of Italian Workers) appear to have played a decisive role in championing the cause of workers in the Italian Houses of Parliament. Maurizio Ridolfi (2010, 1) has shown that job stability was one of the fundamental objectives of the Italian Republic. The achievement of job stability emerges as a complex process shared by the political majority and opposition alike, while the role of the parliamentary institutions was decisive, regardless of the strictly economic policies launched by the subsequent governments. A closer look into parliamentary debates and the various bills of law reveal the importance of homeworking in Italian economic-industrial and social history, demonstrating the persistence of forms of work that, although long considered “archaic” and “pre-industrial,” have actually adapted to changing industrial production and economic conditions (Toffanin 2016). Over the past thirty years, the parliament and subsequent governments have played a significant role in the debate over flexibility and more recently the one on precarity. This volume highlights the alignment of Italy with EU policies, as

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well as the pervasiveness of the problem of precarity and its perception in the Second Republic, particularly into the new millennium. It also demonstrates how self-organized social movements, alongside the significant albeit ambivalent work of trade unions, have helped create a public voice to oppose labor precarity, bringing an unprecedented visibility for precarious workers. The Italian parliamentary debate over labor market reforms of the past twenty years has been more complex than is usually reported by the press. Analyzing failed bills from this period reveals considerable differentiation among politicians and the awareness, at least among some of them, of the need to address the problem of precarity. Reform bills aimed at countering precarity during the second Prodi Government (2006–2008) gave the parliament a more active role in this respect than what has become understood in the collective memory of this period. The historicization of the global economic crisis adopted in this volume, informed by the analyses carried out by Adam Tooze (2018) and by studies on the Italian Republic (Giovagnoli 2016; De Bernardi 2014), permits the investigation of the past decade as a distinct period which has opened up unprecedented scenarios for the study of labor conditions. Precarity, which became a labor market norm in the “decade that changed the world” (Tooze 2018; ILO 2016), combined with expulsive factors like mass unemployment, causing new, huge waves of emigration from Italy. The new frontiers of precarity during the global crisis, outlined in great detail by social scientists, are only the latest episode of a longer and still unfinished story. The history of precarity provides room for re-reading the ambivalent and changing relationships between citizens and rulers in the history of the Italian Republic, as in the work of historians like Mariuccia Salvati (1997). The complexity of the problem and its effects upon the lives of all Italians, no longer young people and women alone, and the lives of the many who have chosen Italy as home, urges a lengthy and critical re-appraisal of the route taken to this point as well as of the pathways not pursued. There were missed political opportunities here. Indeed, politics continues to play an important role in the Italian economic and social development of the past seventy years, as pointed out by Michele Salvati (2000) with reference to the First Republic.

III. Precarious workers: A readers’ guide This volume covers sixty years of the history of the Italian Republic (1958–2018) over the course of six chapters, thematizing the main phases marking the history of precarity in Italy: the “discovery” of precarity during the economic boom, the “construction” of stable employment in the parliamentary debate and in the

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legislation of the sixties, the establishment of stability and the contextual diffusion of renewed forms of precarity in the seventies, the emergence of the paradigm of flexibility in the eighties, the new wave of precarity between the nineties and the new millennium, and finally its normalization during the years of the global crisis. The first chapter analyses the theoretical positions and discussions of politicians and trade-unionists during the years of the economic boom (1958–1963). It focuses on the emergence of a transversal kind of thinking about precarious work between the boom years and 1968. Particular attention is paid both to the role of women who, at various levels, were the true protagonists in these early theories, and to economist Paolo Sylos Labini, one of the first scholars to define work as precarious. This chapter further outlines the important role played by the political and trade union organizations and their leaders, as well as women’s associations and social movements, in arguing for stable working conditions with reduced labor precarity in its many forms. Finally, this chapter examines some of the early social struggles for stable work, highlighting how the demand for stability became gradually more urgent for male and female workers alike. The second chapter outlines how job stability was constructed beginning with the fifties and how it matured over the following decade. Parliamentary and legislative action played a decisive role in bestowing substance upon theories that considered full, stable employment a value not only for society but also for the entire economic system. It shows how competing political ideologies could, albeit from different positions, place human work and living conditions at the center of political action. This chapter discusses the central role of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy (Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sulle condizioni dei lavoratori in Italia), whose recommendations became the basis of the progressive legislation enacted between the late fifties and the late sixties. It also examines the numerous bills and the diverse parliamentary debate on “particular labor relations,” which preceded the approval of important provisions on fixed-term contracts, home-based industrial work, and contract work. The final part of this chapter foregrounds the discussion of and the procedures leading to the approval of the laws on the dismissal of individuals, including on the basis of marriage, factors of great importance for the affirmation of job stability. The third chapter addresses the so-called “Long Seventies,” highlighting it as a watershed moment. If the launch in 1970 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights constituted a pinnacle for work stability, the new legislation on home-based industrial work, which established the equivalence of factory and home-based workers, already bore the signs of the industrial restructuring that was to mark the second half of the decade. The chapter examines the precarizing effects of the crisis and its influence in the studies of the period linked to productive decentralization in

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the metalworking and textile sectors. This chapter ends by addressing another aspect of precarity in the seventies: intellectual precarity in the field of education, especially at universities. An unprecedented kind of subjectivity, of a truly precarious nature and unknown during the previous period, forcefully emerged both in the claims of activists of the CGIL’s School-Workers’ Union and within some fringes of the feminist and “1977” movements. Here emerged a new generation, brought up around 1968. The fourth chapter focuses on flexibility, examined both as a paradigm of the national and international socio-economic debate, and a guiding principle of the labor policies of the governments led by the socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi (1983–87) in the mid-eighties. The role of labor law did not cease to exist but underwent a “genetic mutation” after the seventies. The importance assumed in the eighties by the new paradigm of flexibility led to the introduction of the first “flexible” contracts, in which trade unions played a major role through collective bargaining. In the collective imagination the notion of flexibility (and hence the flexibility of working time) began to be considered as synonymous with freedom, as a result of new ideas concerning flexible management of life and working times, discussed often in conjunction with the feminization of the labor market. The fifth chapter considers the explosion of precarious work that occurred between the nineties and the new millennium, examining it on three different levels. It outlines the changes in labor legislation and policies that characterized the first fifteen years of the Second Republic (1994–2009), and examines both well-known measures like the Treu Package, the White Paper, and the “Biagi” Law, and lesser known ones, such as the investigative inquiry regarding precarity and numerous bills aimed at contrasting precarious work presented during the Second Prodi Government. It then looks into the emergence of new forms of precarious subjectivity, strongly characterized from the point of view of gender and generation. A movement—not only Italian but transnational—appeared during the second half of the so-called “aughts,” which expressed new forms of resistance and activism as well as a real re-appropriation of the condition of precarity. All this laid the foundations for the development of unprecedented artistic-cultural representativity and a renewed public debate on the issue of temporary work as the true social emergency of the mid-aughts. This chapter closes with the analysis of the birth and development of new forms of representation: the atypical workers’ unions. The final chapter deals with the normalization of precarity that occurred over the past decade, begun by the global crisis of 2008. It provides a reflection on the frontiers of precarity at the crossroads between new forms of exploitation, the explosion of mass unemployment, and the growth of unpaid labor. The relationship between precarity and emigration completes the bleak picture of

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working conditions during the years of the Great Recession. The second part of the chapter tries to provide a “balance sheet” for how recent legislative reforms countered or exacerbated precarity, with particular attention to changes to the law on dismissals and article 18. The chapter ends with an illustrative, but by no means exhaustive, review of protest campaigns and forms of resistance against precarity. The relationship between precarity and gender is a recurring theme of opposition to the phenomenon of blank letters of resignation, while the connection between precarity and modern forms of slavery are part of far-reaching campaigns against illegal hiring. The connection between precarity and gender gained renewed media attention and became explosive precisely during the global crisis. The last paragraph sums up the bill Carta dei diritti universali del lavoro (The charter for universal labor rights), which proposes addressing the structural problem of precarity and provides a redefinition of labor rights and relations. The volume closes with the end of Italy’s seventeenth legislature, March 2018, a particularly significant historical event that led to the subsequent election of candidates from the Five Star Movement and an unprecedented coalition government between the Five Star Movement and Salvini’s League. With the start of the new legislature, the problem of job precarity hit the headlines once more following the so-called “Decreto dignità,”2 (Decree of dignity), approved in August 2018. The “battle against precarity” appeared as the primary objective of this decree, followed by the fight against relocation and gambling. The restrictive modification of the law governing fixed-term contracts, a major change, has provoked a serious debate between the government and the employers’ organizations.3 The measure provoked widespread opposition during parliamentary discussion that brought together a united front of center-right and centerleft members of all parties, ranging from the Democratic Party to Forza Italia.4 Entrepreneurial organizations like Confindustria voiced radical criticism of the provision, claiming deleterious effects on the workforce due to the new limitations on the use of fixed-term contracts.5 Trade unions, while appreciating Law no. 96, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decreto-legge 12 luglio 2018, n. 87, recante disposizioni urgenti per la dignità dei lavoratori e delle imprese,” approved on August 9, 2018, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 186, August 11, 2018. 3 For a summary of the main changes, see Menegotto, Seghezzi, and Spattini (2018). 4 For accounts of the debate see Roberto Ciccarelli, “No Articolo 18, sì voucher: la logica del decreto dignità,” Il Manifesto, August 2, 2018; Roberto Petrini, “I sette errori del decreto dignità. Dalle causali al ‘cannone’ sul tempo determinato, ecco cosa non funziona,” la Repubblica, August 1, 2018; Valentina Conte, “I sindacati bocciano il decreto dignità: ‘Senza coraggio e vergognoso sui voucher,’” la Repubblica, July 28, 2018; Nicola Barone, “Il ‘decreto dignità’ è legge. Via libera definitivo del Senato: tutte le novità,” Il Sole 24 Ore, August 8, 2018; “Il decreto Dignità è legge: stretta per il tempo determinato e bonus per gli Under 35,” La Stampa, August 7, 2018. 5 Claudio Tucci, “Il mercato del lavoro si è fermato: Ora calano anche gli occupati a termine,” Il Sole 24 Ore, November 30, 2018. 2

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the initial intentions of the measure, highlighted its various limitations, uniting against the reintroduction of vouchers into sectors like tourism and agriculture. Criticism of the failure to restore Article 18 was voiced by CGIL, Liberi and Uguali (LeU), and a portion of the Democratic Party. The Constitutional Court subsequently declared the compensatory parameters sanctioned by the Jobs Act in cases of illegitimate dismissals as illegitimate, causing new discussions regarding the reintroduction of the notorious article.6 The “decree of dignity,” whose genuine contribution to job security cannot yet be assessed, has undoubtedly led to a renewed discussion on job precarity. Two aspects have characterized parliamentary debate and action through the sixty years considered here: on the one hand, the regulation of labor relations defined variously as “particular,” “flexible,” “atypical,” and “precarious,” on the other, protective norms against and the forms of compensation for illegitimate dismissal. If the “decree of dignity” is unlikely to constitute the “Waterloo of precarity” advocated by law makers, it does highlight the persistent centrality of precarity within Italian political debate and the political and economic expectations of millions of precarians.

Raffaele Ricciardi, “Jobs act, incostituzionale il criterio di indennizzo per il licenziamento ingiustificato: Bocciatura della Consulta,” la Repubblica, September 26, 2018.

6

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CHAPTER 1

THE OTHER FACE OF THE BOOM: THE DISCOVERY OF PRECARITY

1.1 The invention of precarity: Paolo Sylos Labini’s contribution It is important to note that, particularly in a backward economy, no clear division exists between employment and unemployment. […] The essential difference is not between employment and unemployment, but between reasonably stable, continuous and unstable work, that is, precarious and irregular employment: this concept is broader and appears to be more relevant when analyzing backward economies, the concepts of underemployment and hidden unemployment. (Sylos Labini 1966, xxi)

T

he boom years (1958–1963) were crucial for the emergence of the idea of the precarity of work and related concepts in scholarly and political debate. The economist Paolo Sylos Labini was the first scholar to introduce the concept of lavoro precario (precarious work) during the Italian economic miracle (1958–1963), problematizing the solely quantitative view that characterized the economic and political debate over employment in Italy at that time (Pugliese and Rebeggianini 1997). According to Sylos Labini, it was both necessary and timely to reach beyond the employment/unemployment dichotomy in order to understand the characteristics and imbalances of the labor market, especially in the country’s most backward areas. It is not surprising, then, that the category of precarity was first developed during Labini’s thorough examination of the Sicilian labor market where, according to him, the boundary between employment and unemployment was weak, while the division between stable and precarious forms of work was obvious (Sylos Labini 1966). Sylos Labini’s idea of precarious employment matured over the next decade or so, enriched by later reformulations provided by himself and other scholars in the sixties and seventies. The first time the concept of “precarious work” appeared in his works was in an essay dedicated to the problems of the Sicilian economy, published in 1961 in Il Ponte (The Bridge), the journal founded by Piero Calamandrei (Sylos Labini 1961). He used the concept again a few

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years later in a memorandum he wrote with Giorgio Fuà for the Commissione Nazionale per la Programmazione Economica (National Commission for Economic Planning) (Fuà and Sylos Labini 1963), which circulated widely among politicians, economists, and trade unionists (Lavista 2010). The next year he translated the concept into English for an international audience as “precarious employment”. Shortly later he published a massive book presenting results of a labor survey carried out in Sicily in the mid-sixties, which analyzed the problem of precarity in greater detail with regard to different sectors and local social conditions (Sylos Labini 1964; 1966). Other scholars who took part in the survey applied Sylos Labini’s theories to the individual cases they examined, providing the first quantitative estimates of precarious work in Sicily. It was during the early seventies, in a much changed socio-economic and political-cultural environment, that Sylos Labini systematically defined the concept for the first time in a now famous essay on social classes in which he related precarious workers to the Marxist concept of lumpenproletariat (under-class) (Sylos Labini 1974). It was during this time, the so-called “long seventies,” that other scholars really started to take on the concept of precarious work. Sylos Labini was no longer a lone voice calling out for attention to this troubling underside of labor relations in an economy otherwise thought to be booming.

1.1.1 THE INQUIRY INTO CONDITIONS IN SICILY The fundamental problem that economic development needs to solve in Sicily is, therefore, that of the workers employed in a precarious manner: precarious employment needs to be replaced progressively by stable jobs, capable, therefore, of acting as a stimulus to the improvement of the productive capacity and cultural level of those who work (Sylos Labini 1966, xxi).

Back at the end of the fifties, as a professor at the University of Catania, Sylos Labini conceived of and directed a social-economic survey of Sicily, conducted with the help of an interdisciplinary group of students, assistants, and colleagues, like the sociologist Franco Leonardi and jurist Vittorio Ottaviano. Backing the project was the University of Catania, Milan’s Feltrinelli Institute, and the Istituto regionale per il finanziamento alle industrie in Sicilia (Regional Institute for Financing Industry in Sicily, IRFIS). It took two years to complete (1959–60). The data collected was compared and contrasted to industrial and population censuses from 1961, the year when the journal Il Ponte first published the initial findings of the investigation (Sylos Labini 1961). It was not the first time that Sylos Labini took an interest in Sicily and the issue of employment there. Already in 1957, he had taken part in a conference

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on national and local initiatives for “full employment” organized in Palermo by Danilo Dolci, where he presented a paper on the problem of unemployment in depressed areas (Sylos Labini 1958). His collaboration with Dolci, described in detail in a recent essay (La Bruna 2017), was a significant step towards the later survey project in Sicily, a study which became a pillar for research on the Sicilian economy and the socio-economic development of southern Italy more broadly (Ibid., 141–42). Sylos Labini had already been thinking about the Italian “southern question” and the related problem of development there since the early fifties, thanks partly to the influence of Gaetano Salvemini, an influential socialist politician and historian from southern Italy (Roncaglia 2015). In 1953, he visited a number of rural districts of Campania, Puglia, and Calabria, where he analyzed the local economic situation, social structure, housing conditions, and state of education (Sylos Labini 1955a; 1955b; 1955c). However, though Sylos Labini was interested in the social and economic problems of southern Italy since the mid-fifties, the concept of precarity itself does not seem to have yet become part of his theoretical apparatus. His inquiries into Sicily, instead, pointed to the existence of precarious work and linked it to the problem of underdevelopment and the unresolved social imbalances created (at times even accentuated) by the economic boom. In his view, the backwardness of Sicily’s economic structure was the underlying reason why the phenomenon was widespread. The region was characterized by the seasonality of many of its industrial and artisan activities, its inability to provide stable employment, and also the poor quality of its agriculture, based on monoculture, in which daily employment prevailed. The growth of employment typical of the boom years had not produced substantial improvements; where it had occurred (like in construction) it had generated mostly temporary jobs (Sylos Labini 1966, xiv). According to Sylos Labini, the labor situation was decidedly more serious in rural areas than in urban ones. In cities there were greater chances of finding a job and generally speaking precarious workers could benefit more from forms of social security, while in the countryside precarity was associated with chronic underemployment. The distinction between the former and the latter lay in the temporal characteristics of labor relations, Sylos Labini argued. While precarious work followed a pattern of discontinuous employment based on a cycle of hiring and dismissal, the underemployed generally worked a fewer number of hours per day throughout the year (Ibid., xvi). The new factories in urban areas were capable of guaranteeing more stable employment. Industrialization created greater job stability and guaranteed Sicilian workers the coveted status of “industrial laborer.” The survey research group noticed the positive correlation between the development of industrialization and stable employment in eastern

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Sicily where, thanks to the new “modern” factories, relationships of stable employment were increasing (Ibid., xxi). This investigation of the situation in Sicily provided data and estimates of precarious employment within various economic sectors, which in the early sixties included between one third and half of the island’s entire working population: 300,000 in agriculture, 200,000 in industrial craftsmanship, and 100,000 in services (Ibid., xxi). According to Sylos Labini and his collaborators, there were discrepancies between the census of the population and industrial data due to important categories of precarious work (e.g., seasonal, occasional, homebased) not included in the industrial censuses, which recorded only regular (and basically stable) employment. Sylos Labini’s methodological approach was adopted by some of the studies carried out during the seventies (Meldolesi 1972). Among these temporary workers that Sylos Labini pointed to were day laborers and the owners of very small holdings obliged to hire themselves out to others, while in urban areas they included those employed irregularly in homebased industrial work, crafts, petty commerce, and the service industry. To these were added workers employed in sectors like the construction and the food industry, who, although they did not fall within the category of precariousness tout court, were not occupied permanently and full-time due to seasonal fluctuation. The problem of precarious employment had repercussions on the overall well-being of a given community and on its prospects of improvement. Taking the case of Sicily as an example, Sylos Labini highlighted the relationship existing between high percentages of temporary workers and the lack of initiatives and stimuli capable of improving people’s cultural and productive capacities, as well as their “poor sense of responsibility towards children.” The phenomenon was linked to the high birth rate typical of backward rural areas devoted to the monoculture of cereals (where day labor prevailed), as well as of the poor neighborhoods of the big cities, where precarious activities flourished within petty commerce and the crafts. People who live precariously do not plan in advance; they are induced to reduce the birth rate but only after the fact, that is, only after experience has shown them the need to limit the number of their children. This is why the birth rate decreases so slowly in the most depressed areas. The instability and precarity of employment prevent any systematic effort to improve while all initiative is discouraged. This, I think, is the most serious problem of a backward economy: and this is the main reason that makes it necessary to foster a process of rapid industrialization (Sylos Labini 1966, xxi, emphasis in original).

For the survey team, the existence of large numbers of precarious workers was the “fundamental problem which economic development needed to solve in Sicily” (xxi). The reduction of precarious work and an increase in stable employment

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would not only enhance the social conditions of Sicilian workers but was an indispensable requirement for improving all of Sicily’s productive and cultural capacities. Sylos Labini saw the precariat not only as a problem, but also as a potential resource for the economic and industrial development of the island, as a “potential workforce” to be employed full time. Thus, he added a further dimension to the discussion of “potential workforces,” which in the 1960s fascinated economists regardless of their divergent views (Vinci 1974; Leon and Marocchi 1973).

1.1.2 THE FUÀ–SYLOS LABINI PROPOSAL FOR ECONOMIC PLANNING Ten years ago, the most serious problem plaguing our country was unemployment. Today, it appears that this problem is being solved; the increase in income has been such as to permit a significant increase in employment, despite strong increases in productivity. Consequently, open or visible unemployment has been greatly reduced (though it has not disappeared). However, there remains the grave problem of an inefficient employment structure. It can be misleading, therefore, to analyze the Italian economic situation in terms of spontaneous achievement of full employment and limitations regarding development which might derive from an insufficient supply of labor, without asking if it is necessary first of all to increase the efficiency of the workforce, favoring its redistribution among the various sectors and eliminating, as far as possible, existing forms of precarious employment (Fuà and Sylos Labini 1963, 13).

The idea that precarious employment was an obstacle to economic development and a problem that needed to be solved through economic policy became clear in the findings of the Sicilian survey. But for Sylos Labini this was true not only for the so-called “backward economies” of Italy. Sylos Labini introduced the notion of precarious work into the debate on economic planning, describing it as a structural problem regarding employment in Italy. Yet this contribution has remained on the margins of both the recent biographies dealing with his work and the studies addressing the issue of employment itself. From 1962–64, Sylos Labini joined the Commissione nazionale per la programmazione economica (National Commission for Economic Planning), set up in August 1962 by the government of Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani (Roncaglia 2015). The first comprehensive proposal emerged through the collaboration of Labini and Giorgio Fuà, an economist from The Marches in eastern Italy. They published a widely circulated joint memorandum in the spring of 1963. Little was known as yet of the work done by the Commission until the “Saraceno Report” of June 1963, named after its compiler and vice-president of the Commission, the economist Pasquale Saraceno (Lavista 2010).

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The Fuà-Sylos Labini memorandum analyzed the nature and problems of the employment situation in Italy, expanding Labini’s previous reflections on precarious employment. The two authors considered precarious work an unresolved problem—an imbalance accentuated by the economic boom. For them, the quantitative growth in employment during the economic miracle and the increase in labor precarity were two sides of the same coin. Precarious employment had to be solved, and needed to become a necessary measure in quantifying the “efficiency of the workforce” and “potential workforces” (Vinci 1974). The two economists insisted that measures of full employment be separated from analyses of problems of “employment restructuring and, therefore, of vocational training” (Fuà and Sylos Labini 1963, 22), which they saw as crucial for reducing precarity. Their main objective was to increase stable employment, not just employment generally. The elimination of pockets of precarity, especially in sectors where traditional forms of production prevailed, was by no means a secondary aspect of their thinking on employment (Fuà and Sylos Labini, 1963). Their argument about labor precarity was also inextricable from their understanding of labor productivity, particularly in the industrial and craft sectors. According to Fuà and Sylos Labini, “productivism” coincided with their social objective “because it would lead to the continuous use of labor belonging to one of the most conspicuous sectors characterized, today, by precarious employment” (Ibid., 115–16). They provided an indicative estimate of the presence of precarious workers in industry, by comparing employment data from the 1961 industrial census with surveys on the workforce carried out by the National Statistics Office (ISTAT). In the discrepancy between those statistics they found some two million people whose work might be “ascribed largely to the category of precarious employment” (Fuà and Sylos Labini, 1963). Yet despite Fuà and Sylos Labini’s insights, in his various drafts of the Saraceno Report—which were submitted in full to the Minister for the Budget, Antonio Giolitti, in January 1964—Pasquale Saraceno never acknowledged the problem of labor precarity. Saraceno’s analysis, which aimed to incorporate the “prevailing thinking” of the experts, confined itself to a quantitative analysis of employment and its past and future dynamics, based on conventional concepts of employment, unemployment, and underemployment (Saraceno 1963). Fuà and Sylos Labini’s input on labor precarity was missing, as was any such qualitative analysis of employment. One of the objectives acknowledged by the economic planning policy was the elimination of unemployment and underemployment, with the goal of achieving “full employment” as theorized by Saraceno as part of a broader international view (Roncaglia 2013). Neither the statistics nor the analyses of the Saraceno Report paid any attention to the weight and specificity of female employment, although the issue had acquired unprecedented visibility during the boom years. The concept

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of “full employment” itself, as developed by Saraceno, had clear gender connotations, assuming the male-employment model as an exclusive reference value. In fact, the report contained no reference to female employment whatsoever, despite the creation just two years before of the National Commission for Women Workers in the Ministry of Labor and Social Security,1 headed by Riccardo Bauer, president of Milan’s Humanitarian Society.2 Saraceno’s lack of consideration for female employment may be attributed in part to the corresponding lack of attention to precarity, a widespread and detrimental condition of female workers. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the aftermath of the boom, associations like the Unione Donne Italiane (Union of Italian Women, UDI), advocated for women and women’s organization playing an active role in economic planning themselves in order to promote the quantitative and qualitative improvement of female employment, with greater job stability being a top priority (UDI 1966).

1.1.3 RECEPTION OF SYLOS LABINI BETWEEN ROME AND GENEVA Sylos Labini’s ideas on precarity do not seem to have generated much debate in the mid-sixties, either in Italy or on the international scene. In Italy, both Saraceno and the entire economic planning community essentially ignored the concept of precarity that Fuà and Sylos Labini had presented to the National Commission for Economic Planning. Nor does it seem that the debate among trade unions that arose around the same problem addressed precarity either. However, one trade unionist, Silvano Andriani, did note his interest in the Fuà-Sylos Labini proposal in the CGIL journal, Rassegna sindacale, though he focused on their hypothesis of an income policy, which he saw as the more important framework in their proposal.3 Undeterred by the lack of interest in Italy, in 1963 Sylos Labini strove to popularize the concept of precarity on an international level by taking part in the Geneva Convention dedicated to the problem of employment in economic development, co-organized by the International Institute for Labour Studies, the research division of the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the International Economic Association. The ILO published his resulting essay (Sylos Labini 1964), which focused on the problem of precarious employment Ministerial decree, “Istituzione della Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici presso il Ministero del lavoro e della previdenza sociale,” approved on February 1, 1962, published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 55, March 1, 1962. 2 Riccardo Bauer (1895–1982), a partisan activist, was first the director then later the president of the Società Umanitaria di Milano from 1946 to 1969 (Sircana 1988; Melinato 1985). 3 Silvano Andriani, “Tre linee non due,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 11, March 9, 1963: 19. 1

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in Sicily. This was most likely the very first introduction of precarious employment into the English language, a significant step in its international genealogy. However, Sylos Labini’s concept still remained mostly unacknowledged in Italy, Western Europe, or internationally, if the lack of further discussion in the International Labour Organization or the International Economic Association is taken to be indicative. The ILO’s International Labour Review did not generate any debate on the topic, nor did it publish anything else on precarious work. A few years after the conference in which Sylos Labini had taken part, the International Economic Association organized a congress in Varenna, Italy dedicated to the theme of under-developed areas in advanced economies (Robinson 1969). Pasquale Saraceno, Francesco Vito, and Ugo Papi took part on behalf of Italy, but not Sylos Labini, though he had already dedicated many publications to the topic (Sylos Labini 1963; 1965). In the sixties, the relationship between precarious work and backward economies remained a dead letter. Another scholar interested in the problem of job precarity was French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who, similar to Sylos Labini, argued in his wellknown study Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Bourdieu 1963) that the condition of most Algerian workers was “unstable,” comparable to Marx’s Lumpenproletariat. Bourdieu associated the condition of precarity (precarité) and its opposite, stability, with the capitalist transformation of Algeria’s traditional society and the birth of a dualistic labor market, characterized by very few stable workers employed in modern sectors and a heterogeneous group of unemployed, underemployed, and casual workers who experienced unstable working and living conditions. Despite the important similarities in their work, it seems Sylos Labini and Bourdieu had at the time no direct contact with each other.

1.2 Precarity thy name is woman: Genesis of a debate But here a first limitation appeared immediately, a first contradiction: the female workforce is highly unstable, that is, it remains in production for a few years and then is renewed […] There is no doubt that instability of work is the first and perhaps most serious indictment against the employers and which, with and like the policy of low wages, hinders employment rights (Turtura 1962, 19).

It was at the end of the boom years that employment instability became a serious topic within the political and trade-union debates, and was marked from the very beginning by concerns about female workers. Beginning in the early sixties, the working conditions of Italian women came to be increasingly discussed in relation to “precarity” as the economy turned from boom to the so-called “conjuncture.” This debate over job instability for women, often labelled as “employment precarity,”

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involved trade unionists, leaders of political parties, and women’s associations and was carried out in numerous conferences on female labor, congresses of women’s associations like the UDI, and meetings on women’s issues by trade unions, including the PCI, PSI, CGIL, and ACLI. The problem of the failure to guarantee female job stability became part, albeit in a rather limited manner, of discussions within the National Commission for Women Workers. The debate in the trade union press is particularly useful here for understanding the centrality of female labor during the boom years, an important aspect of the still largely unrecognized concept of precarious work. The transformations of labor itself triggered by economic-industrial growth in those years, particularly the entry into the paid labor market of thousands of young women (Betti 2010), led to renewed interest not only in positive and negative features of female employment. The problem of employment stability was initially associated with that of fair evaluation of women’s work value, which was particularly important when it came to rural workers. As the boom years came to an abrupt end, however, this problem assumed an autonomy all its own. The reinterpretation of the economic boom through the lenses of female employment accents the darker rather than the brighter aspects of the period. The problem of job instability/precarity emerged among the imbalances of the economic boom, when the officials of the trade unions, parties, and female associations started to acknowledge it. It was with the onset of the crisis that people began to reflect on the problem more frequently and in greater detail, insisting increasingly on the cardinal role of economic planning in containing the harmful effects of the economic recession on female employment. The relative stability that many female workers had achieved was again threatened by mass redundancy and the sudden “disappearance” from the labor market of thousands of women, obliged to return to being housewives and/or to seek home-based industrial employment.4 Contemporary commentators clearly warned of the danger of the possible retreat of women from the productive and social sphere.5 The voices of women themselves, recorded in the minutes of conferences and conventions, focused overwhelmingly on the issues of job instability. The presence of male trade union and party leaders, like Vittorio Foa, Agostino Novella, Luciano Lama, and Guido Fanti, at these conferences highlights how such organizations were taking a renewed interest in and assuming responsibility over female workers’ labor precarity and “women’s issues” more broadly. Archivio Centrale UDI (UDI Central Archive, hereafter ACUDI), Sezione tematica, Diritto al lavoro (hereafter DILA), b. 10, fasc. 82, sottofasc. 3, Nora Federici, “I problemi del mondo del lavoro” (Roma, January 12, 1965). 5 ACUDI, Sezione cronologica, 1965, b. 112, fasc. 894, sottofasc. 4, “Per il diritto delle donne al lavoro stabile e qualificato,” Minutes of the National Conference (Milan, June 12–13, 1965). 4

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Criticism of economic planning was central to the debates of the mid-sixties.6 Trade unionists, party leaders, and women’s associations contested the very structure of planning (Carabba 1977), from the Saraceno Report to the later “Pieraccini Plan,” due to the limited importance allotted to analyses and proposals regarding female employment. They questioned the very concept of “full employment,” the idea of eliminating all permanent unemployment that was then a cornerstone of economic planning, because it did not include women. What they demanded was “full female employment” (Novella 1962). Similarly to what Fuà and Sylos Labini had done with their memorandum to the National Commission for Economic Planning during the late years of the boom period, in the years of the economic crisis it was mainly women who promoted critical analyses of the qualitative characteristics of (female) employment. They too were “discovering” the existence of precarity, even if they did not articulate the issue necessarily in these terms. Although this phenomenon had already characterized the work of women (and others) throughout the fifties, it was the rapid slowdown of the economy and lowered expectations of growth that had finally brought the issue of precarity to the fore. The years between 1962 and 1965 were central to the “discovery” of precarity and the assumption of “stability” as a priority for political strategies of female associations and trade union organizations, principally UDI and CGIL, which made the greatest efforts in this respect. At the time, awareness of the problem was more widespread and transversal, as evident in the memoirs of members of the “National Commission for Women Workers.” Different groups, however, articulated very different concerns stemming from the issue of precarious female employment. For instance, the leaders of the Catholic ACLI referred expressly to the urgent need for “a stable employment of the women of the South,” during the ACLI Workers’ Congress of 1962, which reported on the predominance of women in casual jobs. Yet such Catholic women’s and trade-union associations paid attention first and foremost to the relationship between work and family (CIF 1961). Unlike the socialists and communists, Catholics rejected work outside of the home as the basis of female emancipation, a sentiment frequently articulated by Franca Falcucci on behalf of the women’s Christian Democrat trade union movement, who was later a politician and Minister of Public Education (ACLI Lavoratrici 1966, 16).

“Processo ai licenziamenti per matrimonio,” Noi Donne, March 12, 1961: 13.

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1.2.1 THE CGIL’S FEMALE TRADE-UNIONISTS The mass entry of women into the modern production process is accompanied, however, by the permanence of traditional and premodern conditions. In fact, women’s work largely preserves its complementary character with respect to family income and, therefore, a character of precariousness and instability; the increase in employment is unevenly distributed between regions; the sectors where female labor remains heavily oppressed and under-remunerated are found in the rural areas in particular.7

During a March 1962 press conference on female employment, trade union leaders Vittorio Foa and Luciano Lama denounced the problems that had come to light in the aftermath of the positive growth process of the previous years. They considered “job instability” the most serious phenomenon affecting female workers, who are exploited from an early age and only usually employed for a few years without the possibility of acquiring any real kind of professional training or chance to raise their wages. Even in the supposed economic boom, Italian women were typically underemployed and working jobs that were seasonal, underpaid, and under-qualified. A document by two secretaries of the CGIL encapsulated this image8 of women’s work perfectly in 1962. Female employment—thanks to economic planning—must be able to reach the highest levels, so that the right to work be achieved in full by all women who want to work. Female employment, in a planned economy, needs to shed the character of instability it possesses today; on the contrary, it must guarantee the stability and duration of the work relationship (Turtura 1962, 41).

The same issue was picked up that same year by the National Female Workers’ Conference organized by the CGIL in Rome. In the opening address, trade unionist leader Donatella Turtura emphasized the link between women’s right to work, stability of employment, and economic planning. She called the role assumed by female employment in the years of the economic miracle “irreversible,” highlighting the centrality of work outside the home as a mark of renewed female activism in trade unionist and political struggles that would have a positive effect on the development of democracy. 1962, which was then coming to a close, had been a crucial year for women workers fighting for better conditions in all economic sectors, be they women working in trade as shop assistants in department stores, garment makers in the clothing industry, or hotel workers in ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 7, fasc. 4, Nota per la conferenza stampa dei segretari della CGIL Vittorio Foa/Luciano Lama, sul lavoro delle donne (March 13, 1962). 8 Among the other sources, the television documentary series in 8 episodes: La donna che lavora [The woman worker, 1959], the result of a collaboration between journalist Ugo Zatterin and TV director Giovanni Salvi. 7

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the service industry, or range from seasonal farm-laborers to workers in leading sectors of industry, like the electromechanical sector. Turtura explained how female employment had developed at the intersection between cutting-edge and pre-modern sectors: the workforce in seasonal jobs, both agricultural and industrial, appeared to have become strongly feminized. And it was precisely the interweaving of antiquated and modern forms of labor that had triggered the economic boom. Women’s jobs, either seasonal or generally unstable, remained largely disjointed from any kind of conventional industrial relationship. Home-based industrial workers, who numbered around one million, earned less than 60% of the wage of a factory worker. Women who worked as seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers received around 70% of the pay of women with fixed work contracts and were paid less than seasonal male workers. This wage gap highlighted how seasonal women workers were not only exploited more than stable workers, but also more than their “precarious” male colleagues (Turtura 1962, 26–28). In the various policy suggestions made during the National Female Workers’ Conference, the stability of work appeared to be both an objective to be reached and a necessary pre-condition for women’s further professionalization. Pia Ferrante called upon the trade unions to play a more significant role in promoting the professionalization of women. She emphasized the need to end the common perception of women’s work as “transitory” and “complementary” (Ferrante 1962, 53). Vittorio Foa agreed with the need to alter that mentality, which deemed women’s work to be secondary and auxiliary. Like Donatella Turtura, Foa stressed the need for women to work outside the home to develop an economic and productive Italy. In his opinion, it was women who had paid “the highest price for this capitalistic transformation of the Italian economy” (Foa 1962, 123). Their massive entry into productive work represented “a qualitatively new fact, in this respect, not reversible” (Foa 1962, 110). Following Foa’s speech, the Secretary General of CGIL, Agostino Novella, explicitly introduced the concept of “precarity” in regard to women’s employment, contrasting it to “stability”: I believe that it is right, therefore, when appraising some of our claims to take into account the fact that all the female workforce organically employed in production will remain there and, rather, tend to increase; that our entire policy tends not only to have us remain but later on to transfer to this sector the greatest number possible of female workers at present employed in precarious or marginal sectors or still relegated within the limbo of hidden unemployment of women and housewives. All our action concerning matters of employment, in particular, employment stability of the female workforce tends, therefore, to strengthen the weight of the sector organically engaged in productive activities, which tends to increase in size also taking into account a certain contradictory interest shown by the employer class (Novella 1962, 165–66).

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Back in the years of the economic miracle, the CGIL had prioritized work stability as a political goal for female workers. The social dynamics triggered by the economic boom, according to Novella, had allowed for the possibility of changing the traditional relationship between “permanently and precariously employed” workers. If this relationship appeared historically unbalanced to the detriment of female labor, in the boom years Novella saw a reversal of the trend because “we already see clearly that some of the new employment has assumed new characteristics. The female workforce has now penetrated organically into the production process, changing the relationships that existed previously between the permanently and the precariously employed” (Novella 1962, 163). At the end of 1962, the CGIL intended to include stable employment as one of its strategic goals to demand from government forces and economic planners. Novella underlined the absence of any gender perspective from the public debate on “full employment,” of consideration of the female workforce (real and potential) when making employment, unemployment, and underemployment forecasts. Furthermore, the trade unionist foregrounded one of the most important aspects of the changes in female employment during the boom years: its relatively modest growth compared to the overall increase in employment. If the National Female Workers’ Conference was crucial to the introduction of the problem of precarity/job stability into trade union thinking, its optimistic forecasts regarding the future increase of “stable” female labor had to cope with criticism related to new employment trends generated by the economic situation. The 1962 conference had, in any case, a lasting impact in terms of strategies regarding female workers. Over the next few years, the explosion of the economic crisis encouraged more investigation. In January 1964, the speeches delivered by Vittorio Foa and Donatella Turtura during the CGIL’s national conference of women workers indicated the precarity of female employment, and its worsening, as salient issues to address. A few months later, the CGIL delivered a memorandum to the National Commission of Women Workers underlining the dire situation of female employment. Two issues required immediate intervention: “agricultural underemployment and unemployment” and the “temporary” nature of employment. The CGIL also mentioned the problem of consistent inclusion of women in the workforce and the precarious state of women workers in another document sent to the World Trade Union Federation in preparation for the World Conference of Female Workers to be held in Bucharest that year.9

ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 7, fasc. 2, La CGIL per le lavoratrici. Atti e documenti della Confederazione generale Italiana del lavoro—“Dal documento della segretaria confederale per la conferenza mondiale sui problemi delle lavoratrici (FSM).” (Bucarest, May 11–16, 1964): 21.

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1.2.2 THE UNION OF ITALIAN WOMEN Women like you, like millions of other women, have defended their employment with new words, with new strength, at the Conference organized by the UDI. They denounce the unjust and precarious condition of female employment and using their ideas have opened a prospect valid for all women.10

The crisis of 1963, the so-called “conjuncture,” caused a massive expulsion of women from paid work. Between 1963 and 1964, 310,000 female workers lost their jobs according to some estimates of the time.11 Many of them, once they were expelled from the production cycle, could no longer find regular employment and were relegated to the informal sector as industrial home workers or domestic servants, or were obliged to return to the home as unpaid family laborers.12 Between 1963 and 1965, the UDI published in its journal Noi Donne (We women) numerous inquiries into the effects of the ongoing crisis on women workers. The association claimed it wanted to understand how women were reacting to the “great fear of unemployment,” and what their actual living and working conditions had become because of the crisis. The titles of two important reports signed by Luciana Castellina, “Dov’è il miracolo?” (Where is the miracle?)13 and “A casa non si torna” (I won’t return home),14 summed up the critiques and slogans the association wanted to bring to public attention. The issue of women’s employment instability / precarity was a salient feature of the preparatory theses of the UDI’s National Congress (UDI 1964) held in Rome in June 1964.15 The congress provided an opportunity to criticize the “disorderly” development of the miracle years and highlight the limited situation of women’s employment, of which the only significant growth was concentrated in the Italian economy’s most marginal and “pre-modern” sectors. At the congress it was pointed out that “the inclusion of women in society continues to be partial, precarious, unstable, and secondary” (UDI 1964). Serena Madonna of the UDI presidency held that economic planning was crucial to the stable growth of women in paid work and the correction of the imbalances and limits of the boom, which were now worsening since the onset of the crisis (Madonna 1964, 49).

Elisabetta Bonucci, “Il lato forte,” Noi Donne, June 26, 1965: 6. ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 10, fasc. 82, sottofasc. 3, Nora Federici, “I problemi del mondo del lavoro,” relazione alla Conferenza Stampa d’inizio d’anno indetta dall’UDI (Rome, January 12, 1965). 12 Luciana Castellina, “300 giorni perduti,” Noi Donne, November 28, 1964. 13 Luciana Castellina, “Dov’è il miracolo?” Noi Donne, December 5, 1964. 14 Luciana Castellina, “A casa non si torna,” Noi Donne, November 15, 1964. 15 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 9, fasc. 9, “L’Unione Donne Italiane sui problemi dell’occupazione femminile” (Rome, October 1964). 10 11

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In early 1965, Nora Federici, a member of UDI’s national presidency, was given the task of drawing up a preliminary estimate of female issues within the workforce. Federici pointed out that by the end of 1963, as many as 310,000 women had vanished, literally, from the Italian labor force while a further 50,000 newly unemployed or underemployed women had emerged. To these figures, she pointed out, the expanding number of irregularly employed women, like in home-based industrial work, needed to be added. Federici mentioned explicitly the instability of female work and the need to promote its stabilization as a primary issue for the UDI.17 In 1965, the UDI formed an ad hoc campaign to increase job stability. That same year, a letter was sent to the ministers Giovanni Pieraccini (Finance), Luigi Gui (Education), Giacomo Mancini (Public Works), Umberto delle Fave (Labor and Social Security), and Giorgio Bo (State Holdings) requesting that “full female employment” be included among the objectives of the upcoming economic plan, to reduce the “transitory” nature of female employment.18 In June 1965, the UDI organized the National Conference for the Right of Women to Stable and Qualified Work, held in Milan.19 Participants denounced the “unjust and precarious condition of female employment.” After the conference about 4,000 women marched through the streets of Milan with the slogan “For the right of women to stable and qualified work.”20 This demand opposed the condition of precarity which had characterized women’s work in Italy in the fifties and during the economic boom. Thus, precarity, occasionally mentioned by women in the UDI since the fifties, became part of the association’s political platform after the crisis. The conference was not the epilogue but rather the beginning of mobilization. Following the Milan convention, the UDI launched a public petition that collected over 40,000 signatures in only a few months and was delivered to the Italian Parliament in December 1965.21 The petition called first and foremost for the government to “guarantee the right of women to work” and to modify 16

At the time Nora Federici directed the Institute of Demography at Rome’s Sapienza University. As a scholar she addressed issues regarding female work on several occasions, for both official publications and the political-trade-union press. For a biography see: Miriam Focaccia, “Nora Federici,” Scienza a due voci, https://scienzaa2voci.unibo.it/biografie/92-federici-nora, last accessed January 18, 2017. 17 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 10, fasc.82, sottofasc. 3, Nora Federici, “I problemi del mondo del lavoro,” relazione alla Conferenza Stampa d’inizio d’anno indetta dall’UDI (Rome, January 12, 1965). 18 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 10, fasc. 82, sottofasc. 2, Letter of April 7, 1965. 19 ACUDI, Sezione cronologica, 1965, b. 112, fasc. 894, sottofasc. 4, “Per il diritto delle donne al lavoro stabile e qualificato,” Atti della conferenza nazionale (Milan, June 12–13, 1965). 20 Elisabetta Bonucci, “Il lato forte,” Noi Donne, June 26, 1965. 21 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, fasc.82, sottofasc. 1, UDI (ed.), “Petizione al Parlamento. ‘Per il diritto delle donne al lavoro stabile e qualificato.’” 16

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the estimate of Pieraccini’s economic plan for the 1965–69 period, including expected female employment growth, adequate protection for industrial home-workers, and a full evaluation of rural women’s work value along with an increase in their level of job stability. To “guarantee more stable and qualified jobs,” the conference further asked for a fair policy of vocational training, reforming the education system by dissolving the separation between grammar and technical schools, and a radical modification of the law on apprenticeship. Other objectives of the petition included health care for female workers and the improvement of social services within economic planning, as they were considered necessary to the reduction of instability. In 1966, at another national conference entitled “Il lavoro della donna e la programmazione” (The work of women and planning) the UDI continued working towards its goals laid out at the Milan conference: that women’s associations be present at the regional committees for economic planning and that they become the privileged interlocutors regarding issues of women’s employment. The UDI wanted the regional committees to finally take into account the specific perspectives and needs of women. In her closing speech, Giglia Tedesco emphasized how the right of women to paid work could not be left “to the spontaneous development of economic and productive events in our country” (1966). It required specific action at the social and political level.

1.2.3 COMMUNIST WOMEN The onset of the 1964 economic crisis triggered a new appraisal of the nature of female employment in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as well. In this chaotic climate, the communists began to take on the concept of precarity in the context of working women. For the PCI of the sixties, precarity was above all female. It is not surprising that communist women made a fundamental contribution to the analysis of that problem and the definition of the concept. In 1962, at the National Conference of Communist Women (3a Conferenza nazionale donne comuniste, 1962), the problem of the “instability of female employment” was explicitly noted for the first time, although the concept of “precarity” appeared only a few years later (PCI 1965). The Conference’s introductory report, delivered by the communist politician Nilde Iotti, addressed some of the most critical issues of women’s work. The failure to comply with contracts and social security regulations, lay-offs due to marriage, the excessive spread of home-based industrial work, the abuse of apprenticeships and temporary contracts, the scarcity of professional training, and the tendency for seasonal work were only some of the aspects she outlined that were contributing to the inhumane “exploitation” of women at that time during the economic boom.

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The overall increase in female employment, although partial and characterized by the abovementioned limitations, was nevertheless the basis of a transformation of the role of women in society, and this required the PCI to rethink its strategy towards women. “The basic problem,” Iotti summarized, “is that of acknowledging the fact that the existence of a female question is a national issue for this country” (3a Conferenza nazionale donne comuniste, 1962, 26): As far as girls are concerned, we place the issue of stable, qualified, fairly paid work upon our emancipation platform and make it the fundamental strand of our action among girls; even if we have not been able to associate this slogan completely with the current and perspective political battle, we have nonetheless tried to make an effort capable of helping us in this sense (Ibid., 152).

The problem of female job stability and its opposite, instability / precarity, although not called that explicitly in Iotti’s report, emerged in the course of the ensuing discussion. Donatella Turtura (Ibid., 105–9) emphasized the need to tackle the problem of the instability of female labor, linking it to the issue of broader structural reforms and to the democratic planning of economic development, strongly supported at the time by the PCI. Two other speakers also emphasized lack of stability as a problem, even as the main problem. Not surprisingly, a leader of the Bari branch of the PCI raised the problem, as did a young woman from the Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana (Italian Communist Youth Federation, FGCI). According to the communist activist Maria Colamonaco, discrimination, wage disparity, and lack of freedom in the workplace most impacted the women of the Mezzogiorno (literally “midday,” this refers to the southern regions of the Italian peninsula, as well as Sicily and Sardinia) (Ibid., 82–84). The economic miracle had generated further imbalances that affected the daily lives of women workers, their right to work, and their job stability. However, Eletta Bertani (Ibid., 150–52), of the FGCI National Commission for Girls, placed girls’ achievement of job stability at the center of her thinking and political strategy, associating it with a new, more democratic view of development, which in southern Italy would mean surpassing the policy of “poles of development.” For Bertani, home-based industrial work was emblematic of both female work instability and of a broader developmental strategy rooted in the interests of large capital, which benefitted greatly from such “pre-modern” forms of work. In 1965, two different events promoted by the PCI addressed the problem again: the Fourth National Conference of Communist Women and the Third National Conference of Communist Factory Workers: One notes for women, in part for men too, a reflux in heterogeneous jobs, which statistics label as “others,” which is just one of the most constant indices

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of underemployment and precarious employment, concomitant with the decline in stable, qualified employment (Rafforzare il P.C.I. 1965, 58).

The Fourth National Conference of Communist Women, during which Nilde Iotti took the floor once again (Ibid., 15–39), harshly criticized the Pieraccini Plan and how it articulated “full employment” solely in masculine terms. The communist parliamentarian, who was also a leader of the Italian Women’s Union (UDI), reiterated the UDI’s previous points, stressing the fact that women could not go on being considered a “reserve army,” but needed to be included as equal participants in the workforce. At the 1965 PCI conference, various speakers also recognized the problem of female job instability and precarity, finally defined as such by Angiola Massucco Costa (Rafforzare il P.C.I. 1965, 52–61) of the Turin Federation of the PCI and others at the conference. According to the communist politician Massucco Costa, the growth in job instability was directly related to the unfavorable economic situation, which had caused not only mass layoffs but also a general deterioration in the quality of employment, with an increase in seasonal jobs, home-based work, and occasional employment in the services. The heads of other communist federations (Rome, Liguria, and Veneto) shared Massucco’s analysis of the worsening of female workers’ general instability. The leader of the CGIL’s union of workers in the food industry, Nella Marcellino (Ibid., 113–22), used the category “precarity” to describe the working conditions of women, by which she meant high degrees of exploitation and under-payment. Marcellino showed how the economic boom had led to an intensification of these problems, which later emerged in all their criticality with the crisis. Marta Murotti of the Bologna federation of the PCI also brought up precarity, arguing that the crisis had most affected the “large areas of home-based work, under-payment, and seasonal work, which made us talk about the precarity of female employment” (Ibid., 204). Riccardo Terzi of the FGCI also found it important to recognize precarity as fundamental in understanding the conditions of women’s labor: This subordinate and transitory character of women’s work is guaranteed by a series of old and new tools of employers’ policy, such as: fixed-term contracts, lay-offs upon marriage, home-based work, and so on. The political conclusion we can draw is recognition of the precarity of female employment, a precarity the economic crisis makes even more visible today (Ibid., 72).

Terzi nevertheless went a step further in theorizing the relationship between female work, precarity, and the capitalist system. According to Terzi, the female workforce dominated the most backward areas of production, a product of the capitalist system’s attempt to reduce the cost of labor. For him, female work

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maintained “a totally subordinate and transitory character.” Female workers’ precarity was becoming a political problem because it was being reproduced by unilateral workforce management methods based on maximum exploitation (Rafforzare il P.C.I. 1965, 68–76). There exists . . . a subjective cause, as well as the even more obvious objective causes (poorer qualification of the female workforce, its inclusion in the most backward and, therefore, most unstable sectors of production, etc.) which today makes the condition of the working woman more precarious. This is a precarity which, although not always portrayed as a threat of expulsion from production—unthinkable beyond a certain extent in all those sectors where female labor is largely in the majority—manifests, however, as an attempt to downgrade the work performed; a downgrading made possible precisely because the conquest of the right to employment, despite the enormous progress made in recent years, is still much more fragile when it comes to women.22

The Third National Conference of Communist Factory Workers (Rafforzare il PCI, 1965) provided the occasion for more reflection by the female leaders of the PCI, especially those belonging to the Central Women’s Section. The excerpt reported above, taken from the conference’s preparatory discussion, indicates that the Communists in 1965 had, like the women of the CGIL and UDI, already taken on the concept of “precarity” as an integral part of their political thinking. The problem as they saw it related to low regard of women’s work, which resulted in under-classification and the persistence of significant pay gaps between male and female workers.23 The Women of the PCI and those of UDI shared the strategic goal of a more “stable and qualified” inclusion of the female workforce in extra-domestic work. Precisely for this reason, they criticized proposals for the part-time employment of women, a solution they considered an obstacle to the achievement of stability and professionalization for women. The central women’s section of the PCI harshly criticized the “Pieraccini Plan.” Firstly, they were skeptical of economic forecasts that did not consider female under-employment and its recent increase. And secondly, they condemned the document for its silence regarding the question of social services, which they considered fundamental if women were to enter stable forms of employment. The problem of precarity and its opposite, the quest for stability, were resolvable, according to the Communist Party women, only through a much more profound change in “the general structure of society” than any government analysis had yet laid out. ACUDI, Sezione cronologica, 1965, b. 11, fasc. 85, Sezione Centrale femminile del Partito Comunista Italiano, “Note sull’occupazione femminile per la preparazione della conferenza operaia” (March 1965). 23 Ibid. 22

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1.2.4 THE NATIONAL COMMISSION FOR WOMEN WORKERS The Ministry of Labor and Social Security set up the Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici (The National Commission for Women Workers) on February 11, 1962. It met for the first time on October 4 of the same year.24 It was established to investigate women’s vocational training; the geography and migration of female labor; the protection of women’s labor relations; and social security and welfare for certain categories of women workers. The Commission was also expected to advise on the implementation of law concerning working mothers, home-based workers, and other special categories like domestic servants. Finally, it was authorized to conduct surveys and other studies.25 The Commission’s composition was particularly broad and pluralist. Riccardo Bauer, former president of the Milan humanitarian society, was the chair;26 Maria Eletta Martini, of the Christian Democrat Women’s Movement, was vice president. The board included four experts and four representatives of the trade unions (the CGIL, CISL, UIL, and CISNAL), as well as a representative of the ACLI, four representatives of the employers’ associations (Confindustria, Confagricoltura, Confcommercio, and The Union of Credit Companies), and five representatives of women’s associations (the UDI, CIF, National Council of Italian Women, Italian Federation of Women Lawyers, and Italian Women Jurists’ Union). The socialist lawyer Elena Gatti Caporaso27 headed the secretariat of the Commission at the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. For its inauguration, the members of the Commission and their respective organizations sent memoranda reflecting on negative aspects of women’s work and formulating hypotheses for government intervention that prioritized their agenda. Of these items, members identified the issue of job stability and the need to surpass forms of work they deemed to be pre-modern and poorly protected (like home-based and seasonal work). The problem of stability emerged above all in the memoranda of the representatives of the trade unions. The representative of the CISL stressed the importance of the professional training of women, seen as essential for the achievement ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 7, fasc. 4, “La Commissione Nazionale per le donne lavoratrici presso il Ministero per il lavoro e la Previdenza Sociale, ha iniziato i suoi lavori in ‘Posta della Settimana,’” 10–11, September–October 1962: 5–9. 25 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 7, fasc. 4, Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici, “Appunto per l’onorevole Ministro” (1962). 26 References to Riccardo Bauer are to be found also in the Archives of the Milan Humanitarian Society: Società umanitaria di Milano (hereafter SUMI), Archivio di Deposito (1982–1986), Serie 1, 1962, fasc. 19, Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici (chairperson Bauer Riccardo). 27 Ministerial decree, Nomina del presidente e dei componenti della Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici, approved on August 23, 1962, published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 228, September 10, 1962. 24

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of employment stability and job security in addition to equal pay. The CGIL’s position was more detailed, providing two memoranda, one from its Women’s Office and the other from its National Women’s Council. The first underlined the need to address particular aspects of women’s working conditions, like the problem of job stability, as well as noting the persistence of home-based work and seasonal employment. The second document made specific reference to the problem of the “instability of female work” and indicated it as one of the main problems about which the Commission should be concerned. The Commission’s actual commitment to the promotion of female job stability is difficult to gauge because of the fragmentary nature of its records. Handwritten minutes of the sessions, however, demonstrate that this theme was taken up again in later sessions. Some categories of work that were seen as the most unstable, such as female laborers in southern Italy (like olive pickers) or homebased workers, became the focus of their attention. When the economic crisis broke out in 1964, the Commission received numerous requests from various organizations and associations. The UDI, in a letter probably from the very same 1964, pointed to the urgent need to stabilize the situation of “women already employed within the productive process,” as well as the “transition of large numbers of underemployed females to full employment and of females engaged in occasional activities to stable jobs.”29 28

1.3 Against precarity: The fight for “job stability” During the transition between boom and crisis the quest for stability became one of the union’s main goals. A heterogeneous aggregate of male and female workers began to denounce their instability/precarity in all of the main economic sectors, from agriculture to the tertiary sector, drawing up political platforms based around job stability. The problem of precarity was, therefore, not only conceptualized and made a part of political-trade-union thinking during the boom-crisis transition period but was also taken on by various categories of male and female workers, who began to reflect with renewed awareness upon the criticality of their respective conditions, although not always referring to the concept of precarity as such. Issues such as stability, continuity, and duration of contracts, along with recognition of qualifications, which were previously separate aspects of employment began to overlap under the label of “stability.” ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 7, fasc. 4, “Memorie presentate dai componenti la Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici—Indicazioni in ordine ad un primo programma di lavoro della Commissione” (CISL). 29 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 9, fasc. 78, sottofasc.1, “Note per la Commissione nazionale per la programmazione economica” (1964). 28

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For the home-based workers and the most exploited of agricultural laborers, like jasmine pickers, the primary goal was to become hourly wage earners and overcome the inhuman exploitation to which they were subjected by the piecework system with its highly uncertain wages. But so did other workers in different fields, like hospital doctors (assistant physicians), expressly demand job stability and the end of fixed-term contracts. The problem of the discontinuity of employment emerged during labor disputes by workers engaged in food production and the building trades, who demanded a “guaranteed annual salary.” The heterogeneity of the fight for stability in the early sixties demonstrates how the problem of precarity concerned not only backward sectors of the economy, although these were certainly the most gravely affected. The processes of economic-productive transformation triggered by the boom, in particular by the growth of the industrial and tertiary sectors, did not automatically reduce employment precarity nor did it promote generalized stability. New economic imbalances emerged alongside traditional forms of exploitation and precarity in both agriculture and industry, which witnessed an increase in home-based work during the boom years. Although hospital facilities underwent development, this lacked structural reform, and thus tended to reproduce precarity on the ward. The expansion of seasonal employment, as in the building trade, was not accompanied by an improvement in workers’ conditions but, on the contrary, accentuated their exploitation and instability. However, new progressive legislation, discussed in the next chapter, alongside the efforts of male and female workers themselves, played a decisive role in building workplace stability in the sixties and seventies.

1.3.1 INVISIBLE PRECARITY: INDUSTRIAL HOME-BASED WORKERS [To] this we add the fact that they have no insurance and no guarantee of job continuity. In fact, these female workers, generally speaking, do not work in the months of January, February, March, August, September, and mid-October; they work practically six months a year and when there is work they are literally obsessed because they must produce rapidly and a lot.30

During the economic boom, industrial home-based work, traditionally considered one of the most backward forms of employment, seemed widespread in Italian cities and the countryside, and was particularly common in some areas of central and northern Italy, primarily in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, as shown by the Archivio UDI Bologna (Archives of the Union of Italian Women, Bologna branch), Fondo comitato provinciale, b. 2, fasc. “Convegno sul lavoro a domicilio Bologna (Ottobre 1958),” (typescript): 10–11.

30

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data provided by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy (1959). Other contemporary sources, including complaints made by trade unionists and investigations made by women’s associations (UDI 1958; ACLI 1961), testified to the increasing spread of home-based work during the latter half of the fifties (Tommasetta 1977; Pacini 2009; Sonetti 2007; Betti 2021). Industrial home-based work was stigmatized as one of the most precarious forms of employment since the early fifties. At that time, the trade union press and women’s associations carried out investigations31 revealing the extreme exploitation of industrial home-based workers, who were mostly women. The UDI played a crucial role in denouncing the conditions of home-based workers, publishing several reports in Noi Donne during the boom years.32 The concept of precarity increasingly became a focus of trade unionists and leaders of women’s associations during the boom, who frequently denounced the phenomenon and fostered the parliamentary process that eventually led to legislation on industrial home-based work (1958), considered in detail in the next chapter. On February 23, 1958, the day before the law’s approval, the UDI held a conference in Florence, the Convegno nazionale sulle lavoranti a domicilio (The National Convention on Female Industrial Home-based Workers) (UDI 1958).33 Numerous local meetings in Bologna and elsewhere followed.34 These not only enhanced awareness of the conditions of these workers, but also exposed their numbers, between 800,000 and 1 million, according to estimates provided by the association.35 Despite the difficulty of organizing home-based workers, as often discussed by union leaders and party leaders,36 it was during the boom years that some collective battles took place and these previously invisible women workers became visible. In March 1960, over 1,200 home-based workers from the Bologna plain went on strike, demonstrating in the streets all over the region.37 In addition to wage increases, they sought the end of discrimination against them and argued Remo Clementi, “Trappola a domicilio,” Noi Donne, April 3, 1955; Alessandro Skuk, “Una grave piaga economica e sociale. Nostra inchiesta sul lavoro a domicilio (II),” La voce dei lavoratori, October 13, 1954. 32 Luisa Melograni, “Prigioniere nella propria casa,” Noi Donne, February 23, 1958; Luisa Melograni, “Il ricatto a domicilio,” Noi Donne, July 12, 1959. 33 “Il convegno dell’UDI sul lavoro a domicilio,” Noi Donne, March 8, 1958. 34 Ibid. 35 Melograni, “Prigioniere nella propria casa.” 36 Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna Onlus (Gramsci Foundation of Emilia-Romagna Region Onlus), Fondo Vittorina Dal Monte, serie 2 “Attività sindacale” (1951–1965), fasc.1, “Lavoro a domicilio,” CGIL-Federazione italiana lavoratori dell’abbigliamento, “I diritti salariali e previdenziale delle maglieriste lavoranti a domicilio” (1963). “Ha rivelato un quadro impressionante lo sciopero dei lavoranti a domicilio,” l’Unità—Cronaca di Bologna, March 6, 1960. 37 Remo Cappelli, “La tessera del pane per le lavoranti a domicilio?” La lotta, March 10, 1960. 31

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for greater continuity of work. These concerns remained on the agenda during the following decades. 38

1.3.2 PRECARITY IN THE FIELDS: THE DREAM OF BECOMING EMPLOYEES And yet, this increased numerical and specific weight of women does not correspond to adequate contractual acknowledgement and job stability. Just consider that the 100,000-unit increase in employment registered in recent years regarded almost predominantly “exceptional” laborers, that is, people with the most precarious jobs.39

In the very early sixties, as part of an investigation into the issue of women employed outside the home, numerous studies foregrounded a quantitatively and qualitatively significant phenomenon: the so-called “feminization” of agriculture (Federici 1962). Noi Donne portrayed women working in the fields as tractor drivers and pruners as both protagonists and icons of this feminization.40 This feminization was taking place across the whole country, fueled by internal migration and rural desertion, as men moved to cities in order to find jobs, but was also the consequence of structural transformations of farming, like increased mechanization. Yet, these enormous transformations of a modernizing agriculture, positive or negative, failed to contribute to the stabilization of female employment. While permanent wage earners constituted a small part of the total number of agricultural workers, more than half of them lacked a fixed wage; their working relationship was classified as exceptional, occasional, or registered in special lists. This restricted their access to welfare benefits (like sick pay, maternity leave, and unemployment benefits), the criteria for which excluded the most precarious workers, those without at least 51 days of work a year.41 Stability and its opposite, precarity, emerge clearly in the documents of the Federbraccianti (The Farm Laborers’ Trade Union)42 and in coverage of women’s

Irea Gualandi, and Antonio Bloise, “La funzione decisiva delle lavoratrici per il rinnovamento delle campagne nelle condizioni nuove del mercato del lavoro,” Rassegna sindacale, nos. 55–56, July–August 1962: 54–61. 39 Gualandi and Bloise, “La funzione decisiva delle lavoratrici,” 58. 40 Giovanni Cesareo, “L’agricoltura è donna,” Noi Donne, April 2, 1961. 41 Gualandi and Bloise, “La funzione decisiva delle lavoratrici.” 42 Archivio federazione lavoratori agro-industria (Archives of the Federation of Agro-Industrial Workers, hereafter AFLAI), Fondo Federbraccianti I, Serie 3, Commissione di lavoro, b. 221, fasc. 6/2.3.1, III Corso Naz.le Femminile, February 1964, “Per la piena occupazione ed il riconoscimento del valore del lavoro femminile” (typescript). 38

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work in agriculture in the trade union press. Stability became a central issue, though it was understood in different ways in regards to the various categories of agricultural workers. The need to guarantee minimum annual employment through contracted hiring agreements in order to eliminate the precarious nature of seasonal female work was among the main objectives of Federbraccianti in the early sixties, put forward through the training courses it organized for women (though not only for them).44 The jasmine pickers, or “gelsominaie,” offer an emblematic case study. Each needed to pick as many as 22,200 flowers in a day to receive a meagre pay of 800–900 liras. They experienced horrible hours, working from 2 or 3 in the morning throughout the entire day till the evening. But it was the widespread use of child labor among the 20,000 gelsominaie in the regions of Reggio Calabria and Messina that put their horrendous working conditions in the headlines.45 The “dream” of the gelsominaie was that of becoming hired wage-earning farm laborers, to escape their extreme exploitation as “piece workers,” whose wages depended solely on quantity harvested.46 43

The goal of the jasmine pickers, the “gelsominaie” (whom the landowners do not consider laborers and to whom they do not grant agricultural wages) is to win the right to a “wage” of a guaranteed daily minimum of 1,540 liras and to collocate the task of “picker” (which permits the sector’s employers—like the owners of olive groves—to depreciate labor) within the category of farm laborer. But this fight also aims at stabilizing employment. […] Today, farm laborers are fighting to obtain “commissions for their placement” and guarantees that their contract last for the duration of the entire work campaign, without interruption.47

At the beginning of the sixties, the jasmine pickers drew up a declaration asking for substantial changes in their employment relationship, focusing on the problem of job stability. Inspired by the battles of the olive harvesters, another group of southern Italian workers, mostly women, who previously received some public attention and been the subject of an investigation by the Ministry of Labor and the Parliament,48 the jasmine pickers demanded a conference be organized Domenico Solaini, “E ora: qualifiche e stabilità dell’occupazione femminile,” Rassegna sindacale, July 13, 1963. 44 AFLAI, Fondo Federbraccianti I, Serie 3, Commissione di lavoro, b. 221, fasc. 2.3.1, “Corso femminile. Lezione di studio elaborata da (Bloise)” and “Lezione di studio elaborata da Irea Gualandi, L’iniziativa del sindacato per l’assistenza, la previdenza e i servizi sociali.” 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Domenico Solaini, “Le gelsominaie da cottimiste a salariate con qualifica,” Rassegna sindacale, July 13, 1963: 2. 48 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, Donne della campagna, b. 7, fasc. 2, “Commissione di inchiesta tra le lavoratrici di olive promossa dal Comitato per la parità di retribuzione.” AFLAI, Fondo Federbraccianti I, Serie, Commissione di lavoro, b. 237, fasc. 12, Commissione femminile 1962 (typescript, 1961). 43

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to investigate their difficult working conditions. There they established specific goals to fight for with the support of the trade unions,49 including a daily minimum wage and stable contracts during the harvesting period for a minimum of 90 consecutive days. This was an important demand because, despite work lasting for a whole season, employers often deliberately shortened contracts by means of interruption, in order to circumvent state regulations concerning daily wages. Food, transport, dormitories, work clothes, nurseries for working mothers, and trade-union management of placements were other goals mentioned in the union’s flyers and leaflets.50 In 1962, the female jasmine pickers went on strike, obtaining what the trade unions considered a “great victory,” a production bonus of 120 liras per day and 260 liras per kilogram, to be applied from the beginning of the next year.51

1.3.3 AGAINST BOGUS SEASONAL WORK: THE FOOD INDUSTRY WORKERS These few details suffice to justify the discontent and protest of the sugar industry workers, who feel that their job stability is increasingly uncertain, while they are subjected to totally inadequate treatment, to the point that some of them leave the sector in search of safer and better paid employment.52

Another group fighting for stability was food industry workers. At their 1963 congress, they declared their main objective to be eliminating “bogus seasonal work.”53 Like in the case of farm workers, labor in the food industry was largely feminized and the problem of seasonal employment was targeted as a clear obstacle to achieving job stability. The sugar industry sector presented specific problems. The trade unions complained about contraction in the sector, attested by the fact that plants in the sugar industry were underused, with production levels reaching only 60–70% of their potential. Over a ten-year period from 1953 to 1963, the number of permanent AFLAI, Fondo Federbraccianti I, Serie, Commissione di lavoro, b. 237, fasc. 12, Commissione femminile 1962, CGIL Federbraccinati Reggio Calabria, Conquistare un contratto organico per i Lavoratori addetti al Gelsomineto (flyer). 50 AFLAI, Fondo Federbraccianti I, Serie, Commissione di lavoro, b. 237, fasc. 12, Commissione femminile 1962 (typescript, 1961). 51 Ilario Guazzaloca, “Lotta contrattuale delle maestranze degli zuccherifici,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 13, June 8, 1963: 9. 52 “Mozione finale del Congresso nazionale della Federazione lavoratori zuccherieri, alimentaristi e tabacchine (FILZIAT),” Rassegna sindacale, no. 9, April 13, 1963. 53 Ilario Guazzaloca, “Lotta contrattuale delle maestranze degli zuccherifici,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 13, June 8, 1963. 49

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workers, male and female, had fallen by 35%, and temporary laborers by 20%. According to the trade union press, it was the absence of a minimum level of job stability, considered necessary by men and women workers alike, that was the root cause of the drastic drop in labor supply as workers sought out more stable and better- paid jobs in other productive sectors.54 The congress of the FILZIAT (The Italian Federation of Sugar, Food Industry and Tobacco Workers) made bargaining demands over staffing and employment levels in order to help negotiate for a set minimum duration of seasonal contracts and more regulation of shift work. They followed that up with a proposal to abolish fixed-term contracts and sub-contracting in order to assert the principle of just cause in cases of dismissal,55 a topic that, as we shall see, was amply debated at the time. Fixedterm contracts were the means most often used to create a reserve of temporary and unstable work, as the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy (1959) had noted a few years earlier. These unstable labor relations mostly affected women, as they comprised the majority employed in the food industries.

1.3.4 FOR A SECURE ANNUAL WAGE: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS The establishment of a special contribution paid totally by the employers and administered by the Casse Edili [the builders’ fund], which allows the worker who loses days and hours of work for reasons beyond his control (suspension, unemployment, illness, accident, etc.) to receive at least 85% of the earnings lost. This claim is also known as “minimum guaranteed annual income.”56

In the early sixties, workers in the construction industry, a strongly masculinized sector, also sought greater job stability. Subject to structural instability, these workers were not seeking stability in terms of the employment relationship, as agricultural and food workers were, but rather wanted to be paid for periods of inactivity, which were common in the construction industry. The trade union press in the sixties defined the very life of the construction laborer as “provisional” and “casual” due to the temporary nature of construction.57 With the above demands of the construction workers, the issue of stability came to be linked to that of greater welfare benefits, as only these could guarantee an escape from the condition of precarity. As historian Stefano Gallo has noted Ibid. “Mozione finale del Congresso nazionale della Federazione lavoratori zuccherieri, alimentaristi e tabacchine (FILZIAT),” Rassegna sindacale, no. 9, April, 13 1963. 56 Elio Capodaglio, “Salario minimo annuo garantito e riduzione degli orari di lavoro,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 13, June 8, 1963. 57 G.I., “Edili: categoria di punta,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 20, September 28, 1963. 54 55

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(Gallo 2012), the desire for job stability became central to construction workers beginning with the so-called “hot autumn” (1969–1970). The trade union press clarified the features of struggle in the early sixties, when construction workers went so far as to claim a “guaranteed annual salary.” Employers were to provide a guaranteed annual salary, through the creation of a special fund. Periods of involuntary inactivity due to unemployment or illness were also be covered (Capodaglio 1963). This demand reversed a traditional trade union strategy to fight for increased wages to make up for unpaid inactivity, rather than pay for inactivity. These workers understood the issue in the following terms: “above all it is a matter of achieving greater power in the workplace, in the entities typical of the category (pension funds and schools), and obtaining certain mechanisms without which even the extra ‘money’ which we shall certainly have, would lose much of its practical significance.”58 The Federazione italiana lavoratori legno edili ed affini (The Federation of Construction, Wood, and Allied Workers, FILLEA) took up the demands of construction workers during its National Congress in March 1963.59 Besides a “guaranteed minimum annual wage,” FILLEA’s demands included the reduction of working hours (to 40 hours a week), but for the same wages; new regulations for piece rates and other forms of incentivized wages, recognition of trade union rights, wage increases, and training reforms. The Federation also talked about including working hours for “seasonal” laborers, and an increase in social benefits and welfare in a comprehensive social security system (Ibid.)

1.3.5 PRECARITY ON THE WARD: THE HOSPITAL DOCTORS’ DISPUTE The organized action of hospital doctors belongs to the complex framework of the problem of the development of our country’s hospital system and strikes some extremely interesting notes. They started from a trade union claim, a sectorial one: job stability for hospital aids and assistants up to the age of 65. […] The fixed-term contract for aids and assistants (4 years for aids, 2 for assistants, with possibility of renewal by the administration but for no more than one further term) is not only a mediaeval survival in actual fact but also represents a grave obstacle to serious work by hospital physicians. These are inevitably induced to seek—outside of the hospitals—in the free-lance professions or in the National Health Day Surgeries, that stable income they will find indispensable once they are laid off.60 Ibid. “La Risoluzione del VI Congresso della Federazione Lavoratori Edili, Legno e Affini (FILLEA), Firenze 16–19 Marzo 1963,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 13, June 8, 1963. 60 Felice Piersanti, “Lo Stato deve pagare la riforma ospedaliera,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 4, January 26, 1963: 18. 58 59

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In the early sixties, demands for greater job stability were not the exclusive prerogative of the lower classes. Alongside farm hands, factory workers, industrial home workers, and building laborers, highly qualified workers—like hospital doctors—felt the lack of stability in their work. Particularly problematic was the status of assistant physicians working as aides to senior hospital doctors.61 Their demands stemmed from the way work was organized in Italian hospitals in the early sixties and were due to the limited career pathways available to these workers. Between the 1960s and 1970s, they grafted these demands onto a more radical criticism of the disorganized development of the Italian National Health Service upon which the funding of hospitals depended (Luzzi 2004; Vicarellli 2010). The birth of the ANAAO (Associazione nazionale aiuti e assistenti ospedalieri, The National Association of Hospital Aids and Assistants) in 1959, and its rapid development in the early sixties, as recounted by activists of the period, marked the development of a certain class consciousness among hospital doctors (Fassari 2009).62 It was not only the shared structural precarity of hospital doctors acting as aides and assistants to senior physicians that generated collective awareness, so were also the repeated strikes and demonstrations organized by doctors during the long dispute that took place in the early sixties. The first strike, according to the political-trade union press of the time, led to “profound resonance in all sectors, which concerned and worried government, parties, trade unions, public opinion in general, even public law and order, in certain areas of the country.”63 In 1961, on the occasion of the Extraordinary Congress of ANAAO, five hundred doctors marched through the streets of Milan, wearing white coats, the symbol of their profession (Fassari 2009). Further strikes, with demonstrations in the streets of Rome and other Italian cities, followed. The strikers primarily demanded the elimination of fixed-term contracts and the stabilization of the status of assistant physicians, guaranteed job stability up to the age of 65, alongside supplementary demands for changes to additional salary quotas among assistant physicians. These wage subsidies were particularly important for assistant doctors, whose wages at the time were low, considerably lower than those of hospital physicians. The “fixed fees,” as they were called at the time, were distributed by the head physicians on an arbitrary basis to their assistants, paying only a very small (and variable) part. The problem of instability of the employment relationship, based on fixed-term contracts, compounded that of low-salaries (Piersanti 1963). “La Segreteria della CGIL sull’agitazione dei medici e sulla riforma dell’organizzazione ospedaliera,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 4, January 26, 1963. 62 “Tavola Rotonda sulla vertenza Medici-Mutue,” Rassegna sindacale, no. 11, May 11, 1963. 63 Ibid. 61

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The ANAAO played an increasingly important role in promoting the demands of assistant and other temporary doctors during the early sixties, and arguing for legal reforms pertaining to hospital doctors (Fassari 2009). However, these claims were part of the broader debate regarding the reform of the hospital and health-care system which involved a wide range of subjects. Emblematic in this regard was the round table discussion dedicated to the “Medici–Mutue” (National Health Doctors) dispute promoted by the journal Rassegna Sindacale (Trade Union Review) in 1963, attended by representatives of the National Federation of the Order of Physicians, the National Union of Physicians, the CGIL, the INCA, several local authorities, and the ANAAO itself.64 In 1965, following massive strikes which saw the collaboration of several medical trade union organizations, hospital doctors up to the age of 65 gained workplace stability. In addition, a collective labor agreement linked salaries to full-time (40 hours per week) or part-time (30 hours) (Fassari 2009). Only in 1968, however, did a long-awaited hospital reform, signed by Health Minister and socialist Luigi Mariotti, come to fruition.

Ibid.

64

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CHAPTER 2

THE CONSTRUCTION OF STABLE WORK BETWEEN PARLIAMENT AND LABOR LAW

A

sharp, increasing clash of dramatic proportions exists in Italy between actual working conditions and the right to work solemnly guaranteed all Italians by Article 4 of the Republican Constitution.1 The decade before 1968 was central to the construction of “stable work” in Italy. The so-called “Years of Garantismo” (Ichino 2008; Costa 2009)—underestimated by historiography, which has instead emphasized the innovative character of the 1968–73 period—were crucial for creating more stable labor relations, culminating in 1970 with the approval of the Statuto dei Diritti dei Lavoratori (The Statute of Workers’ Rights) (Alleva 1970; Napoli 1980). Some particularly advanced and progressive new legislation, enabled by a convergence between political parties over a set of common goals, gave rise to one of the most significant periods of labor reforms both in Europe and the world. A broad investigation into the conditions of Italian workers, particularly the working classes, was crucial for defining the contours of these reforms. The parliamentary inquiry, already used during the early fifties to investigate subjects like poverty and unemployment, became a particularly important tool for the communist opposition to effect labor reform under center and center-left governments by instilling their demands with a sense of objectivity. This convergence of social goals became the basis for labor legislation in the sixties, which in turn cemented overtime the identification of standard employment with permanent (full-time) contracts and promoted the idea that other kinds of contractual relationships were phenomena that needed to be regulated strictly in order to promote job stability. The protection of male and female workers from such improper labor relations was fundamental for the reduction of certain forms of precarity that still existed within the Italian labor market during the economic boom years, as was highlighted in the previous chapter. Meanwhile, protection against discriminatory dismissals came to represent a crucial aspect of building “job stability” (Napoli 1980). Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Agostino Novella and Vittorio Foa, “Istituzione di un comitato interministeriale per la stabilità dell’occupazione nell’industria,” announced on February 25, 1959.

1

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The need to promote employment and wage stability had already been a topic of parliamentary discussion during the early fifties, when two bills on the issue were presented. On May 14, 1954, Teresa Noce and Giuseppe di Vittorio were the first signatories of a bill proposing a minimum wage for all.2 The declared goal of the bill was to implement Article 36 of the Constitution, guaranteeing men and women workers a salary commensurate not only with the quantity and quality of the work performed but also sufficient to assure them and their families a free an decent life.3 The bill established a certain minimum wage (hourly and daily) for all workers, regardless of gender or age.4 Besides the Constitution, the text expressly mentioned Convention 26 “Methods for Fixing Minimum Wages” of the International Labor Organization,5 ratified by Italy in 1930 although never actually applied. Some motivating factors for this bill were the “precarious” wage situation of the period, the practice of dismissals as retaliation for trade-union activity, the dismantling of entire industrial plants, and the migration of the rural workforce to urban areas in search of permanent employment. Vittorio Foa and Agostino Novella drew up a second bill in 1959 to assure the stability of employment in the industrial sector through the establishment of an inter-ministerial committee, which was charged with conducting labor surveys and proposing ways of dealing with the industrial crises arising in large-scale companies (those with over 500 employees).6 They called upon jurist Costantino Mortati,7 former member of the Commissione dei 75 (The Commission of 75) and one of the most authoritative drafters of the Constitution, to confirm the fact that “the policy of full employment of the workforce had been prescribed as Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Teresa Noce, Giuseppe Di Vittorio et al., “Fissazione di un minimo garantito di retribuzione per tutti i lavoratori,” announced on May 14, 1954. 3 On the more general attitude of left-wing parties on the issue of poverty, see Fulvio Cammarano, “Il Partito comunista italiano ed il Partito socialista italiano di fronte al problema della povertà (1945–1970),” in La povertà in Italia, edited by Giovanni Sarpellon, 549–90 (Milan: Franco-Angeli, 1982). 4 The law fixed the minimum salary at 100 liras per hour and 800 liras per 8-hour day, with additional incentives for overtime. 5 “Minimum Wage-Fixing Machinery Convention,” adopted by Geneva during the 11th session of the International Labor Conference ( June 16, 1928), ratified by Italy on September 9, 1930. http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f ?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300:P11300_INSTRUMENT_ID:312171. 6 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Agostino Novella and Vittorio Foa, “Istituzione di un comitato interministeriale per la stabilità dell’occupazione nell’industria,” announced on February 25, 1959. 7 Costantino Mortati (1891–1985), university teacher, was a member of the commission for the re-organization of the State and the Constituent Assembly of Italy, later a judge of the Constitutional Court; he is considered one of the greatest constitutionalists of the twentieth century. For a biography see: Fulco Lanchester, Mortati, Costantino in “Il contributo italiano alla storia del Pensiero: Diritto,” Enciclopedia Treccani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ costantino-mortati/. 2

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one of the fundamental necessities of the democratic State.” According to Foa and Novella, the problem of unemployment and underemployment had been far from solved in the course of the previous decade. Their bill aimed, therefore, at creating a tool capable of controlling investment policies “from the point of view of the workforce employed”9 and preventing further decreases in employment, constantly threatened by collective and individual redundancy. The Noce-Di Vittorio and Foa-Novella bills were not the only ones that sought to implement articles regarding labor in the Italian Constitution. For instance, there was a legislative effort in the fifties to implement Article 37 of the Italian Constitution concerning equal pay for men and women (Betti 2018a). Throughout the fifties, and to some extent even up until the approval of the Statute of Workers’ Rights in 1970, the Constitution was the reference model for the modernization of labor legislation (Costa 2009; Mortati 2005; Mengoni 1998). “Bringing the Constitution into the factories” was not just a slogan launched by the CGIL but was also a genuine political strategy. During the early fifties, the darkest hour for Italian labor relations,10 the relationship between the Constitution and labor was part of the thinking of the so-called leftist labor jurists centered around the journal Rivista giuridica del lavoro e della previdenza sociale (Legal Review of Labor and Social Security), in which Piero Calamandrei and Ugo Natoli were particularly prominent (Ichino 2008; Cazzetta 2009; Romagnoli 1995; Passaniti 2016). At the international level, there were other organizations, like the International Labor Organization (Maul 2019; Kott and Droux 2013; Rodgers et al. 2009) which held conventions and formulated recommendations11 to safeguard workers against discrimination (Convention 111, 1958) and illegitimate layoffs (Resolution 119, 1963), and advocated for labor stability generally in the economic boom years. Only in 1971, though, did Italy ratify the ILO Employment Policy Convention (no. 122, 1964), something which was only possible because of the positive political and cultural atmosphere following the approval of the Statute of Workers’ Rights. 8

Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Agostino Novella and Vittorio Foa, “Istituzione di un comitato interministeriale per la stabilità dell’occupazione nell’industria,” announced on February 25, 1959: 1. 9 Ibid., 2. 10 On the repressive character of the first fifteen years of Republican Italy, see Marino (1991; 1995) and the more recent Matard-Bonucci, Dogliani (2017). 11 See the ILO’s website: https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/introduction-to-international-labour-standards/conventions-and-recommendations/lang--en/index.htm. 8

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2.1 The parliamentary inquiry into the conditions of workers in Italy 2.1.1 A POLITICAL ALLIANCE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE WORKING-CLASS CONDITION All this leads to the conclusion that it is not sufficient that Parliament make laws regarding social issues. It is not sufficient to demand that labor contracts take mandatory effect: it is necessary, above all, to dispel the climate of “fear” present in several firms which prevents workers from “daring to” assert their rights. The Parliament cannot live in the abstract but must, as it has done following previous investigations, become effectively acquainted with the country’s “real” conditions. In a Republic, such as Italy, based on labor, it is fundamental to establish whether labor citizenship really exists within the firm community.12

With these words, the Christian Democrat parliamentary deputy Giuseppe Rapelli, president of the House’s Labor Commission, presented the bill “Inchiesta parlamentare sulle condizioni dei lavoratori in Italia” (The Parliamentary Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy). THe Christian Democrat members of the Chamber of Deputies Alessandro Butté and Ettore Calvi13 put forward the bill in February 1954. This proposal had a two-fold significance for its backers. First, they positioned the bill as a “corollary” to previous parliamentary inquiries that had dealt with the issues of poverty and unemployment. Second, it followed a previous investigation14 into workers’ rights that had been championed by the ACLI15 and by the Milan Humanitarian Society, among other groups.16 The purpose of this parliamentary inquiry was also twofold: “to conduct an indepth, exhaustive survey on the conditions of industrial workers” and to “propose measures to the Parliament and the Government aimed at improving the worker’s social security system and its strict implementation.”17 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti, Relazione della XI Commissione permanente sulla proposta d’Inchiesta parlamentare dei deputati Alessandro Butté ed Ettore Calvi, submitted by Giuseppe Rapelli on November 3, 1954: 2. 13 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” Proposta d’Inchiesta parlamentare di iniziativa dei deputati Alessandro Butté e Ettore Calvi, “Inchiesta parlamentare sulle condizioni dei lavoratori in Italia,” announced on February 18, 1954. 14 See also Rieser and Ganapini, 1981. 15 The ACLI published a white book entitled “La classe lavoratrice si difende” [The working class defends itself ], ACLI, 1953. 16 La Società Umanitaria di Milano published “Le condizioni del lavoratore nell’impresa industriale” [The conditions of the worker in industrial enterprises], 1954. 17 Ibid., 2. 12

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The House approved the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy with a very large majority in January 1955 (with only 33 votes against out of a total of 413).18 The parliamentary debate that preceded the vote shows how the respect for labor contracts, welfare state legislation, and the “dignity of the man as citizen and worker” were shared by majority and opposition alike. Speeches by the communist deputies, who approved the Christian Democrats’ proposal, reveal an extraordinary synergy of political forces concerning the problems of the working classes, in total incongruity with the divisive political atmosphere during one of the harshest periods of the Cold War. The Secretary General of the CGIL Giuseppe Di Vittorio joined with the progressive and reforming aims of the Christian Democratic Party’s bill, among other significant trade union leaders. In his speech, in which he assured the Communist Party’s support for the bill, Di Vittorio emphasized the commitment of the PCI and the CGIL to such issues, and particularly to the defense of the rights and dignity of factory workers. He emphasized pointedly the political significance and values of the Christian Democrats’ proposal: We believe that the approval of this bill by the Parliament of the Republic is of high social and human significance. This act means that Parliament is no stranger to the real, painful lives that workers experienced in industrial, agricultural and all kinds of enterprises. This act of the Parliament of the Republic means that the national community as a whole is intervening to protect the rights of workers to liberty, freedom of expression, thought, organization, press, that is, the right to exercise all of the fundamental rights that the Constitution of the Republic guarantees all Italians, therefore workers too.19

The socialist deputy Oreste Lizzadri,20 future vice president of the Inquiry Commission, agreed that this instrument was important because it would inform Parliament of the grave abuses that workers faced. Majority and opposition agreed on the need for direct state intervention to regulate working conditions and relationships in order to safeguard workers’ rights. Some speakers stressed the importance of detailed analyses of the so-called “particular contractual relationships” (industrial home-based work, sub-contract work, and fixed-term contract work),21 as well as the need to pay particular attention to the condition of female workers.22

Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Discussioni,” session of January 28, 1955, bill in favor of a parliamentary inquiry: 16554. 19 Ibid., 16544–16545. 20 Ibid., 16537–16538. 21 Ibid., 16535–16536 (speech by Clemente Maglietta). 22 Ibid., 16541–16542 (speech by Renzo Pigni). 18

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The Inquiry Commission took these suggestions into consideration when drawing up a questionnaire for male and female workers, which was then used to map the use of fixed-term contract, sub-contract, and home-based industrial work.23 It also asked about levels and stability of employment, and was interested in the problem of firings and forms of discrimination, particularly against women.24 Some Christian Democrat MPs, like Dino Penazzato, explicitly defined working conditions in Italy as “precarious” and the topic of job stability emerged as an important theme within this parliamentary debate. Measuring work instability was difficult because companies often discouraged workers from reporting workplace conditions and abuses that made their jobs unstable. In the thinking of the parliamentarians of the fifties, the problem of job instability was closely linked to employers’ violations of contracts and norms and discrimination against employees, as emerged from Penazzato’s speech: We notice that, quite often, even serious complaints are not openly lodged with legislative and administrative bodies, in particular with the labor inspectorates, since workers, for fear of job stability, prefer to suffer in silence. We do not fool ourselves that investigation alone may suffice to overcome this situation, which is so closely linked to the precarious employment conditions, to the high numbers of unemployed […].25

The high unemployment rate and the absence of safeguard measures against firings tended to exacerbate both the precariousness workers faced and the degree to which they perceived it. Overall, the concept of precarity, although explicitly mentioned by some parliamentarians, had not yet become broadly spread in the mid-fifties beyond Republican Italy’s first two parliamentary inquiries. The Unemployment Inquiry26 made it perfectly clear that the Italian working class sought “secure employment, that is jobs without risks and with only minor irregularities” (Tremelloni 1954, xi–xii). Unemployed workers were finding a lack of stable work and only occasional, temporary employment. Even if it still only appeared on the margins, the concept of precarity did come up in summary reports of the inquiries (Ruffolo and Parasassi 1954). Antonio Pesenti,

“La commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sulle condizioni dei lavoratori inizierà l’indagine a partire dal Gennaio 1956,” Rassegna sindacale, December 15, 1955. 24 Ibid., 31–32. 25 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of January 28, 1955, bill in favor of a parliamentary inquiry: 16531 (speech by Dino Penazzato). The third parliamentary inquiry of the fifties began in 1955 and formally continued its activity until 1958. For a summary, see Addario 1976. 26 The “Unemployment Inquiry” was realized by the Italian Parliament in the early 1950s (1952–1954), right before the Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy. 23

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in his book chapter “Sottoretribuzione e miseria” (Underpayment and poverty), argued that “worker’s employment precarity” (Pesenti 1953, 193) was one reason for workers accepting underpayment and therefore poverty, which was particularly the case in small businesses and in crafts. The same parliamentarian noted the “precarity of the majority of southern laborers,” who worked an average of only 78 days a year. The number of permanent workers was low compared to the extremely high percentage of seasonal male and female workers (Pesenti 1953, 195). The Parliamentary Inquiry into the Conditions of Italian Workers subsequently investigated the conditions of specific categories of seasonal workers, like olive harvesters, and others usually employed without regular contracts, like home-based industrial workers and domestic workers.

2.1.2 “PRECARITY” IN THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry’s efforts were fundamental for understanding the relationship between employment precarity, management strategy, gender, and the construction of employment “stability,” which culminated in the Statute of Workers’ Rights.27 The vast bulk of documents collected over three years by the Commission (April 1955–June 1958) led to the publication of as many as 25 volumes in two series, Relazioni and Documenti (Reports and Documents). Although these volumes do not address the problem of precarious employment in those exact words, they did examine “particular labor relationships” (fixed-term contract, sub-contract, and home-based industrial work) in which the conditions of precarious work are evident. Though precarity was not employed as a major concept in the volumes, the authors did occasionally use the word “precarity” in analyzing the employment and social consequences of the diffusion of particular labor relationships. In the reports, the President of the Commission, the Christian Democrat Leopoldo Rubinacci (Commissione parlamentare 1959), explained the conceptual framework that had guided the parliamentarians in their study. It is clear throughout the volumes that the Commission made assumptions about the “normality of fixed-term employment relationships” versus the “exceptional nature” of other forms of employment like temporary contracts and sub-contract work. According to Rubinacci, the use of these abusive “particular A third parliamentary inquiry of the fifties was established in 1955 and continued working until 1958. For a synthesis, see Addario (1976).

27

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labor relationships” had so abruptly exploded that they had become almost overnight part of the structure of the Italian labor market. This was an issue the Commission sought to address legislatively: The fixed-term contract is […] adopted by the entrepreneurs, not for reasons inherent to the functional, productive organization of the company […] but with the intent of avoiding the constraints and charges deriving from permanent contracts. It is therefore a question of relationships which by nature should be permanent and for which there would be no reason to foresee their termination at a given moment, but to which a term has been set for purposes of evasion. This is confirmed by the fact […] that very often these contractual relationships do not cease when they come to an end but are renewed […]. The short interruptions between their renewals are not due to any productive exigencies but to avoid formal continuity (Ibid., 106).

Here the Commission notes pointedly that by the end of the fifties, the fixedterm contract had become used not just for conventional productive and organizational needs (like in seasonal, temporary, and informal work), to replace absent workers, to subcontract work, or to cope with orders. Rather, fixed-term contracts had become a tool of employers to “evade contractual or legislative regulations.” Yet up until the 1966 law on individual dismissals, the fixed-term contract had actually proved sometimes more “stable” than the permanent contract, since permanent contract workers were subject to ad nutum dismissal. Fixed-term workers, in contrast, were protected by the terms of their contract for its duration, though usually that was not for very long. In 1963, the Commission addressed the abuse of fixed-term contracts, underlining their abnormally fast growth during the boom years. These contracts, according to the Commission, were used in an abusive manner: as a means to cover trial periods for workers, fire workers for illness or injury, keep workers subjugated, discriminate against political and union activists, and circumvent typical contractual provisions regarding the seniority of workers (Commissione parlamentare 1963). Female workers found themselves in a condition of particular precarity: fixed-term contracts could be used to give employers the ability to fire them if they decided to marry or have children, thus effectively evading Law no. 860 on the protection of working mothers. That fixed-term contracts were a legal way to fire women for marriage or on the grounds of “spinsterhood clauses,” was also emphasized by the Commission’s report: The causes that lead employers to take advantage of the stipulation of fixedterm contracts are well-known […]. The system is built […] within this overall framework and used by various companies to hire female staff, availing themselves of fixed-term contracts. As we know, art. 3 of law number 860 (3) which prohibits the dismissal of pregnant women and of women who have recently

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given birth, although within certain time limits, establishes that this prohibition does not apply if the service for which the worker was hired terminates or the contractual relationship itself as stipulated expires (Commissione parlamentare 1963, 252).

It was precisely between the late 1950s and the early 1960s that these discriminatory practices became widespread, giving rise to an increase in labor disputes, official complaints by female workers, and parliamentary actions to protect female workers (Merlin 1961; SUMI 1962). According to the Commission, those interventions did lead to a decline in layoffs due to marriage, but also led to a simultaneous increase in fixed-term contracts (Commissione parlamentare 1963). By means of subcontracted work, often masked by fictitious cooperatives, a system of illegal labor brokerage takes form and translates into a true market of people hired under dire circumstances and without any guarantee of job continuity, taking advantage of both their jobless state, and of particular conditions like those of southern Italian laborers who have moved to the north of the country (Commissione parlamentare 1959, 132).

The Commission’s concerns were not restricted to fixed-term contracts. Subcontracted work was also widespread in Italian industry by the end of the fifties and raised its own dilemmas. The Commission identified two types of sub-contract work: “pure and simple workforce subcontracting” and “subcontracting of services.” The Commission President Rubinacci considered workforce subcontracting to be “an abnormal system involving very serious evasion of the law and of labor contract norms, which cannot be justified by any productive-organizational reason” (Ibid.). For the Commission members, low wages were connected to a whole set of not fully legal recruitment practices, leading to the caporalato phenomenon, which they saw as one of the forces deteriorating the legal labor brokerage system. Employers used sub-contracted work primarily for economic convenience, but also because it allowed them greater freedom to fire their employees, to reduce the number of permanent employees they had, and to circumvent rules on public labor exchange through intermediation. This tactic, argued the Commission’s report is strictly trade union related and aims, by sub-contracted work, to have at one’s disposal a workforce less inclined to take part in union action, because of the precarity of their situation, or who, in any case, take no interest in the issues regarding the stable workforce of single companies (Ibid., 174).

As evident from the above quotation, the Commission also pointed out that sub-contracted work was clearly a way for employers to keep their workers in a permanent state of precarity and to make it harder for them to unionize, creating

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a divide between them and the contracted workforce. It is precisely in relation to this kind of contract that the concept of precarity and its opposite, stability, most clearly entered the mindset of the Commission. They related precarity directly to the broader situation of discrimination and dependance sub-contracted workers experienced compared to the permanently employed. By the end of the fifties home-based industrial work, according to estimates provided by the Commission, involved between 600,000 and 700,000 workers nationwide, mostly women. It was widespread all over the country and involved the cities of southern (Palermo, Naples, Salerno), central (Prato, Florence, Ancona), north-western (Milan, Turin, Savona, Biella), and north-eastern Italy (Venice, Vicenza) alike. Home-based industrial work was publicly stigmatized and thought of as an (almost) exclusively female issue (Ibid.) The Commission saw home-based work as the most precarious form of labor because of the absence of contracts, the lack of protection in cases of illness, pregnancy, termination, or reduction of work, and the instability of wages, which were calculated on a piecework basis. All of these factors made for a highly exploitative industry in the eyes of the Commission (Ibid.). The main observations were made regarding home-based work of a professional nature, involving several thousand specialized female workers, who dedicate themselves permanently to production on behalf of others, at times even advancing the funds for the purchase of machinery, without the necessary safeguards for their future and, above all, for their old age, as they lack the social security provisions required for employees (Ibid., 306).

The Commission underlined two intertwined phenomena emerging during the boom years, usually considered as opposites: the widespread diffusion of home-based work and mass industrial development (Betti 2021). In its reports, the Commission emphasized the social consequences of the growth of home-based work in various areas, including the impoverishment of the local economies of small and medium urban areas, which only had a small number of factories. Employers’ associations, like the Industrial Association of Vicenza, were of particular interest to the Commission in this regard. The testimony of members of that organization, which the Commission included in its documentation, demonstrated the strong concern some employers’ organizations felt towards the expansion of home-based work, which they saw as sucking production and growth away from their businesses (Ibid., 335). The Commission discovered how in some cases entire production units in factories, like mechanized looms, would be dismantled and then reappear in the homes of former female employees who had been officially fired and then were expected to rent or buy on credit the very same machines they had used in the factory. Not only was this system more exploitative from the outset

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compared to normal industrial labor, the introduction of piecework payment and the predatory rates charged for the machines also forced the now homebased workers to labor far beyond what was considered legally to be physical exploitation (an average of 12–14 hours per day) (Ibid.).

2.1.3 THE PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY AND THE NEW LABOR LAW The Commission drafted several recommendations for new laws regulating these “particular labor relationships.” To restrain the growth of fixed-term contracts, they proposed strict regulations on them and finding ways to reduce the expulsion of women from the labor market, which is where fixed-term employers found most of their new hires. The Commission reiterated “the principle that employment relationships be permanent normally,” stating that fixed-term contracts should be considered an exception rather than a norm and looked upon “with disfavor and suspicion” by legislators (Ibid., 108–9). This kind of short-term contract should be made less advantageous than permanent ones by providing higher minimum wages to “compensate for the precarity of the relationship” and by limiting the number of renewals. Fixed-term contracts would only be allowed in a few situations: for seasonal work (according to specific tables of professions), for substituting temporarily absent workers, for non-ordinary or temporary jobs, for subcontracting when extra labor is needed, for work requiring different skills than normal, and, in general, when contracts have a duration of less than three years. In the absence of these conditions, contracts were to be considered permanent. The employer had to prove conclusively one of those conditions to hire on fixed-term contracts. A 1962 labor law finally adopted most of the Commission’s proposals.28 Regarding sub-contracting, the Commission proposed to amend Article 2127 of the Civil Code in such a way as to prohibit “the procurement of labor in any form,” and redefine contract as “provision to the entrepreneur, by an employee or a third party, of labor to be used by the company.” Subcontracting, instead, had to be explicitly limited and considered exceptional, because it was a less favorable situation for workers. Workers hired under this kind of contract were to receive the same regulatory and remunerative treatment as the company’s main workers in order to avoid employers using the contract just to save on the cost of wages. Employers had to be held accountable to the employees of the sub-contracting company and had to guarantee compliance with contractual and legal obligations (including those relating to social security). Violations of all these provisions on sub-contracting and fixed-term contracts were subject to fines. 28

Law no. 230, “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a tempo determinato,” passed on April 18, 1962, and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 125, May 17, 1962.

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The Commission’s role in forming legislation on home-based industrial work was more complex. The legislative process leading to approval of the 1958 law “Tutela del lavoro a domicilio” (The Home-based Work Protection)29 had begun several years before with the presentation of two bills during the first legislature of Republican Italy (1948–1953) and presented again during the second (1953–58). In 1957, when the bills were merged, the parliamentarians working on the proposed legislation called upon the role of the Commission. Though the Commission agreed on the need for such a law, its members emphasized a number of problematic aspects regarding the proposed legislation, first pointing out that if the definition of “home-based work” was too narrow, it might lead to grey areas of employment unclassifiable as either home-based work, artisanal work, or standard employed work. The Commission confirmed the need of introducing ad hoc tools capable of regulating home-based industrial work (like registers for home-based workers, provincial and central control committees, registers for employers, and some sort of work papers for home-based workers), as well as establishing mandatory rates based on the full piecework principle, and the creation of a social security regime specifically for home-based workers (to cover accidents, health benefits, and old-age insurance) (Betti 2021, 68). The Commission’s report on home-based industrial work contained one dissenting opinion from the socialist deputy Oreste Lizzadri and the communist deputy Massimo Caprara, who proposed instead making full-time home-based workers classified as normal employees in order to guarantee a minimum wage and circumnavigate many of these issues. As we shall see, the parliamentary debate and the subsequent legislation ended up revolving around that very issue of whether home-based workers should be recognized as normal employees.

2.2 Legislation on “particular labor relationships” during the boom years The legislation on “particular labor relations” introduced during the years of the economic boom (1958–63) represented a fundamental step towards creating job stability. It assumed permanent employment contracts as the “standard,” a position emphasized by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy. That regulatory norm, however, was based around male workers employed by large industrial enterprises. In other words, this new era of Italian labor law begun during the economic boom did not focus on the numerous other categories of workers, especially women, who were employed in Law no. 264, “Tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” approved on March 13, 1958, and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 85, April 9, 1958.

29

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“particular employment relationships” in the manufacturing and services sectors or in agriculture, where there were many temporary and casual forms of work. As a product of the Commission’s conclusions, itself a widely agreed upon conglomerate of all the main Italian political parties from Christian Democrat to Communist and Socialist, this new era of regulation would target these kinds of “abnormal” labor relationships as something to be avoided and reduced. The labor legislation of the boom years, an expression of the so-called “Season of garantismo” or the Italian “New Deal” of labor law (Costa 2009), required lengthy preparation to get to this point, as shown by the long list of unapproved bills on home-based work (1958), on workforce sub-contracting and labor brokerage (1960), and on fixed-term contracts (1962). The three bills examined below had already been presented during the first half of the fifties, before the Commission had highlighted the abnormal growth in these forms of employment and their increasing abuse. The boom years were a time of great social and economic ferment, allowing both for the rapid rise of “the most extreme and selfish forms of exploitation of the workforce” (Montuschi 1979) and for the state to lay down the foundations of a new body of regulations to combat that exploitation. The importance of these laws for the creation of stability in the workplace and the reduction of labor precarity clearly emerges in a diachronic perspective. It was precisely the laws governing fixed-term contracts and workforce sub-contracting that later in the eighties and nineties wound up at the center of heated discussions between labor lawyers. In the new atmosphere of that era, the paradigm of labor stability would give way to that of labor flexibility (Ichino 2008). The juridical debate on the above mentioned bills (home-based work, workforce sub-contracting and labor brokerage, and fixed-term contracts) was much smaller than the one on firings. The articles on them in the two main labor law journals, the Rivista di Diritto del lavoro (Labor Law Review) and the Rivista giuridica del lavoro e della previdenza sociale Labor Law and Social Security Review) were limited and mostly appeared after the passing of the law. The juridical thinking on “particular labor relationships” had no effect on the drawing up of the bills, whose final architecture almost solely reflected the recommendations of the Commission. 2.2.1 HOME-BASED INDUSTRIAL WORK Persons of both sexes who in their own homes or in places at their disposal carry out—even with the help of their family members, but with the exclusion of a paid workforce—employee work however retributed, on behalf of one or more entrepreneurs, using raw or ancillary materials and equipment of their own or provided by the entrepreneur, shall be considered home-based workers for the purposes of this law.30 Law no. 264, “Tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” art. 1.

30

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The above definition describes how home-based industrial workers were defined by the law approved in March 1958, which regulated for the first time “particular labor relations.” Home-based workers who worked in places belonging to the employer or enrolled in the artisans’ register were not protected by this law. This proved too restrictive and led to the law’s revision in 1973.31 Among the most significant aspects of the law was the banning of the use of intermediaries by employers, the establishment of provincial labor-office registers for both homebased workers and contractors, the creation of provincial commissions with the task of screening workers, and the establishment of a central commission of control at the Ministry of Labor. As an additional tool, the law established “registers” for employers, issued by the Labor Inspectorate, and a work booklet for home-based workers where they wrote down their job description and respective compensation. These were to be established on the basis of full piecework rates, which would be assessed through collective bargaining or stipulated by provincial commissions. The rates were to be displayed in the labor exchanges and at the headquarters of the Labor Inspectorate to inform the workers. Registered home-based workers could benefit from the main social security benefits (like disability, pensions, maternity leave, and sick leave), but not from unemployment insurance. The law also established, in the event of infringement by employers, a daily fine of between 2,000 and 5,000 liras.32 As discussed above, the law was the result of a lengthy legislative process that involved the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy. The first draft of the bills on home-based work were dated 1950 and endorsed, respectively, by Giuseppe Di Vittorio and Giulio Pastore,33 who re-submitted them with some slight variations at the beginning of the second legislature (1953–54).34 Both texts highlighted the abnormal growth of home-based work during the post-war period, the lack of social security, and the exploitation of these workers who, according to the two trade unionists, should have been granted the same treatment as employees as far as social security, welfare, and maternity were concerned. The definition of home-based workers and their employers was a decisive point in both bills, as were the establishment of provincial commissions, Ibid. Ibid., arts. 2–15. 33 Chamber of Deputies, I Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Vittorio Santi et al., “Regolamentazione del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on March 7, 1950; Chamber of Deputies, I Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giulio Pastore, Luigi Morelli et al., “Tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on April 28, 1950. 34 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Oreste Lizzadri et al., “Regolamentazione del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on March 23, 1954; Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giulio Pastore and Luigi Morelli, “Tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on September 22, 1953. 31 32

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registers for employers, and collective bargaining rights for workers. Collective bargaining was considered necessary for the establishment of minimum wages no lower than those of factory workers. Di Vittorio also emphasized the role of public employment agencies (collocamento) in acting as an intermediary between employer and worker, while Pastore called for a national fund for social security and a ban on home-based work for children under 14. The Labor Commission of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Paliament discussed the two bills jointly in April 1955.35 A select committee of several deputies, including the communist Adele Bei, the socialist Elena Gatti Caporaso, and the Christian Democrat Gigliola Valandro, was set up to draw up a bill supported by majority and opposition alike. A completed text was presented to the Labor Commission in November 1956.36 The discussion that followed centered on the difficulty of defining the dual aspect of home-based work: traditional home-based crafts and home-based industrial work that tended to replace factory work. The members of the Labor Commission were agreed that work at home was to be both protected and fought against. Work in the home that was seen as traditional needed to be preserved, but “industrial” work that had snuck into the home needed to be reduced, or for some Commission members, even abolished. Yet, it was difficult for the MPs to discern between the two types, as noted by Teresa Noce.37 Di Vittorio held that the “law needed to prevent all forms of employment that were not normal,” while Pastore argued that the law should be premised on the “mistrust” of employers, as they would seek every possible way to circumvent the rules. Umberto Delle Fave, the Undersecretary for Labor, feared the possible negative impact of future legislation on home-based workers, who were generally motivated by poverty and unemployment to accept this kind of employment. Rapelli proposed the creation of cooperatives as a possible solution to over-exploitation, while Sergio Scarpa and Alessandro Butté pointed out that there had to be a strict mechanism to enforce the rules. It was noted several times that Parliament and the Government should play a crucial role in balancing the relationship between capital and labor by stopping the diffusion of industrial work from the factory into the more precarious and exploitative realm of the home.38 On March 27, 1957, after almost two years of discussion,39 the Labor Commission of the Chamber drew up and approved almost unanimously (43 out of Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa, XI Commissione,” Session of April 20, 1955: 557–62. 36 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XI Commissione, Session of November 21, 1956: 916–25. 37 Ibid. 38 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XI Commissione, Session of January 25, 1957: 1002–08. 39 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XI Commissione, Session of January 30, 1957, February 1, 1957, February 13, 1957, February 15, 1957, February 22, 1957, March 22, 1957. 35

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44 favorable) a joint bill based on the two proposed ones.40 The bill was then presented to the Labor Commission of the Senate, which suggested several amendments. The revised bill met with the disapproval of those who had worked on it for so long, who pointed out that the broadly shared goal of making home-based work more costly and equating it to factory-based labor was not achieved. The law passed on March 13, 1958, but almost two years went by before it was fully implemented. The executive regulation was signed by the President of the Republic in December 1959 and became effective in February.41 The trade unions and women’s associations politically mobilized to make the law known to the country’s thousands of female home-based workers and urge them to force their employer to meet the new regulations. The difficulty of applying a law intended to considerably reduce employer’s profits quickly became apparent. In order to evade the obligations imposed by the law, many employers started to blackmail their home-based workers, to force them to become formally artisans, on pain of losing their jobs entirely. Some sources show that this strategy led to the founding of a myriad of new artisanal firms in which employee income was very low, often much less than that of a third level blue-collar worker.42 The limits of the law also emerged in legal debates of the 1960s. For example, Pierpaolo Cipressi of Modena University provided an earlier assessment of the law in 1966, claiming that “problems concerning the notion of home-based workers still persist, as do the difficulties in distinguishing them from craftsmen, the legal nature of their relative employment relationships, and the implementation of the aforementioned law” (Cipressi 1966, 47). The difficulties encountered in applying the 1958 law and its palpable ineffectiveness in fighting violations and workers’ exploitation led to the creation of a new law in 1973, within a much changed socio-economic and political setting.

2.2.2 SUB-CONTRACTED WORK What was the actual problem? What was the scandalous aspect? That of finding side by side at the same bench, two workers, not employed by the same firm, and though both were engaged in the same trade, paid differently.43

Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” Session of March 27, 1957: 1111–22. 41 Decree of the President of the Republic, “Approvazione del regolamento concernente l’applicazione della legge 13 Marzo 1958, no. 264, sulla tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” approved on December 16, 1959, published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 35, February 11, 1960. 42 Remo Cappelli, “La tessera del pane per le lavoranti a domicilio?” La lotta, March 10, 1960. 43 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of October 8, 1959: 10889. 40

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The law prohibiting workforce sub-contracting and labor brokerage was approved on October 23.44 In compliance with the Commission’s recommendations, contracting and sub-contracting labor (even in cooperatives) was strictly forbidden. Employers (including public administration and state-owned companies) were forbidden from entrusting intermediaries with paying “hired laborers” in a piecework system. Workers employed in violation of the law were to be considered direct employees by the employers who benefitted from their work. A second part of the law governed the sub-contracting of services, deeming employers to be jointly and severally liable for the (wage and regulatory) treatment of workers under contract, which should not be inferior to that of those employed by the main firm. Various types of contracts were excluded from this clause: construction, installation and assembly of machinery, maintenance in exceptional cases, transportation, temporary and casual services, porterage, the construction of telephone booths, and other unusual production activities. The Inspectorate of Labor was entrusted with enforcing the law and collecting fines and penalties from violators.45 The path to this law’s creation had been much shorter than for the ones on home-based work and fixed-term contracts. Only five years had passed since the presentation by Giulio Pastore of the first bill on sub-contracting in May 1955.46 The reason that had prompted the then Secretary of the CISL and his ChristianDemocrat colleagues to draw up the bill was the spread of “bogus sub-contracting by companies of their ordinary work to compliant firms to make the latter responsible for non-application of collectively bargained agreements and non-compliance with social legislation.”47 According to the proponents of the bill, the subcontracting system produced insufficient wages, violated labor protection regulations, and led to workers not receiving social benefits. The text of the bill cited well-known jurists like Francesco Santoro Passarelli to support its thesis: the sub-contracting of manpower needed to be banned because it gave rise to people “defrauding the law.”48 A fine of 1,000 liras per worker hired in violation of the law was considered necessary. In June 1956, a second, more detailed bill was submitted by Giuseppe Di Vittorio and Oreste Lizzadri,49 which was aimed at regulating two kinds of Law no. 1369, “Divieto di intermediazione ed interposizione nelle prestazioni di lavoro e nuova disciplina di impiego di manodopera negli appalti di opere e di servizi,” approved on October 23, 1960, published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 289, November 25, 1960. 45 The fines amounted to 2,000 liras for each worker contracted, and 1,000 liras for violations of the norm’s regulations. 46 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill submitted by Giulio Pastore, Renato Cappugi et al., “Divieto di concessione di subappalto,” announced on May 10, 1955. 47 Ibid., 1. 48 Ibid., 2. 49 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill submitted 44

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labor scenarios: the first was employers’ sub-contracting to firms or companies providing labor at cut-rate prices by acting as “illegal employment agencies”; and the second was cooperatives or pseudo-companies that carried out jobs as sub-contractors or on a piecework basis for cut-rate prices. Di Vittorio-Lizzadri’s bill emphasized the violation of collective agreements and agreements regarding firings, as well as on failures to comply with social security policies, which they saw as leading to more workplace accidents. The communist and socialist deputies referenced to Pastore’s bill when underlining the urgency to create rules forbidding all forms of sub-contracting and piecework contracts, including in areas that had been previously left as exceptions, like maintenance, cleaning, surveillance, and porterage. The debate over labor brokerage also involved jurists. Aldo Cessari, a lecturer at Parma University,50 argued that different systems of brokerage should be investigated for “illegality due to fraud”: brokerage was legally incompatible with the standard employment contract which should have been normally used by a company (Cessari 1959). This argument would be taken up again during the formulation of subsequent legislation (Ichino 2008). At the beginning of the third legislature of the Italian Parliament (1958– 1963), two new bills were presented on sub-contracting and labor brokerage. Bruno Storti and Ettore Calvi,51 the proponents of the new bill advanced by the Christian Democrats, cited as precedent the proposals provided by the Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Workers in Italy. This bill brought back the distinction between manpower sub-contracting and sub-contracting of services (like in maintenance, cleaning, and porterage), forbidding the former and granting the latter a clause of joint liability: the employer had to pay for the workers’ social insurance and security, which they were now entitled to. The bill related the issue of sub-contracting to “a growing phenomenon of semi- and underemployment,” and to illegal forms of hiring,52 which were seen as detrimental to workers’ wages, as well as to legal and union guarantees. The communist Clemente Maglietta and the socialist Mario Bettoli also submitted a bill that cited the Commission’s data and the categories it had established between sub-contracting and other forms of employment, aimed by Giuseppe di Vittorio, Oreste Lizzadri et al., “Regolamentazione degli appalti, subappalti ed analoghi contratti relativi a prestazioni di lavoro,” announced on June 22, 1956. 50 See Rivista giuridica del lavoro e della previdenza sociale, 1955. Aldo Cessari, at the time lecturer at Parma University (Parma), stressed the fact that there already existed a negative orientation towards the intervention of intermediaries between workers and entrepreneurs, expressly forbidden in the case of work in the rice fields (Cessari 1955). 51 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Bruno Storti, Ettore Calvi et al., “Disciplina dell’impiego di mano d’opera nella concessione di lavori in appalto,” announced on July 22, 1958. 52 Ibid., 1.

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at regulating sub-contracting. The Commission’s data provided clear evidence of the existence of an “authentic area of inferiority” among workers that served as “a test sector and a tool for maneuvering towards a normally employed workforce.”54 Maglietta and Bettoli envisioned a list of services to be subcontracted and advertisement for the tenders in order to make them more widely known. Finally, this bill entrusted the labor inspectorates with the task of enforcing the law, including the employer’s joint responsibility. The Commission for Industry of the Chamber of Deputies and the Commission for Justice and Labor jointly examined these two bills. As in the case of the law on home-based work, a select Committee including members from both Commissions was created in October 1959 to write a new draft combining both bills, which was broadly supported by all political parties. The rewritten bill passed in the House with a very large majority (370 votes in favor and 38 against).55 Ettore Calvi, Undersecretary for Labor and Social Security and rapporteur of one of the two bills, spoke before the parliament in support of the bill, arguing that the huge disparity of wages between sub-contracted workers was what motivated the Parliamentary Commission to investigate the issue.56 Butté, previously a rapporteur on the bill, also spoke, highlighting the social importance of the law and citing Pope John XXIII’s commitment to eliminate sub-contracted work in the Vatican City. The Minister of Labor and Social Security, Benigno Zaccagnini, pointed out that the law would be “very far-reaching and produce vast repercussions, probably within the economic and employment fields too.” It would finally protect workers from the most serious forms of exploitation and would ensure their pay was regulated.57 The bill then passed to the Senate, which confirmed the law’s title and specified the employers’ joint liability for benefits claimed by their employees. The Senate also specified how the bill would apply to workers in state-run sectors (like railroads, post offices, and public monopolies). Nine months later the bill returned to the Chamber, where it was finally approved in October 1960. A year later, in November 1961, a Presidential Decree regulated the use of sub-contracted work in tenders issued by state administrations as well. The early sixties saw widespread debates among jurists on how to apply the new law, a discussion summarized by lawyer Spartaco Spano58 in 1965 in Rivista di Diritto del Lavoro 53

Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Clemente Maglietta, Mario Bettoli et al., “Protezione dei lavoratori contro alcune forme anomale di appalto,” announced on July 22, 1958. 54 Ibid., 1. 55 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of October 15, 1959: 11065. 56 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of October 8, 1959: 10889–10892. 57 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of October 14, 1959: 10986–10998. 58 Spartaco Spano, “Osservazioni a margine della legge sugli appalti di mano d’opera,” Rivista di Diritto del Lavoro, 1965. 53

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( Journal of Labor Law). By 1965, interpretations of it were far from unanimous and various unsuccessful attempts at government implementation of it highlighted the difficulty of applying it to concrete cases, despite the commitment of the trade unions to the law.

2.2.3 THE FIXED-TERM CONTRACT The bill intends that a fixed-term contract be used only for the purposes for which it is officially established and not, rather, for the purpose of blackmailing weaker workers and causing them damage for the economic benefit of the employer, thus generating, by a substantially illegitimate application of an article of the law, a truly unprecedented form of gain.59 The basic criterion which inspired the proponents, and which constitutes the political justification of the present project, is that of restoring normal application to fixed-term contracts, by creating a legal framework capable of discouraging any form whatsoever of abuse and preventing irregular elusion.60

On April 18, 1962, the law governing fixed-term contracts, “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a tempo determinato,” was passed.61 The law declared that contracts were normally permanent: it was on the employer to prove the need for a contract end date. This might be due to the special nature of the work (like seasonal, artistic, and technical work) or because of the need to replace permanent workers; or for not ordinary work; occasional work; or work requiring different steps to be carried out by different workers. The employer had to indicate the expiration of the contract in writing, a copy of which had to be delivered to the worker to render it valid. An extension of the contract could only be granted once and for a duration no longer than that of the first contract. If the work relationship continued after expiry, or if the worker was hired again within a certain lapse of time, the contract would automatically become permanent. Temporary workers were entitled to the same social security and treatment as permanent workers (like seniority allowance, paid holidays, a Christmas bonus, and a thirteenth monthly wage) in proportion to the time employed. The law of 1962 abrogated article 2097 of the Civil Code, which had previously regulated fixed-term contracts, instituting a fine for employers who default (between Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill promoted by deputies Silvio Ortona, Teresa Noce et al., “Regolamentazione dei contratti di lavoro a tempo determinato,” announced on April 12, 1954: 2. 60 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill endorsed by Giulio Pastore, Renato Cappugi et al., “Disciplina dei contratti di lavoro a termine,” announced on April 19, 1958. 61 Law no. 230, “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a tempo determinato,” cit. 59

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5,000 and 100,000 liras per worker). The Labor Inspectorates were again responsible for enforcing the law. Though ultimately successful, the legislation on fixed-term contracts took a long time to come about. The first iteration of the bill was presented in the month of April 1954 with communists Silvio Ortona and Teresa Noce among the first signatories.62 Ortona had already questioned the parliament on the issue in June 1953, requesting that the Labor Inspectorates investigate the massive use of fixed-term contracts in the industrial sector. The Ministry of Labor issued directives to the Inspectorates to carry out “investigations into the causes and the actual extent of the phenomenon,” which it saw as being “of no negligible social importance.”63 Ortona’s bill aimed at reducing the abuse of workers by limiting fixed-term contracts to cases of real necessity. The bill’s five articles placed the employer with the “charge of proof ” for the need for a fixed-term contract and made the seniority allowance mandatory for fixed-term workers.64 Moreover, it made it obligatory for employers to notify the Inspectorate when contracts were stipulated, created public lists of fixed-term contracts, and instituted a pecuniary fee of 1,000 liras per day for each illegally hired worker. The Chamber’s Labor Commission discussed the proposal in December 1954.65 While they agreed on the need to solve the problem, the members of the Commission expressed different positions regarding the procedure to follow. The bill then passed to the Justice Commission, where it ran aground. A second bill was submitted in 1956 by Giulio Pastore with similar political motivations:66 to avoid abuse of fixed-term contracts and guarantee conditions of freedom and security to workers. The Ortona and Pastore bills converged on several issues: notification of infractions to the Labor Inspectorate, obligatory seniority allowance, and, above all, the “charge of proof ” laid with the employer. For Pastore’s bill, if this proof were not provided, or if the contract were renewed more than twice (or extended after expiry), it would automatically become a permanent contract. Pastore’s bill explicitly reiterated that “a work contract should be permanent normally.” Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill endorsed by deputies Silvio Ortona, Teresa Noce et al., “Regolamentazione dei contratti di lavoro a tempo determinato,” announced on April 12, 1954. 63 Ibid., 1. 64 The minimum amount of the allowance was the sum due to a worker who had worked a year. Ibid. 65 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XI Commissione, Session of December 2, 1954: 457–59. 66 Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giulio Pastore, Renato Cappugi et al., “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a termine,” announced on April 19, 1956. 62

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At the beginning of the Third Legislature (1958), two new bills were presented, one by Ettore Calvi and Bruno Storti67 of the Christian Democrats, the other by Giacomo Brodolini and Massimo Caprara of the Socialist and Communist parties.68 Both bills referenced the previous Pastore and Ortona bills, but introduced new measures based on the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission, which included the identification of records on the use of fixed-term contracts, the establishment of a maximum duration for this kind of contract, the stipulation of the contract in writing, and the same social security conditions for fixed-term as for permanent employees. The Labor and Justice Commissions discussed the two bills jointly in July 1959. As in the case of home-based work, a select committee was created to combine the two.69 On January 2, 1960, while that discussion was happening, the Minister of Labor Benigno Zaccagnini and the Minister of Justice Guido Gonnella presented a bill that incorporated most of the recommendations made by the parliamentary commission and shared some of the key measures of the two 1958 bills.70 The select committee continued its work taking into account this third text too. After the bloody interlude of the Tambroni Government,71 the new Minister of Labor Fiorentino Sullo and his Undersecretary Ettore Calvi met with the Select Committee during the Third Fanfani Government ( July 27, 1960–February 2, 1962) to combine the three texts. The new, combined version was released on May 25, 1961. When presenting the new bill to the Labor and Justice Commission, the Christian Democrat deputies Umberto Breganze and Amos Zanibelli underlined the wide range of the debate and the common desire to find a balance among the various bills that had gone into this one, the ultimate goal of which was to make fixed-term contracts “exceptional” and not permanent.72 Achieving Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by Storti, Ettore Calvi et al., “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a termine,” announced on July 22, 1958. 68 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giacomo Brodolini, Massimo Caprara et al., “Regolamentazione del contratto di lavoro a tempo determinato,” announced on February 4, 1958. 69 Members of the committee: Francesco Maria Dominedò, Umberto Delle Fave, Federico Comandini, Antonio Zoboli, Mario Bettoli, Clemente Maglietta, Ettore Calvi, Guerrieri Emanuele, Alberto Ferioli, Alessandrò Butté, Samuele Andreucci, Umberto Breganze, Amos Zanibelli. 70 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented to the Presidency by Minister of Labor and Social Welfare Benigno Zaccagnini jointly with Minister of Justice Guido Gonnella titled “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a tempo determinato,” submitted on January 2, 1960. 71 The brief Tambroni government was remembered for the escalation of protests against the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, leading to the murder of five communist blue-collar workers in Reggio Emilia by the police. 72 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” report by the IV and XIII permanent commissions on the bill titled “Disciplina del contratto di lavoro 67

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employment stability was considered a measure best suited to meet both the needs of the company and the interests of the worker. They felt that continuity in contracts was the best way of achieving job stability and of protecting workers from an economic, welfare, and regulatory point of view. For the parliamentarians, the bill under discussion could also serve as a way of regulating the market by creating conditions of fair competition not based exclusively on labor costs. During the discussion of the bill in the Chamber of Deputies73 the importance and centrality of job stability emerged again in the words of CISL trade unionist Pierino Azimonti, and similarly Christian Democrat Vittorino referred to the bill as “a first step towards the greater goal of job stability.” He also spoke of the bill as being of great value and stated that “work is not a simple commodity that may be treated according to the normal laws of exchange.”74 The Socialist Brodolini and communist Maglietta called for the immediate application of the bill to workers within state agencies lest the state might be seen as a non-complying employer itself. On November 15, 1961, the draft of the bill drawn up by the Select Committee, with a few amendments added in the House, was passed by the Chamber with a large majority (298 for, 21 against). By now, seven years after the first bill on fixed-term contracts had been proposed, everyone agree that this was an issue worth regulating. It then passed to the Labor Commission of the Senate on March 28, 1962, and was approved on April 12, 1962, without amendments.75 In 1978, over twenty-five years after the approval of the law, the Italian Labor and Social Security Law association dedicated a two-day workshop on the topic. Luigi Montuschi (1979), pointing to numerous ministerial letters and circulars on fixed-term contracts between 1962 and 1967, argued that their use remained mostly uninhibited even after the law had become effective as there had been continuous attempts by employers to enlarge the list of “exceptions,” which were only rarely blocked. The march towards job stability was still a long away because, except for specific and explicit cases of firing (like of women for marriage), a rather care-free regime of terminating permanent contracts persisted despite the law.

a tempo determinato,” and the bill titled “Regolamentazione del contratto di lavoro a tempo determinate e Disciplina del contratto di lavoro a termine,” (Compiled by Uberto Breganze and Amos Zanibelli), presented to the Presidency on July 22, 1961. 73 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of November 10, 1961: 25990–26006. 74 Ibid.: 25998–26006. 75 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of November 15, 1961: 26089.

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2.3 New regulations on dismissals in the nineteensixties In the sixties, the Italian working class’s efforts to “construct” job stability peaked. During the years of the economic boom (1958–1963) the important legislative measures described in this chapter limited employment precarity by regulating “non-standard” forms of labor, and in the mid-sixties two new laws had a significant impact on the issue of firing. One forbade the dismissal of female workers on the grounds of marriage (“Divieto di licenziamento delle lavoratrici per causa di matrimonio” 1963) and the other regulated the firing of individual workers (“Norme sui licenziamenti individuali” 1966). The debate on the need to protect workers from ad nutum dismissal, that is, laying off without any justification, dates back to the early fifties, when jurists and trade unionists began to dwell on the need to limit employers’ unilateral power to terminate a contract (Costa 2009). During the fifties, the thousands of lay-offs of workers affiliated with trade unions (Ballone 1987) that struck union activists (particularly in the CGIL, PCI, and PSI, and to a lesser extent in the Catholic ACLI Union) began a quest for a legislative solution to balance worker and employer power relations (Ricciardi 1975; Mattera 2015). One bill, the “Statute of Workers,” proposed by Giuseppe Di Vittorio at the National Congress of the CGIL in 1952 (CGIL 1956, 36–41), and taken up again in the years of center-left government by the ministerial Commission established by Gino Giugni and Federico Mancini (Mattera 2015), was aimed at increasing job stability by regulating firing. Di Vittorio’s “Statute of Workers’ Rights in companies” (Statuto dei diritti dei lavoratori nelle aziende) dealt directly with the topic and proposed, though not explicitly, to establish a principle of requiring justification for the firing of workers. He argued that the termination of contracts should not occur for “reasons extraneous to the needs of production, for retaliation against employees belonging to certain organizations or because of their political or religious convictions, or out of revenge against workers intending to enforce their freedom as citizens” (CGIL 1956, 38). Some principles of this 1952 document were to become the basis of Article 4 of the law on dismissals approved in 1966, almost fifteen years later. The 1966 law was the outcome of a parliamentary process that lasted over ten years and modified the Civil Code of 1942, changing the norms which until then had governed the ad nutum termination of workers and setting significant limits to dismissal without just cause for the very first time in Italy (Alleva 1970). The best known statute of workers’ rights, which became effective in 1970, guaranteed in its Article 18 a worker’s reinstatement in the event of their illegitimate firing.

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The 1963 law, which outlawed layoffs for marriage and associated practices, like “blank resignations” and “spinsterhood clauses,” also passed after over ten years in parliament. During the boom years, a shared, transversal mobilization of parliamentarians, trade unionists, women’s associations, and the Milan Humanitarian Society helped the law pass. The legal debate over that law demonstrates how this subject was closely linked to more general discussions over limiting the unilateral powers of employers. Before this law, the firing of women for marriage was a power that existed in stark contrast to the principles enshrined in the Italian Constitution, which guaranteed working women the right and the support required to carry out their maternal and family functions, defined by the Charter as “essential” (Ballestrero 1979).

2.3.1 DISMISSAL FOR MARRIAGE The methods availed of are different. It is common to occur at the moment of hiring the female worker or when the contract is being stipulated, that she is obliged to sign a blank letter of resignation which the employer may use at the time of her marriage; or the worker may explicitly undertake in writing to leave her job in the event of her marriage, or more simply the employer may resort to a letter of dismissal […]. Finally, there are many company regulations that provide for the termination of contracts when female workers get married (Commissione Parlamentare 1963, 256).

On January 9, 1963, the law forbidding the dismissal of women workers for reasons of marriage passed after a long parliamentary procedure.76 The law outlawed layoffs for marriage and declared spinsterhood clauses contained in contracts null and void. The prohibition protected women from being fired within a year of marriage. A woman worker fired during that time had the right to reinstatement and payment for the salary she had not received during the time in which she had been dismissed (Ballestrero 1979). The Parliamentary Commission had dealt extensively with this issue and investigated the various methods used to discriminate against women for marriage. They examined layoffs for marriage and related practices (like blank resignations, spinsterhood clauses) alongside the issue of maternity benefits, which were particularly problematic within the Italian labor market of the fifties and sixties. According to the Commission, the methods used to finance maternity benefits and the obligations regarding nurseries and nursing facilities were Law no. 7, “Divieto di licenziamento delle lavoratrici per causa di matrimonio e modifiche alla legge 26 agosto 1950, no. 860: ‘Tutela fisica ed economica delle lavoratrici madri,’” approved on January 9, 1963, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 27, January 30, 1963.

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responsible for the aforementioned practices, which had important repercussions for women’s job instability. Women employed in industry and in banks and commerce, whose maternity leave and benefits weighed entirely upon their employers, were those most exposed to such practices. The problem of the dismissal of married women was, according to the Commission, linked to the more general need to regulate both collective dismissals and individual firings by limiting the unilateral power of employers. The increase of firings for marriage during the early sixties led to formal inquiries and conferences dedicated to the subject. This included a White Paper on dismissals on grounds of marriage edited by Lina Merlin (1961) and a conference on dismissals due to marriage (1962), organized by the Committee of Women’s Associations for Equal Pay, under the auspices of the Humanitarian Society of Milan. The UDI launched an important information campaign against layoffs due to marriage, aimed at denouncing the serious consequences to the professional and family lives of women in its Noi Donne magazine. The campaign reported on some of the practices women resorted to in order to avoid losing their jobs: cohabitation without marriage, clandestine marriage, illegal abortion, illegitimate children, and even declarations of sterility.77 The long parliamentary journey that led to the approval of the 1963 law had begun in 1951, when socialist senator Lina Merlin presented a bill entitled “Divieto di licenziamento dai posti d’impiego e di lavoro delle donne che si sposano,” forbidding the firing of women for marriage, which after failing was presented again in 1953. The 1951 bill ran aground in the Labor Commission of the Senate, while in 1953 it was postposed sine die to become, effectively, a dead letter.78 According to a number of subsequent accounts, opposition to the bill stemmed from the concern that such a law might increase competition between the male and female workforce at a time of already high unemployment rates. In support of this argument, the Ministry of Labor issued a circular in May 1955 declaring the illegitimacy of spinsterhood clauses, which circumvented the firing of working mothers sanctioned by the 1950 law (Ballestrero 1979). Three years after the second failure of that bill in June 1956, a new bill regulating the firing of married women, “Disciplina dei licenziamenti delle donne che si sposano,”79 was submitted to the Chamber, signed jointly by female communist and socialist deputies. Among these there were several CGIL trade Luisa Melograni, “Voci della città,” Noi Donne, March 8, 1959; Enrico Lucarelli, “Le lavoratrici in parlamento,” Noi Donne, May 1, 1960; G.S., “Sposarsi è un reato,” Noi Donne, May 23, 1954; “Processo ai licenziamenti per matrimonio,” Noi Donne, March 12, 1961. 78 Senate of the Republic, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill initiated by Senator Angelina Merlin, “Divieto di licenziamento dai posti d’impiego e di lavoro delle donne che si sposano,” 1953, ad indicem. 79 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Ada del Vecchio Guelfi, Anna De Lauro Matera et al., “Disciplina dei licenziamenti delle donne che si sposano,” announced on June 5, 1956.

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unionists and UDI board members, as well as Senator Merlin herself. The bill pointed out how dismissals for marriage and spinsterhood clauses violated the Italian Constitution, in particular articles 31 and 37, which guaranteed working women the ability to fulfill their maternal role and to form families. The bill expressly stated that it sought to limit the ad nutum dismissal of female workers. Faced with the proliferation of complaints by female workers on the abovementioned practices, Lina Merlin and her Socialist Party colleague, Anna De Lauro Matera,80 proposed another bill in June 1958. This new bill targeted gender discrimination against women workers only, since marital status, or possible offspring, were discriminatory factors that affected male and female workers differently. They reiterated the ongoing violation of articles 31 and 37 of the Constitution and of the 1950 law on working mothers. Like its forerunner, this bill also forbade the firing of women for marriage by private employers and state agencies alike. The socialist senator’s bill was followed by another in 1959, which was only endorsed by communist parliamentarians, among whom Giuseppina Re81 is particularly noteworthy. The bill pointed again to the rise of dismissals due to marriage, now frequent enough to cause more concern than they had a few years earlier. The juridical and constitutional references the Commission made were the same as those contained in the previous bill: the Constitution and the 1950 law on working mothers. Unlike the previous bills, Re’s proposed that the layoff of workers for marriage be outlawed, that wages should be paid to the worker for the time in which she was fired, and that the worker be rehired too. In June 1962, the Minister of Labor, jointly with the Minister of Justice and Treasure, presented another bill forbidding the dismissal of female workers for marriage,82 citing studies and recommendations from the National Council for Economics and Labor (CNEL).83 The CNEL had proposed the standardization of maternity leave and pay for various categories of female workers (laborers, white-collar employees, apprentices, and managers), so that the brunt of the costs might be borne by welfare agencies and would no longer constitute a pretext for the dismissal of women workers. Another important aspect was the reversal of Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Angelina Merlin, Anna De Lauro Matera, “Divieto di licenziamento dai posti d’impiego e di lavoro delle donne che si sposano,” announced on June 20, 1958. 81 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giuseppina Re, Maria Lisa Cinciari Rodano et al., “Divieto di licenziamento dai posti d’impiego e di lavoro delle donne che si sposano,” announced on May 6, 1959. 82 Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill submitted by the Minister of Labor and Social Security Virginio Bertinelli in conjunction with the Minister of Justice Giacinto Bosco and the Treasury Minister Roberto Tremelloni, “Divieto di licenziamento del personale femminile per causa di matrimonio,” presented to the Presidency on June 28, 1962. 83 National Council for Economics and Labor, “Osservazioni e proposte per la disciplina legislativa del divieto di licenziamento delle lavoratrici a causa di matrimonio,” Ibid.: 4–8. 80

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the charge of proof: now it was the employer who had to prove that the dismissal within one year of the marriage was not due to marriage itself. In October 1962, the three above-mentioned bills were finally examined by the Chamber’s Labor Commission.84 During the intense discussion that followed, the speeches made by Lina Merlin, Marisa Cinciari Rodano, and Giuseppina Re stood out. They all expressed the necessity of this law, highlighting the need to increase maternity quotas for agricultural workers, who were not included in the provisions established for all other female workers. Some men, however, took the opposite side during the debate, declaring that the law might be overly protective of women workers. Ultimately though the Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved the bill, and it was forwarded, albeit with some amendments, to the Senate. The discussion in the Senate began in November 1962 and became particularly heated after some members of the majority proposed amendments to the bill, arguing that the measures proposed by the Chamber to combat blank dismissals were unsatisfactory.85 The communist opposition, through its spokeswoman Senator Maglietta, feared that the bill would be returned to the Chamber. A meeting held by the Minister of Labor fine tuned the draft and added some amendments with the approval of colleagues in the Chamber. The discussion of the bill in the Senate demonstrated the persistence of conservative positions on female employment even among supporters of the proposal. Some Christian Democrat parliamentarians signed on to the bill not because of a belief in women’s rights but rather seeing the regulation as a necessary evil, made urgent by the difficult economic conditions of working-class families. The bills on firings for marriage generated a heated debate among jurists as well, who believed it provided an opportunity to question the principle of dismissal ad nutum, even if limited to female workers. According to some (Ballestrero 1979), the broad consensus on the bill among the majority was largely due to the conservativism rooted in the morals and customs the bills contained in nuce. During the parliamentary discussion the right to marry and the need to safeguard the family had been emphasized and deemed more highly than women’s right to work. Whether the result of a political strategy or real conviction, the 1963 law was the first to sanction the reintegration of wrongfully dismissed female workers and limit employers’ unilateral power to fire workers. The parliament finally declared dismissal on grounds of marriage and related practices to be unlawful, citing as precedent already existing constitutional principles and laws.

Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of October 17, 1962: 862–88. Senate of the Republic, III Legislature, X Commissione, Sessions of November 14, 15, and 22, 1962.

84 85

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2.3.2 INDIVIDUAL DISMISSALS Therefore, a law is required to update the regulation of dismissals in all sectors of employment where job stability is not otherwise guaranteed, in order to render effective the free exercise of trade-union and democratic rights safeguarded by the Constitution, without the worker being exposed to employer retaliation through unjustified dismissal. This is the purpose of this bill.86

Another law governing individual dismissals passed on July 15, 1966, after an almost ten-year-long parliamentary procedure after the bill’s first submission and an equally lengthy legal debate.87 It established that the dismissal of a worker might take place only for just cause or a justified reason, while declaring firings based on a worker’s political beliefs, religious faith, membership in a union, or participation in trade-union action to be null and void. The employer was charged with the responsibility of providing evidence of just cause for firing a worker. There also had to be a written record of the firing given to the worker, which after receiving the worker had 60 days to ask for cause and to challenge the employer. Trade unions were given the explicit right to mediate between employer and employee. If the dismissal was shown to be without just cause or lack of a justifiable reason, the employer was required to re-hire the worker or, alternatively, pay them a modest compensation of between 2.5 and 6 months’ wages. This regulation pertained to both manual laborers and white-collar workers in companies with more than 35 employees. Unlike the other proposals discussed in this chapter, this effort to regulate firing generally was almost only supported by the Communist Party and the Socialist Party for quite some time. Its primary supporters were parliamentarians who ranked highly in the CGIL, particularly Giuseppe Di Vittorio and later on Luciano Lama as well. The first bill, aimed at regulating individual dismissals, “Regolamentazione del licenziamento,” was presented in February 1957 with Di Vittorio and the socialist Oreste Lizzadri among its first signatories, alongside the future minister of labor and promoter of the “Statute of Workers’ Rights,” the socialist deputy Giacomo Brodolini. The bill was based on the assumption that the power of the employer to fire workers (without just cause) was incompatible with the Italian Constitution. They considered the “right to work” to be the very basis of the political and trade union rights set out in the Constitution and believed that right was being undermined by the persistence of high unemployment and underemployment. The proposed bill, which became Chamber of Deputies, II Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” Bill presented by deputies Giuseppe di Vittorio, Oreste Lizzadri et al., “Regolamentazione del licenziamento,” announced on February 19, 1957. 87 Law no. 604, “Norme sui licenziamenti individuali,” approved on July 15, 1966, and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 195 August 6, 1966. 86

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law in 1966, was built on a two-part cornerstone: the concept that without “just cause” or a “justified reason” dismissals were illegitimate. The free expression of ideas and participation in a trade union could not be considered just cause for dismissal.88 The bill’s supporters cited explicitly the problem of firings as retaliation for trade union activity and represented a possible point of convergence with organizations like the ACLI. Dismissals on these grounds were considered null and void by the law of 1966 because they were discriminatory. The Di Vittorio-Lizzadri bill was never discussed in parliament, but was instead referred, like many others, to the Chamber’s Labor Commission. In April 1961, the bill was submitted once more, with a few changes, and signed this time by communist deputy Egidio Sulotto and by socialist deputy Mario Bettoli. During his presentation of the bill to the House, in September 1962, Sulotto stressed the fact that retaliatory dismissals had by no means ceased since the presentation of the first bill five years previously, citing a case in which FIAT had fired 84 workers in Turin. By reiterating the need for the law to align Italy with other “civil” nations, he pointed out that it was necessary to make the right to work, enshrined in the Italian Constitution, effective “through job stability.” This second bill also ran aground. Around the same time, in February 1961, the Christian Democrat deputy Vittorino Colombo was the proponent of another bill restricting the power of employers to rescind contracts unilaterally.89 The Christian Democrat bill also adopted “guarantees” of employment as the conceptual reference point for the limitation of employers’ freedom to lay workers off. Job stability, the bill asserted, was fundamental to the enjoyment of civil and political rights, as well as of the full development of a worker’s personality. The Christian Democrat deputies claimed that too little had been done to assure stability, given that the worker could still be fired at any time, even without any serious cause. The bill identified only two reasons that might justify termination of contracts by employers: workers’ negligent behavior or necessity related to company organization. Like the other bills, the exercise of religious, civil, political, and trade union rights could not be grounds for dismissal. In these cases, a firing could be challenged and if the worker won, they would be entitled to compensation from their former employer. This bill was again referred to the Labor Commission and never discussed in the Chamber. Unlike the Colombo bill, which was presented only once, Sulotto’s was submitted again in July 1963, without any substantial changes.90 The legal procedures Ibid., 1–8. Chamber of Deputies, III Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Vittorino Colombo, Bianchi Fortunato et al., “Limitazione al potere di recesso dell’imprenditore dal rapporto di lavoro,” announced on February 28, 1961. 90 Chamber of Deputies, IV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented 88 89

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regarding individual firings in the aftermath of the economic boom were interwoven with those concerning the “Statute of Workers’ Rights.” In 1964, the first temporary commission, appointed to draft a statute on worker’s rights, was set up at the behest of the then deputy prime minister, the socialist Pietro Nenni.91 Among the most relevant points treated by the commission, which made their way into the first draft of the Statute, was the issue of “just cause for individual dismissals.” The commission’s work ran aground due to the government crisis in July 1964 following the attempted coup d’etat by General De Lorenzo, which also marked the end of the first center-left government (Mattera 2015, 404–05). Despite such hazards, these efforts continued through the insistence of the CGIL, particularly through Luciano Lama, an MP in the ranks of the PCI and a CGIL representative in Parliament, who in March 1965 urged further discussion on the Sulotto bill.92 Important events in both Italy and abroad also boosted such efforts at regulating firing. In addition to the law banning the firing of women for marriage, in April 1965, a collective agreement was signed by unions and employers’ representatives regulating dismissals in industry, which also questioned the principle of ad nutum termination. In May of the same year, a Constitutional Court ruling reiterated the validity of Article 4 of the Constitution, which “recognizes the right of all citizens to work and promotes the conditions that make this right effective” and the need to adapt existing legislation to ensure “job continuity.” Finally, Recommendation 119, put forward by the ILO in June 1963, stated that trade union membership or activity could not be accepted as valid grounds for dismissal, and that the only grounds for an employer to fire a worker had to relate to that worker’s behavior or to the company’s organizational necessity.93 In 1964 Deputy Prime Minister Pietro Nenni committed to passing the bill, delegating this effort to the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Umberto delle Fave, in 1965. The bill containing the fundamentals of the future law was presented in June of that year and contained the cornerstone of the 1966 act.94



91



92 93



94

by deputies Egidio Sulotto, Spagnoli et al., “Regolamentazione del licenziamento,” announced on July 26, 1963. Archivio Fondazione Pietro Nenni (Pietro Nenni Foundation Archives), Fondo Pietro Nenni, Serie 2: Documenti, sottoserie III: Governo, sottosottoserie 7: Pietro Nenni vice-prime minister of the second Moro government ( July 22, 1964–January 21, 1966), b. 112, “Provvedimenti inerenti allo statuto dei lavoratori,” 1964, http://www.archivionline.senato.it/scripts/ GeaCGI.exe. Chamber of Deputies, IV Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of March 24, 1965: 18789. “Termination of Employment Recommendation,” adopted at Geneva during the 47th Session of the ILO Conference (June 26, 1963), replaced in 1982 (legislative recommendation no. 166), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f ?p=1000:12100:11705529139889:12100:NO: :P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312504: Chamber of Deputies, IV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the Minister of Labor and Social Security Umberto Delle Fave jointly with the Minister of

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The bill included the regulatory changes mentioned above and cited other laws in force in other European countries and elsewhere on regulating firing. One of the bill’s explicit goals was a guarantee of “job continuity,” deemed necessary to rebalance the disparity of power existing between employers and workers. Over a year had gone by since the bill was first proposed when it was approved in July 15, 1966. A report from December 10, 1965, by the Labor and Justice commissions on the different bills on individual dismissals95 contained a declaration “on behalf of the majority” signed by socialist deputy Loris Fortuna and Christian Democrat deputy Raffaello Russo Spena, and one for “the minority” endorsed by Francesco Cacciatore, member of the newly formed Partito Socialista di Unità Proletaria (Socialist Party for Proletarian Unity, PSIUP). The minority criticized the law for several reasons: it only applied to companies with at least 35 employees; the way how dismissal was to be communicated was problematic; the employer enjoyed the freedom to decide whether or not to reinstate the worker; and the amount of the worker’s payment for compensation was insufficient.96 The Labor and Justice commissions did not incorporate these suggestions by the minority, but made some changes to the bill that were largely included in the final draft. The Chamber discussed the new text between April 20 and May 12, 1966, and approved it by a very wide majority (422 out of 470). The law received the undivided support of the socialist (PSI, PSIUP, PSDI), the communist, and even the republican deputies (who saw the text as an important step towards achieving job stability), but generated a rift within the Christian Democrat party, with ACLI and CISL parliamentarians assuming opposing positions.97 While the ACLI trade unionists were in favor of the bill, those belonging to the CISL did not approve of the legislation. Bruno Storti, general secretary of the CISL, held that dismissals should be regulated by contract, to avoid damaging the autonomy of collective bargaining and the trade unions themselves. He announced the intention of his own and that of his fellow trade unionists to abstain. Despite that dispute, even the right-wing Italian Social Movement and Liberal Party voted in favor of the bill.98

Justice Reale Oronzo, the Minister for Agriculture Mario Ferrari Aggradi and the Minister for Industry and Commerce Edgardo Lami Starnuti “Norme sui licenziamenti individuali,” presented to the President on June 15, 1965. 95 Chamber of Deputies, IV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” Relazione delle Commissioni permanenti IV and XIII sul disegno di legge “Norme sui licenziamenti individuali” e sulla proposta di legge “Regolamentazione del licenziamento,” (Relatori Loris Fortuna and Raffaello Russo Spena, for the majority, Francesco Cacciatore, for the minority), presented to the President on December 10, 1965. 96 Ibid.,14–31. 97 Chamber of Deputies, IV Legislature, “Discussioni,” Sessions of April 20, 21, 22, 26, and 27, 1966 and May 2, 3, 4, and 12, 1966. 98 Chamber of Deputies, IV Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of May 12, 1966.

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The bill, amended by the Chamber, was then delivered to the Senate, where it was finally approved two months later. Here the senator from the Liberal Party, Michelangelo Pasquato, stated in a speech on July 11, 1966, that job stability was not a shared goal: “The guarantee of job stability, which the bill in question aims at sanctioning legally, represents a factor which decreases work productivity, as shown by the instance of public bodies.”99 Senators from the Liberal Party submitted various amendments to the bill, but eventually voted in favor.

Senate of the Republic, IV Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of July 11, 1966: 24977.

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CHAPTER 3

STABILITY OR PRECARITY? THE TWO FACES OF THE LONG SEVENTIES

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he approval of the Statute of Workers’ Rights (1970), especially article 18, marked the period of highest job stability in Italy. Various political parties and trade union organizations had sought this stability ever since the years of the economic boom (1958–1963), though with greater energy during the period of economic planning in the 1960s (Lo statuto dei lavoratori 1970). However, in the seventies job stability was not universally perceived as a common good. Stability became a touchstone for people on the margins of Fordist society in Italy to make a whole new set of demands. These were people who had been excluded from the Statute of Workers’ Rights. They were a new generation entering a tight intellectual labor market. By the late seventies, that discussion on stability evolved into intellectual and socio-economic studies of precarity, which had exploded in new forms in a society dominated by economic crisis. This was the period that saw the birth of a true subjective perception of precarity, in which some people began to define themselves as “precarians” and observers of the period pointed to them as occupying a new sector of work and social marginality. Already from the early seventies on, though, “Precariat” was a common feature of the headlines of the journal Sindacato e Scuola, published by the CGIL teacher’s union beginning in 1967. Those who belonged to the 1977 Movement, Movimento del Settantasette, defined themselves as precarians and as “non-guaranteed workers.” Precarians were also male and female workers hired by small businesses in Italy, which had grown exponentially due to productive decentralization, as well as blue-collar female workers employed in home-based industry. Complaints about precarious labor conditions were heard from north to south in the Italy of the long seventies, both in industry, deeply affected by productive restructuring, and in education. The growth of the latter was rapid and disorderly, causing the sudden proliferation of a widespread, heterogeneous intellectual precariat. Precarious primary and secondary school teachers, as well as a variety of different types of scholars, engaged in a decade-long struggle to stabilize education and academia for the non-tenured.

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In southern Italy, the 1970s crisis was woven into an already weak fabric of production and employment. Unprecedented forms of activism came into being, like the “Committees of Unemployed and Precarious Graduates” who advocated for stable employment and demanded a concrete and quantifiable path for the country to get there. Yet, precarious work, freshly analyzed and opposed by a broad swath of youth, was also sought out by some fringes of these youth movements. For some younger people, precarity and mobility were the only alternative to the repetitiveness and alienation of stable employment that was “consuming” their lives day after day. Unlike in the previous decade and a half prior to the seventies, the concept of precarious work entered fully-fledged into the mindset of political parties, trade unions, and social movements, generating a new kind of subjectivity and identification with precarity. “Untenured” school workers, later known as “precarians,” became a social group who advocated for stability, along with university researchers and student workers, also self-proclaimed precarians. In the decade examined here, factory and agricultural workers were no longer the only ones associated with precarity; intellectual work became one of the main drivers of precarization. Precarious work spread not only among young people but among women as well. Precarity and female employment were linked in the thinking advanced by women’s associations like UDI, which had long been committed to job stability, members of second-wave feminist movements, and the new female trade union section, namely Coordinamenti donne. Thanks to the new conceptual paradigms fostered by second-wave feminist thinking, the women’s perspective placed the origin of the great precarity of female work in the unsolved relationship between production and reproduction. The latter was the result of a society that attributed childcare primarily to women, but without providing them social services to alleviate that burden. The image of “two societies” or “two classes,” however, described by some scholars of the time (Asor Rosa 1977) did not correspond to reality. A “guaranteed” stable working class did not exclude certain forms of marginalization, unemployment, and precarity thought only to be the conditions of the “non-guaranteed.” The universe of the “guaranteed” and “non-guaranteed” appeared much more fluid and interwoven due to both industrial restructuring and the progressive stabilization of the service sector, particularly in public administration. The stereotype of “a stable job,” which emerged in some of the intellectual thinking of the period, became a reality only at the beginning of the seventies but not for the entire working class. The stereotype or rhetorical image of the “guaranteed worker” became popular though it never became a widespread phenomenon. The quest for job stability, laid down by the Statute of Workers’ Rights (1970), was already being eroded within the industrial sector even before the 1973 Oil Shock, while for workers in other sectors of the economy it remained one of the major demands of seventies.

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If the spread of precarious work following the 1970s economic crisis and industrial restructuring confirmed the relationship between crisis and precarity, its subsequent explosion in education (and universities in particular) showed how disorderly, unbridled employment growth could produce precarity as well. In the seventies, the concepts of precarity and precarious employment appeared frequently in contemporary economic, sociological, and juridical studies and also in debates within trade unions and social movements. The CGIL Secretary General Luciano Lama (Montali 2017) also explicitly mentioned precarious work in his opening addresses to the congresses of 1973 (CGIL 1973, 59) and 1977 (CGIL 1977, 60–62), but it was mainly thanks to the press that the term “precarious” became a part of the Italian collective imagination and vernacular.

3.1 The achievement of stability 3.1.1 THE STATUTE OF WORKERS’ RIGHTS AND ARTICLE 18 Job stability, though it has been one of the aspirations of the working class since the dawn of the industrial revolution, has come to be protected forcefully by the Italian legal system only since 1970, with the enactment of the Workers’ Statute. This law, which radically changed the mechanisms by which the workplace is legally protected, achieved the political goal introduced in 1966 with the law on individual dismissals. It is no coincidence that this legislative reform has been compared to an “earthquake,” precisely because of its ability to overturn the regulatory framework of employment relationships, previously centered on the opposite principle of instability (Napoli 1980, 11).

Some analyses of labor law written during the 1970s positioned the Statute of Workers’ Rights, particularly Article 18, as the “most prominent aspect of a system of true stability” (Napoli 1980). The fundamental novelty of the Statute compared to the 1966 law governing individual dismissals examined in the previous chapter was that it made it mandatory for employers to not only pay wrongfully fired employers for lost time but also to rehire them. The professed aim of the Statute’s writers was to eliminate unlawful behavior on the part of employers who until then could illegally deprive workers of their jobs. Now those workers could be legally reinstated (Alleva 1970). The lengthy process leading to the approval of the Statute, recently illustrated in historical (Mattera 2015) and history of law studies (Passaniti 2009), is beyond the limits of this work. However, the genesis of Article 18, the fulcrum of the “Italian way” to job stability, deserves to be presented in brief (Mazzotta 2007).

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A proposal to create a mechanism to reinstate workers whose dismissals were declared unlawful had already been included in article 10 of a bill presented to parliament by the Minister of Labor and Social Security, the socialist Giacomo Brodolini,1 in June 1969.2 In a note accompanying the bill, Brodolini emphasized the importance of protecting workers, in particular trade union representatives, from discriminatory firings and the need to allow them to be legally reinstated if they were fired. This early version of Article 18, which generalized reinstatement in cases of illegitimate dismissals, was proposed during parliamentary proceedings and included in the new text of a bill approved by the Senate and sent to the Chamber in December 1969.3 The MP Vincenzo Mancini carefully examined the bill in his report4 to the Chamber, and did not substantially modify it. It was then in the parliamentary debate between the Chamber and the Senate, right during the period of strong social conflict known in Italy as the “hot autumn,” that Article 18 acquired its final form. In an effort to explain to the public the radical changes the Statute of Worker’s Rights brought to labor relations by legally guaranteeing job stability and the continuity of employment for the first time, labor lawyers referred to it as the “Earthquake” and the “Copernican Revolution” (Napoli 1980). The Statute aimed at establishing a balance of power between workers and employers by ending once and for all the liberal conception of dismissals ad nutum (Mancini 1976; Giugni 1973; Alleva 1970), which had aimed to establish a principle of equality between employer and employee by allowing both to voluntarily terminate a contract at any time. After the approval of the Statute, jobs came increasingly to be seen as stable and guaranteed by the existence of Article 18, at least in the eyes of the public, even if this was true to a lesser degree in reality. Giacomo Brodolini (1920–69) was a leader of the CGIL and the PSI. He was elected to the Chamber in 1953, where he remained until 1968 when he was elected senator and assumed the role of minister of labor and social security in the second Rumor government. For a biography see Francesco Maria Biscione, “Brodolini, Giacomo,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 34 (1988). 2 Senate of the Republic, V Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the then Minister of Labor and Social Security Giacomo Brodolini, jointly with Minister of Justice Silvio Gava, “Norme sulla tutela della libertà e dignità dei lavoratori, della libertà sindacale e dell’attività sindacale nei luoghi di lavoro,” presented on June 24, 1969. 3 Chamber of Deputies, V Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” law approved by the Senate of the Republic (Session of December 11, 1969), presented by Minister of Labor and Social Security Giacomo Brodolini, jointly with the Minister of Justice Silvio Gava, 1; “Norme sulla tutela della libertà e dignità dei lavoratori, della libertà sindacale e dell’attività sindacale nei luoghi di lavoro,” presented by the Speaker of the Senate of the Republic to the President on December 17, 1969. 4 Chamber of Deputies, V Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” Report by the XIII Permanent Commission (spokesperson Vincenzo Mancini) regarding the bill “Norme sulla tutela della libertà e dignità dei lavoratori, della libertà sindacale e dell’attività sindacale nei luoghi di lavoro,” Ibid., and the bill presented by Vecchietti et al., “Norme per la tutela della sicurezza, della libertà e della dignità dei lavoratori,” presented on May 6, 1970. 1

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The new law, although it enlarged the numbers of workers guaranteed against illegitimate dismissal, did not apply to workers in companies of fewer than 15 workers. It is not surprising then that this category of small business worker began to be defined as “precarious” when compared to those employed by medium and large companies. It must be considered stable every work relationship which, regardless of the public or private nature of the employer, is regulated by a norm which subordinates the legitimacy of effective termination to the existence of objective, predetermined circumstances and, from a procedural standpoint, entrusts magistrates with the assessment of these circumstances and the possibility of cancelling the effects of illegitimate dismissal.5

This excerpt is a clarification of the concept of stable employment made by the Constitutional Court in April 1976 in a ruling by the Joint Sections. Here job stability was defined as the existence of laws governing firings, which meant strict rules over what constituted a justified firing and a government mechanism for reinstating wrongfully fired employees (Mazzotta 2008). As the Constitutional Court defined it, precarious workers were those who did not enjoy job stability: male and female workers in small businesses, home-based industry, or employed illegally, but also employees in the public sector, particularly in education and academia, who were also seen as unstably employed. In the late 1970s, these types of workers began to demand their inclusion under the Statute of Workers’ Rights and the elimination of their “precarious” labor relations.

3.1.2 THE NEW HOME-BASED INDUSTRIAL WORK LAW It is precisely because home-based industrial work is presented as a typical form of precarious work, subject to calculations related to business convenience, that the law intervenes to rectify the material imbalance of the situation. This regulatory intervention aims at counteracting precarity by introducing strict forms of regulation: in essence, by superimposing specific “rigid” constraints upon the entire social area of absolute “mobility (including tools of administrative control)” (Mariucci 1979, 110).

In 1973, a new law was passed regulating home-based industrial work,6 a form of employment that had been defined as “precarious” since the fifties, evident above in the interpretation of jurist Luigi Mariucci in 1979. The new law established Sentence of the joint sections of the Corte di Cassazione, April 12, 1976. Law no. 877, “Nuove norme per la tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” approved on December 18, 1973, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 5, January 1974.

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a principle of equality between workers within and outside the factory and made possible home-based workers’ negotiation of piecework rates with their employers. Thousands of home-based industrial workers could finally enjoy all the social insurance benefits provided to factory workers, like paid sick leave, maternity leave, and unemployment benefits. The law abolished the incompatibility between signing up simultaneously in the register of artisans and that of home-based workers. It also forbade home-based work on materials that were considered to be harmful and outlawed the rehiring of fired employees as homebased workers. Hence, the “exit” of hundreds of thousands of women from the active productive workforce has been largely transformed into hidden and underpaid female employment. The creation of this underpaid female workforce, employed in the home, has certainly contributed to the serious lack of development of the social services available to families.7

The procedure leading to the approval of the new law was much shorter than that of the earlier 1958 law that had regulated home-based work. The first version of this bill was presented in December 1969 by communist deputies Luciana Sgarbi, Nilde Iotti, and Nives Gessi as its first signatories, followed by many other Communist Party MPs.8 An accompanying report criticized the implementation of the 1958 law, a sentiment shared by the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Labor, Leandro Rampa, and by the CGIL, CISL, and UIL trade unions.9 According to the trade unions, the most critical issue with that law was the massive registration of home-based industrial workers as artisans, often driven to do so by employers who threatened not to provide them with more work. Employers aimed to avoid paying social security provisions and related costs. In 1968, an estimated million to a million and a half home-based industrial workers existed, though only 24,000 were registered with the national social security fund (INPS) into which regular contributions were supposed to be paid. The expansion of home-based work as the last phase in the industrial production chain had coincided with a significant reduction in female employment, about 1,200,000 women according to the promotors of the 1969 Sgarbi bill. Their goals were increasing the costs for home-based work, forcing employers to make greater investments in and hire home-based workers as employees, extending to them all the social benefits enjoyed by factory workers. Municipal commissions of control would be set up to measure the enrollment of home-based workers in the Chamber of Deputies, V Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Luciana Sgarbi, Nilde Iotti et al., “Modifiche alla legge 13 Marzo 1958, no. 264, concernente la tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on December 19, 1969: 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 1. 7

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official registers (which had existed since 1958). Though it failed at first, the Sgarbi bill was resubmitted following the approval of the Statute for Workers’ Rights in October 1972.10 In January 1973, a new bill was presented by the socialist lawyer Maria Magnani Noya and other parliamentarians belonging to the Socialist Party.11 A brief note accompanying the bill emphasized the abuses and violations made possible by the lacunas and ambiguities of the 1958 law. Such abuses led to a new definition of home-based industrial workers, which made the status of subordination obvious and clarified the distinction between work performed at home and in the factory. This very socialist bill also proposed setting up regional commissions with the task of controlling and coordinating the existing provincial commissions, as well as creating new municipal commissions. In March 1973, a Christian Democrat bill was proposed by the future Minister of Labor Tina Anselmi.12 This text proposed redefining home-based industrial workers in a similar way to the previous bills and introduced a clause aimed at regulating home-based work more rigidly in cases of industrial restructuring, forbidding companies, which had previously dismissed or suspended workers, from commissioning industrial homework. This bill also dealt with the issue of health and safety, prohibiting the use of harmful substances in home-based work that were considered dangerous to the health of workers and their families.13 A fourth bill was presented by Antonio Cavriglia14 of the Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI). Its main objectives were to guarantee greater protection for home-based industrial workers, reclassifying them as regular employees and prohibiting certain activities deemed harmful. Like the previous Christian Democrat bill, this one also proposed preventing employers who had laid off or suspended their regular employees from placing production orders with homebased workers and would have allowed for home-based workers to receive family allowances and involuntary unemployment benefits, calculated on the same scale as that of non-agricultural workers. Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Luciana Sgarbi, Fernando Di Giulio et al., “Modifiche alla legge 13 Marzo 1958, no. 264, concernente la tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on October 12, 1972. 11 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Maria Magnani Noya, Alfredo Giovanardi et al., “Modifiche alla legge 13 Marzo 1958, no. 264, recante norme per la tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on January 27, 1973. 12 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Anselmi Tina, Vincenzo Mancini et al., “Modifica della legge 13 Marzo 1958, no. 264, per la tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on February 14, 1973. 13 The bill proposed that a table on harmful work be set up jointly by the Minister of Labor and the Minister of Health. 14 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Antonio Cavriglia, Reggiani et al., “Modifica ed integrazione della legge 13 Marzo 1958, no. 264, relativa alla tutela del lavoro a domicilio,” announced on May 9, 1973. 10

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Today, home-based industrial work is no longer simply a complementary activity used to supplement family income and, as such, entrusted to the housewife, the pensioner, the farmer’s wife, or the worker dismissed from textile factories experiencing a crisis. Rather it rests upon the shoulders of a multitude of young workers seeking their first jobs, workers marginalized from factories during the years of economic recession and unfavorable economic conditions, all of whom work within a decentralized organization, but of an industrial type and using industrial machinery, the result of which is a reduction in labor costs, due to salaries lower than those resulting from contracts and avoidance of the obligations of social security legislation.15

A new bill, entitled “Nuove norme per il lavoro a domicilio,” (New Rules for Home-based Work), was submitted by the Minister of Labor and others to Parliament on April 16, 1973. A joint report connected the abnormal growth of home-based work to the reduction in female employment and industrial decentralization. Its authors’ assessment of the 1958 law was also negative. Their main criticism was its ambiguous notion of the “home-based-work relationship,” the impossibility of people to be simultaneously included on the registers for artisans and home-based-work, the failure to apply piecework rates to home-based work, and the lack of a ban against intermediaries. Like in 1958, a Select Committee worked on the bill, combining it with the four previous bills mentioned above, before it was discussed by the Labor Commission of the Chamber. Tina Anselmi, writing on behalf the Select Committee,16 made clear that their goal was redefining home-based work more precisely and reducing its spread. Although the link between home-based industrial work and female employment was widely acknowledged by members of the Chamber’s Labor Commission, opinions on the role of this kind of work within the economy varied. Luciana Sgarbi Bompani and Maria Magnani Noya emphasized the connection between the worsening condition of female employment and the explosion of home-based industrial work, the latter being the only source of income for many job-seeking women and former laborers expelled from factories.17 Meanwhile, the Christian Democrat Ines Boffardi emphasized that “when home-based industrial work does not degenerate into irregular, and therefore, unlawful exploitation, it represents a qualifying and dignified way of permitting the female worker to carry out a profitable activity without leaving her home and her family.”18 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the Minister of Labor and Social Security Dionigi Coppo, jointly with the Minister of Justice Guido Gonnella and the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce Mauro Ferri, “Nuove norme per il lavoro a domicilio,” presented to the Presidency on April 16, 1973. 16 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, XIII Commission, Session of October 4, 1973: 242–47. 17 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, XIII Commission, Session of October 4, 1973: 247–50. 18 Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, XIII Commission, Session of October 10, 1973: 264. 15

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The Parliament treated this bill as a high priority, discussing it from October to November of 1973 and finally making it law in December.19 This law on home-based industrial work was a watershed, highlighting at the same time the achieved stability and the consequences of new forms of precarity. Despite the efforts of the bill’s supporters, it failed to place significant checks on the industrial decentralization process, which was making home-based work the last phase of the factory restructuring brought on by the 1970s crisis.

3.2 In the shadow of the crisis: Industrial restructuring and precarity 3.2.1 PRECARIOUS WORK IN THE STUDIES OF THE SEVENTIES Documentation concerning the growing importance of home-based work, of productive decentralization, of having two jobs, of precarious and “black” work in its different forms and arrangements, was emerging and becoming consolidated. (Garonna 1981, 11).

The seventies were a crucial decade for the analysis and measurement of precarious work and other forms of marginal and irregular labor (Garonna 1981). Examining the socio-economic and statistical literature of the period, three aspects appear to have influenced the development of new analytical categories: the effects of the seventies crisis on the industrial structure and employment system, a new understanding of the dynamics of female employment, and a new focus on youth underemployment and unemployment. Meanwhile, official statistical sources were slow to grasp the effects that the crisis were having on the structure of employment and forms of labor (Favero and Trivellato 2000). Statistical data on the emergence of precarious labor relations began to be drawn up during the early seventies within certain sectors of industry respectively, like clothing-textile or metalworking, but there were not yet any official nationwide surveys of the phenomenon (FLM Bologna 1975; Frey 1975). There were also analyses made at this time of part-time agricultural labor, which was associated with the persistence of multi-active workers merging agricultural and industrial work (Zangheri 1978; Barberis 1970), as well as important studies regarding Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, XIII Commission, Sessions of October 4, 10, 11, 1973; Senate of the Republic, VI Legislature, XI Commission, sessions of November 21, 28, 29, and December 5, 1973.

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the “black” labor market (Alessandrini 1978) and under-the-table employment, part of a new focus on the underground economy (CENSIS 1976). The problem of quantifying irregular and precarious forms of work was dealt with clearly in studies on the dualistic structure of the Italian labor market. The dualism existing between regular, stable work, recorded in official rates of activity, and irregular and precarious work, not normally recorded, is one of the possible dichotomies regarding the labor market, which contains a composite reality which varies according to sex, age-group, territorial and sectoral distribution of the workforce (Alessandrini 1978, 17).

The statistics office ISTAT updated their quarterly labor force survey in 1977 to include specific questions for mapping home-based work, casual, and marginal labor, double-job situations, and other forms of occasional employment. The survey was meant to “detect positions on the fringes of the labor market, which tended to be overlooked during the interview [with a worker]. This is particularly true of occasional or marginal female employment and double jobs, which still seem to be underestimated” (Trivellato 1981, 220–21). This change was prompted by a need for “a more precise identification of the fringes of precarious work and of people’s willingness to work in non-professional conditions” (Ioly 1978, 42). ISTAT was more reactive when it came to changing the categories and tools used to measure female employment. The latter was seen in the debates of the seventies as essential to the very concept of precarious work (Badino 2008; Betti 2010; Reyneri 2002). In 1971, it published the results of a special survey of people not considered to be a part of the labor force, Indagine speciale sulle persone non appartenenti alle forze di lavoro, which focused on the phenomenon of the occasional work carried out by housewives and not regarded as such precisely because these casual jobs were labelled “not standard,” “occasional,” and “precarious” (ISTAT 1971). The survey followed a well-publicized debate on the ambiguous position of housewives, classified as “home-based workers” by statisticians of the Bologna school like Luciano Bergonzini,20 who highlighted the pervasiveness of home-based work among housewives in the Emilia-Romagna region. The relationship between female occupation, underemployment, and precarity was at the center of some such studies (Frey, Livragni and Salvati 1977), and there were numerous analyses made of specific industrial sectors (like clothing and textiles) by trade unionists, activists, and scholars involved in the feminist movement. Luciano Bergonzini, “Casalinghe o lavoranti a domicilio?” Inchiesta, no. 10, 1973; Id., “Professionalità femminile e lavoro a domicilio: questioni generali ed esiti di un’indagine statistica in alcuni comuni dell’Emilia-Romagna,” Statistica, no. 4, 1973: 491–596.

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The 1976 CENSIS survey on hidden employment demonstrated the increasing importance of precarity in studies of the Italian labor market. The objective of the survey was “to obtain basic statistical data in order to evaluate the economic characteristics and dimensions of the labor activities, regular and organized, occasional and precarious, carried out by young and adult Italians” (CENSIS 1976, 18). Compared to the official ISTAT survey, the CENSIS survey overestimated the participation rate in the labor market by 2,213,000 units. Of these, the research institute claimed “1.8–2 million people are employed for shorter periods of the year and in large part represent recurrent or occasional, essentially precarious, jobs” (CENSIS 1976, 29). CENSIS deemed jobs lasting less than six months precarious or “weak.” Of the so-called temporary workers, numbering over one million, more than half were women. It is important to note that the notion of precarious employment is much broader than that of underclass: all sub-proletarians are employed precariously, but not all temporary workers belong to the underclass (Sylos Labini 1974, 177).

Generally during the early seventies, precarious work and precarity were at the center of important theoretical analyses of the economy and entered the vocabulary of public debate in Italy by late seventies. In addition to Paolo Sylos Labini, discussed in Chapter I, two more Italian sociologists, Massimo Paci and Luca Meldolesi, also contributed to the conceptualization of precarity, focusing on the changing social and economic conditions of the country and the restructuring of industry. Paolo Sylos Labini played a vital role in the sixties by proposing the first conceptualizations and empirical estimates of precarious labor, beginning with the Sicilian case. In his well-known study of social classes (Sylos Labini 1974), the economist related precarious workers to the Marxist concept of the Lumpenproletariat. However, being a precarious worker did not mean being a member of the sub-proletariat. The “precarian” category included casual workers employed in agriculture, industry, and commerce, whose conditions were characterized by low wages and employment instability. The income of the “precariat,” besides being among the lowest, were also uncertain and highly variable, causing them to be frequently included among the “poor.” Sylos Labini estimated that there were 3.7 million precarious workers in Italy by the end of the sixties, the highest of any Western country. Three quarters of these were concentrated in southern Italy, despite the fact that only one third of the total Italian population lived there. This meant there was a pronounced imbalance in the distribution of temporary workers at a national level (Ibid.). In southern Italy, according to the economist, the sub-proletariat made up an enormous proportion of both cities and poorer agricultural areas, where the precariat joined the ranks of the unemployed.

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From a sociological standpoint, not only wage-earning workers were precarious but also a large part of the “relatively autonomous petty bourgeoisie.” For Sylos Labini, not all precarious workers were sub-proletarians. Although the precariat belonged in large part to the “working class” and was particularly numerous among agricultural, construction, and petty-trade workers, he also pointed to precarious workers in the “middle classes,” thus providing a crosssectional view of social classes (Ibid.). If two and a half million precarious workers belonged to the working class, the remaining one million were poor farmers, artisans, street hawkers, and itinerant vendors belonging to the lower ranks of the middle class. Sylos Labini’s study helped alter the previous commonly understood image of a stable working class in the seventies, by showing that about one quarter of them were precariously employed. Industrial manufacturing had the highest estimate of precarious workers (about two million), particularly in southern Italy, while there were thought to be 900,000 in agriculture and 800,000 in the tertiary sector. In agriculture the most precarious workers were farm laborers, in industry home-based industrial workers, and in the tertiary sector street vendors (Ibid.). Precarity of employment (and of the income earned from it) may be assumed, approximately, as a criterion to define the marginal proletariat. It is necessary, however, to go more thoroughly into the definition and specify the source of employment precarity (Paci 1973, 282).

It was precisely the composition of the working class, and the factors that characterized the so-called “marginal proletariat,” that constituted the basis of Massimo Paci’s analysis on precarious work and income. His study of precarity, unlike Sylos Labini’s, focused mainly on the industrial sector and on marginal production in particular, where the proletariat was concentrated. For Paci, it was the marginal workers employed in small industrial and craft companies who experienced the highest degree of precarity, which appeared to be inherent in the “precarious” nature of their work. These small businesses had far higher labor turnover rates than larger industries as they were much more susceptible to the fluctuations of the market. The marginal proletariat, meaning precarious workers, were more common in traditional economic sectors and in underdeveloped areas, although peripheral enterprises and workers were present in the most modern and technologically advanced sectors too. The marginal proletariat, which included workers without contracts and those working from home, constituted the “most precarious section of the peripheral labor force” (Ibid.). The connection existing between small-farmers and peripheral industrial sectors emerged clearly, according to Paci, when one examined the precarious incomes of rural families. The latter were an endless supply of precarious workers and the under-employed.

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Like Sylos Labini, Paci tried to estimate marginal employment, categorizing it into “overt” precarious employment, the numbers of which he based on existing statistics, and “hidden” precarious work, which only surfaced during ad hoc surveys, like on people not defined as belonging to the workforce carried out by ISTAT in 1971 (ISTAT 1971). Paci estimated that in the industrial sector there were approximately 2,100,000 marginal workers plus about 230,000 “hidden” precarians, of whom 100,000 belonged to the industrial sector (Paci 1973). He also pointed out that the economic recovery of the early seventies had translated into an “expansion of precarious employment within the peripheral sector” due to the proliferation of the labor force, which saw larger companies outsource an increasing number of production orders to smaller companies (Paci 1973). Although Paci did not make estimates for agriculture directly, he continued Corrado Barberis’s investigation of part-time agricultural labor (Barberis 1970), highlighting the close correlation and partial overlapping between the 1,900,000 part-timers in small agricultural companies and the 2,000,000 temporary workers employed in industry. According to Paci, the existence of such a large number of workers who had not broken their ties to rural, agricultural society was a sign of the “precarious” or “non-regular” employment outside of agriculture (Paci 1973, 307). Let us start, therefore, from the issue of precarious employment. There are no difficulties regarding the definition of precarious employment provided above. This definition is clear and regards all those whose jobs are unstable both from the point of view of employment and earnings (Meldolesi 1972, 41).

The sociologist Luca Meldolesi formulated his definition of precarious employment in relation to the Marxist concept of the “industrial reserve army.” For Meldolesi, that group was composed of both the unemployed (both jobless and jobseekers) and the precariously employed, and he associated it with a lack of occupational and income stability. While he believed this was an obvious category, he saw measuring it as difficult. Official statistics regarding underemployment, conceptually closest to the fuzzy category of precarity, were by definition partial and included only precarious workers who worked less than 32 hours per week. Meldolesi believed that this data on underemployment was too fragmentary and placed too much an emphasis on northern Italy. It could not provide a good overall view of precarious employment in Italy. For this reason, Meldolesi, building on Sylos Labini’s work, made new estimates of precarity, sector by sector, region by region, by comparing census data on the population with census data on industry and commerce, along with agricultural statistics pulled from the Unified Agricultural Contributions Service (Servizio dei Contributi Agricoli Unificati, SCAU).

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According to Meldolesi, in 1961 there were just over 5 million temporary workers in Italy, equal to 25% of the total working population. Of these 845,000 were employed in the tertiary sector, 1,978,000 in agriculture, and 2,212,000 in industry (Meldolesi 1972). A little over a quarter of those employed in industry and a third of those in agriculture were precarious according to Meldolesi’s calculations, while in the tertiary sector precarians accounted for only about one sixth of the workers. The author stressed the fact that the estimates of the precarious workers in agriculture included only the laborers and not small farmers themselves. This meant that the employment precarity rate in agriculture was an underestimate, especially in the poorer areas of the south. He attributed an important role to the South of Italy when it came to the distribution of precarious work, especially in the industrial sector, which led him to conclude that the level of industrial development was closely related to the spread of precarious employment. Meldolesi took stock of the situation of precarious employment up until 1968. That year, he estimated there to be between 3,197,000 and 4,233,000 precarious workers, 14–18.5% of the working population (ITI), with a possible decrease compared to the years of the economic boom. Like Sylos Labini, Meldolesi considered such high rates of precarious employment to be peculiar to Italy, although it was not possible to find estimates for the same period in other countries. Although the concept of precarious work seemed to be closely associated with underdevelopment, scholars in other countries defined “unstable” employment in somewhat different ways, making comparison difficult. This was particularly true for the concept of underemployment as well.

3.2.2 THE DECENTRALIZATION OF PRODUCTION AND PRECARITY: THE METALWORKING AND TEXTILE-CLOTHING INDUSTRIES The organizational changes taking place, inside and outside companies, tend to regain a considerable degree of flexibility both in terms of production and the use of the workforce, on the one hand, by compressing wages of the working class employed in the larger factories, in sectors featuring the most advanced and strongest degrees of trade-unionism, and on the other, by introducing forms of contractually weak precarious employment permitting considerable reductions in labor costs (Mariucci 1975, 482).

In the seventies, the debate on precarity was furthered by trade unionists on the effects of the crisis and the following restructuring processes, which began changing Italian industry from the beginning of the decade and with increasing intensity since 1973. According to observers at the time, the development of precarious work was one of the chief consequences of the industrial decentralization

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processes implemented by large companies to reduce costs and recover the profit margins they had lost as a result of the international stagflation crisis (Mariucci 1975; Trentin 1977; Negri 1976).21 According to the trade unions, the creation of a vast domain of ​​precarious work catered to the employers’ intention to divide the working class by weakening workers’ bargaining power in large companies through layoffs, downsizing, the outsourcing of production to smaller firms, and by continually decentralizing the factory, particularly funneling that work into home-based industry (De Marco and Talamo 1976).22 Massimo Paci’s and Luca Meldolesi’s notion of precarians as members of the marginal proletariat and of the reserve industrial army had a major impact on the debate of the period, becoming an integral part of the conceptual toolkit of trade unionists and scholars close to the labor movement. Paci himself, when publishing his book, spoke of a “rediscovery” of precarious employment in Italy by the trade unions, which, already in the early seventies, had provided opportunities for further study of the changes in labor and production (Paci 1973). One example of this was the volume Occupazione, lavoro precario, piccola e media impresa (Occupation, precarious work, small and medium enterprise, 1974), based on the minutes of a conference of the same title held in Rome in June 1974 by the youth branch of the ACLI. The debate between economists like Sebastiano Brusco and Luigi Frey, Massimo Paci, union leaders like Sergio Garavini (Secretary General of FULTA) and Giovanni Bon (National Secretary of FLM), reveals the central role of precarity as a concept already during the early seventies, no longer just on the fringe of the Catholic world. In his introductory speech at the conference, Alessandro Tesini, a national delegate of the youth branch of the ACLI, emphasized how much of an issue precarious work was and what a decisive problem it posed to the entire labor movement (Occupazione 1974). The most thorough analyses of the different forms of precarity that had emerged through industrial restructuring of the seventies were based on two important industrial sectors: metalworking and textiles. These studies deemed the working conditions of many employees of smaller metalworking companies to be precarious, as well as the hundreds of thousands of home-based industrial workers in the textile industry, who despite the new advanced law of 1973 regulating their work, continued to work informally, without contracts or social security (FLM Bologna 1975; Frey 1975). The number of investigations into the transformations of these two sectors demonstrate the urgency felt within the labor movement to “Sindacato e decentramento produttivo,” Prospettiva sindacale, studi e documenti della CISL di Milano, no. 2, September–December 1974. 22 Franco Butera, “Politica industriale, strategia sindacale e organizzazione del lavoro, tavola rotonda,” special issue, Quaderni di rassegna sindacale 15, nos. 64–65 (1977): 3–43; Claudio Sabattini, “Il controllo sindacale in fabbrica sull’organizzazione del lavoro,” Quaderni di rassegna sindacale, 15, nos. 64–65 (1977): 84–93. 21

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understand and measure the decentralization of production. Decentralization was, according to these scholars and trade unionists, producing an ever-widening gap in the working conditions of the industrial workforce.23 Less and less workers employed by large companies still enjoyed the stability that had been guaranteed to them by labor legislation passed at the beginning of the seventies, and increasing numbers of those employed in smaller firms were becoming precarious due to lack of protection against layoffs and to irregular working conditions (FLM Bergamo 1975; Garibaldo, Rinaldini and Zappelli 1972).24 During the seventies, several investigations were made into the decentralization of industry and into the conditions of male and female workers employed in small metalworking enterprises, looking at different regions of industrialized northern and central Italy, particularly Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. A survey of small and medium-sized metalworking factories in Emilia-Romagna (Bologna in particular) was carried out in 1971. At a joint conference held to present the results of the survey, the then Secretary General of the Bologna-based Italian Federation of Metal Workers (FIOM) Claudio Sabattini spoke on behalf of the Emilia-Romagna branches of the three main metalworkers’ unions FIM, FIOM, and UILM. He called for the creation of a unified trade union movement to fight against the subordination of small businesses and “interrupt the process whereby this industrial sector was obliged to live in a state of precarity and blackmail, undermining levels of employment and wages” (Sabattini 1972). For us it is a matter of understanding whether we are in the presence of a combined, mixed increase in various forms of precarious work (decentralized, home-based, undeclared, evening work, contract work, piecework, second jobs) generalized in our category as a premise to even more ferocious restructuring, with further contraction of the organized production base, as occurred in the textile, clothing and construction sectors (Alvisi et al. 1975, 23).

Two more surveys of decentralization in 1975 in Bologna by the sociologist Vittorio Capecchi and in Bergamo by the economist Sebastiano Brusco became two important reference points for later research on the size, forms, and effects of the phenomenon. They also made a considerable contribution to the debate on the role of small businesses within the Italian capitalist system by calling into and question the presumed subordination and backwardness of small businesses, and highlighted the existence of a number of small, independent, technologically advanced companies (FLM Bergamo 1975). This realization became important Sergio Garavini, “Sviluppo contro occupazione,” Rinascita, November 22, 1976; Claudio Sabattini, “Il controllo sindacale in fabbrica sull’organizzazione del lavoro,” Quaderni di rassegna sindacale 15, nos. 64–65 (1977): 84–93. 24 “Ristrutturazione e organizzazione del lavoro nelle fabbriche metalmeccaniche bolognesi,” Inchiesta, July–September: 6–27. 23

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for trade unions’ strategies for combatting precarious work, which was most evident among small businesses. If small companies enjoyed some autonomy and were not necessarily backward, it became not only possible but urgent, according to many trade unionists from the FLM, to balance working conditions in the factories (Sabattini 1977; Trentin 1977).25 Both surveys pointed out that the worst conditions were those found in small and craft businesses. Workers there had a lack of job security, excess overtime, a higher pace of work, lower wages and qualifications, and no means to bargain collectively (FLM Bergamo 1975; FLM Bologna 1975). This is how the Secretariat of the Bergamo branch of the FLM explained the relationship existing between job precarity and small and medium-sized businesses: […] precarious working conditions, and non-application of work contracts, are not to be sought in situations strictly dependent on the market, which, as we have seen, do not exist in small compared to large businesses, or in situations of technological backwardness caused by scarce investment in the sector. These kinds of precarious labor conditions are to be attributed rather to the will of entrepreneurs to keep wages low and not respect the labor contracts due to the bargaining weakness of trade unions in firms with fewer than 100 workers (FLM Bergamo 1975, 76).

The situation in southern Italy did not appear any different than in northern and central Italy, except for the lower number of small and medium-sized enterprises, which were concentrated almost exclusively in traditional sectors. In the south, home-based industrial work appeared to be widespread, as was non-compliance with contracts, under-the-table work, and “piecework” (Caminiti, Chillé, and Oteri 1979). The situation was aggravated, according to the sources, by the greater willingness of southern Italians to accept precarious jobs because of their high level of unemployment and underemployment. In metalworking companies in the Messina area that produced sheet metal and fixtures, a study carried out in 1979 revealed that most of the workforce was precarious and irregular: One of the immediate consequences of the availability of labor is the creation of unstable work relations between the worker and the factory […]. The use of labor to implement productive flexibility and lower costs leads to the immediate reduction of employment as orders decrease and the dismissal of workers in “coincidence” with seniority pay increases. After dismissal, undeclared re-employment of workers often takes place but the labor relationship is no longer that of the wage earner; their services are paid piece-time rates or by the day, meaning that their wages fluctuate around five thousand liras a day, without any guarantee of continuity (Caminiti, Chillé, and Oteri 1979, 102). Sergio Garavini, “Sviluppo contro occupazione,” Rinascita, November 22, 1976.

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The textile sector was also the focus of numerous investigations during the seventies, promoted both by economists and sociologists as well as directly by joint trade union organizations, like FULTA, in collaboration with scholars close to the labor movement (Del Giudice and Pizzol 1975). Luigi Frey’s study on the textile industry proved to be the most significant in terms of geographical breadth, analytical and methodological expertise, and impact (1975). He focused on the relationship between the decentralization of production and the spread of home-based industrial work in the textile industry. His study provided quantitative data on employment and underemployment in that sector, including information not recorded in official statistics. He analyzed home-based industrial work, seeing it as the last phase in the decentralization of the factory, analyzed alongside small and craft businesses. The results of the research show that there exists some doubt that this is a form of underemployment given its precarious nature. Its precarity derives from its discontinuity, working conditions, and the characteristics of being work-based in the strict sense. On a general average, home-based work in the strict sense does not exceed nine working months a year, 180 hours a month; it presents noticeable instances of discontinuity depending on peaks, standstills, the involvement or otherwise of other family members, etc.; decisions regarding work schedules are totally beyond the control of the individual female worker, just as they affect wage levels only marginally (Frey 1975, 176).

In his survey Frey interrogated the relationship between home-based work and precarity, expanding the concept of precarity to include the duration and intensity of the work. According to Frey, workers’ lack of control over their work schedules and wages was one of the main reasons that home-based work was defined by concepts such as exploitation and precarity. Women constituted 90% of the home-based workforce and accepted this kind of labor because of a lack of alternative employment. Often registered only as housewives in official statistics, many home-based workers came from regions with agricultural underemployment where female and youth unemployment were prevalent (Ibid.). The employer’s interests in reducing costs and getting the “greatest possible flexibility when hiring labor” were among the main causes for the decentralization of production that led to increases in the numbers of home-based workers and workers employed in small and very small artisanal enterprises. Decentralization appeared to be greater wherever un-employed or underemployed workers like “women, the young and the elderly” were prepared to accept lower wages (Ibid.). According to the trade unions and scholars involved in the debate on decentralization (Livragni 1977), the recovery of wider margins of flexibility in workforce management was impossible in the case of large companies but it became the driver of both the decomposition of the production cycle and

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the growth of precarious employment within the small businesses, artisan shops, and home-based labor.26 Decreases in female employment by factories can turn into total unemployment, and much more frequently into underemployment (home-based work) or precarious employment (small businesses and the crafts) (Cutrufelli 1977, 17).

Underemployment and precarity were the main features of the two forms of work carried out in the home: craft work and home-based piecework. According to Frey’s calculations (1975), from 1972 to 1973 approximately half a million people, mostly women, worked in either form. The revealing of such a massive number of home-based workers led to a frenzy of investigations on the subject. Among these, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Operaie senza Fabbrica (Female workers without a factory, 1977) is particularly relevant as the phenomenon Cutrufelli based her book’s title on became one of the major conceptual categories of the discussion that followed. During the late seventies, the numbers of female workers without a factory increased rapidly, even more so than in the early seventies when it had prompted the passing of the 1973 law on home-based industrial labor. Cutrufelli highlighted the worsening situation of female employment precarity since the late sixties, when “the expulsion of a significant proportion of the female workforce from the stable labor market” caused “its transit into the area of marginal and precarious work” (Cutrufelli 1977, 16). According to her, female workers were the true protagonists of the industrial restructuring in this period that brought the factory into the home. Cutrufelli pointed to the family environment and social conditions as the causes of lower female job stability and greater precarity. Married women with children seemed over-represented in home-based irregular work, due to the impossibility of finding jobs that would allow them to balance work and childcare duties (Ibid.). Cutrufelli emphasized that the unsolved problem of managing the family was driving the high turnover rates for the female workforce in the factories. According to her, the results of surveys on high female employment in places like Bologna clearly highlighted the sharp marginalization of female workers and the high levels of precarity they experienced, not only in the sphere of home-based industrial work, but also in agriculture and the tertiary sector. In the seventies, women workers’ precarity was denounced by other people too, as will be seen in the following pages.

Franco Butera et al., “Politica industriale, strategia sindacale e organizzazione del lavoro, tavola rotonda,” Quaderni di rassegna sindacale 15, nos. 64–65 (1977): 3–43.

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3.3 Intellectual precarity and intellectual elaboration on precarity 3.3.1 PRECARITY AND THE WOMAN QUESTION Our desire to count more as women, on the job and in the union, arises from awareness that the inequality and precarity we are submitted to at work depend on the social role as mothers and wives, mothers and housewives, we perform at the social level […]. This is because […] industrial development has consolidated the sexual division of labor […] the organization of life is left entirely on the shoulders of women [who] not only have to bear a double burden […] but are also marginalized in underqualified and precarious jobs.27

The Italian second-wave feminist movement in this period was not so interested in paid work and labor policy, while they did advocate a radical reformation of domestic work within capitalism (Tolomelli 2015). Nevertheless, some branches of the larger women’s movement did address the problem of women’s job precarity. Among the latter, trade union “feminism” in particular (Beccalli 1985; Rossi Doria 2005; Guerra 2008) made an important critique of the organization of work in Italy, which it deemed discriminatory because it was shaped solely on the adult male worker. The organization of factory work reflected the general sexual divisions of labor in Italian society, which gave women the primary task of dealing with family care. According to groups like the Coordinamento Nazionale Donne FLM (The national branch of the women’s FLM movement) and local branches, social roles relegated female workers to marginal and precarious positions (Guerra 2008; Cereseto, Frisone and Varlese 2010; Bracke 2014). Set up in 1976 and officially recognized by the United Metalworkers’ Organization in 1977 (Guerra 2008, 229–44; Varlese 2010, 53–73), the Women’s Branch underlined the weakness of women during times of crisis because employers used female employment as emergency valves that could be taken on and expelled when needed. In the difficult economic situation of the seventies, particularly during the restructuring and decentralization of industrial production, women were those most involved in precarious and irregular work, as well as those most frequently affected by layoffs (Cutrufelli 1977). The female metalworkers’ attitude towards precarity was influenced by both feminist positions on the issue of the interconnection between domestic and paid Archivio del lavoro di Milano (Milan Labor Archives), Archivio FIOM Milano (Milan FIOM Archives), Commissione femminile-Coordinamento delegate, f. 4163, Coordinamento nazionale delle delegate FLM. Contributo al dibattito congressuale, May 6, 1977, cited in Varlese 2009.

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work (Tolomelli 2015; Ribero 2005) and the broader trade union discourse over the consequences of decentralization of production on employment (Butera et al. 1977; Garavini 1976; Sabattini 1977). FLM women saw the condition of precarity as a specific aspect of the more general issue of female subordination in the realm of productive work (Frisone 2014), which was irresolvable unless direct intervention was taken by the government to broaden and improve social services, especially for children. Therefore, women now claim, without the timidity that characterized them in the past, without apologizing for what they do today, numerous things for themselves. They claim the right to change their condition and change it substantially, they claim not being considered objects and sexual commodities […];—they claim not being the simple organizers of men’s homes […];— they claim not being the simple executors of the orders and plans of foremen […]—they claim not being the protagonists, this time yes, the protagonists, of a subsidiary economy, of underpaid wages, of seasonal and precarious labor, exploitation, blackmail, clandestine home-based work;—they claim not being discriminated against when it comes to job opportunities, careers;—they demand that the institution whose task it is to educate by renewing the excellence of our society—the school—finally decide to apply the constitutional dictate of equality […].28

The UDI, as discussed earlier, had already wrestled with the problem of women’s work precarity in the sixties, taking on job stability as one of its main political objectives. In the seventies, as the economic crisis worsened, the association laid out a number of priorities regarding work. Besides wanting to defend women that were already employed, the UDI also wanted to increase women’s work qualifications, work stability, reduce underemployment, and create new opportunities for skilled work in the service sector.29 The elaboration by the UDI on the issue of stability/precarity in the political climate of the seventies was enriched by an increasingly close dialogue with the feminist movement, and influenced by the UN, which declared 1975 the “International Year of Women” (Betti 2015). Participants in the 1974 National Conference held in Genoa advocated for a new model of economic development focusing on the role of women. The UDI closely linked women’s right to paid work with social progress, promoting a national demonstration dedicated to women’s employment in February 1976.30 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 26, fasc. 161, sottofasc. 4, “Manifestazione Nazionale Unione Donne Italiane, 11 Febbraio 1976 (Conclusioni di Margherita Repetto),” (typescript). 29 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 22, fasc. 134, Posta della Settimana, XII, no. 10, July 1, 1972, printed pamphlet. 30 ACUDI, Sezione tematica, DILA, b. 26, fasc. 161, sottofasc. 4, “Manifestazione Nazionale Unione Donne Italiane, 11 Febbraio 1976 (Conclusioni di Margherita Repetto),” (typescript). 28

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UDI leader Margherita Repetto delivered the concluding remarks at the 1976 demonstration, explaining the association’s position on precarious employment. The latter was considered by the UDI as a “secondary,” “peripheral” aspect of the economy, of which women unfortunately tended to become, more and more, the protagonists during the years of the crisis. The association criticized both the organization of production at the workplace and the role of women within society, the home, and the family. “Housewification” was rejected as an unchosen “destiny,” thrust upon women and which obscured female unemployment and underemployment, weakening women’s labor demands. Due to the exponential growth of home-based and undeclared work that followed industrial restructuring, precarity, marginality, and underqualification increased significantly especially among younger women, the UDI reported. The specific problems of women in southern Italy, unemployment above all, prompted the leaders of UDI to organize a second national demonstration in Naples in November of the same year. On that occasion, the association called upon the central government and local authorities to promote social services. The UDI’s goal was to have local governments increase women’s employment stability, help lessen the conflict between women’s work in and outside of the home, and help increase women’s work qualifications. As women we are the first to undergo selection at university and cultural subordination, the first to be expelled from the labor market or to be employed in production with precarious, home-based, underpaid jobs (Benecchi et al. 1977, 191).

The women belonging to the FLM and UDI were not the only ones to connect the conditions of precarity experienced in the labor market and the more general issue of female subordination within Italian society in the seventies. The Coordinated Feminist Commissions of the University of Rome also took a position on the topic, as did some other feminist groups in the 1977 Movement. The positions of the latter differed, however, from those of the unions and UDI (Stelliferi 2015). According to the feminists of the University of Rome, to give women a non-domestic job, or to reserve a percentage of jobs in the labor market for women, was equivalent to giving women a “double job.” Only changes in the family organization and a radical modification of the sexual division of labor could lay the foundations for the improvement of the social and working conditions of women and lead to a real reduction in their precariousness (Benecchi et al. 1977).

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3.3.2 PRECARITY AND THE 1977 MOVEMENT Violence equals autonomy, autonomy equals the 1977 movement, the 1977 movement equals precariat, precariat equals a second society, a second society equals a new bourgeoisie.31

A year after the tragic events of March 1977, which saw the killing of the Bolognese student Francesco Lorusso, the journalist Rossana Rossanda, writing for the left-wing daily Il Manifesto, associated the notion of “precariat” with the entire 1977 Movement. Some activists within that movement writing at the same time called it a “strange movement of strange students” (Lerner, Manconi and Sinibaldi 1978). Certain fringes of the movement came to the fore between December 1976 and December 1977 (Falciola 2015), who put forward a detailed position on the condition of precarity that came to be regarded as one of the movement’s most distinctive features. A fundamental connotation of this condition, which probably embraces the majority of young people aged between 15 and 25, is precarity […] Precarity spans the entire lifespan of these masses of young people (Lerner, Manconi and Sinibaldi 1978, 54–55).

The 1977 Movement was emblematic of an entire generation of self-defined “unguaranteed” subjects who were experiencing a new existential social condition. They were becoming the bearers of a new kind of subjectivity regarding work, which, during those years of rampant youth unemployment, was often precarious. It was the casual nature of the work they could find that deprived this generation of the very significance of work itself. Whereas work had been an important part of one’s identity for the scarcely literate generations of the Italian post-war period, it had largely come to be considered as a means of mere subsistence by the educated youth of the seventies. In actual fact, young people are all looking for a job. And they do work concretely speaking, but they do so in the most casual and precarious way possible. The main characteristic of this precarious, occasional employment is that of not providing identity (Annunziata and Moscati, 1978, 40).

The 1977 Movement brought together a variety of different youngsters “on the margins of the education system” or “poised between the education system and the labor market.” They saw the university as no longer being an instrument of social mobility, much less a way of obtaining stable employment of any kind through cultural education. Rossana Rossanda, “Idee e non idee del ‘77,” Il Manifesto, March 11, 1978.

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It is a kind of “culture” which provides those who possess it with the possibility of finding heavy, precarious, often miserable employment in the institutions of the cultural industry, education, information, communications, research: an army of temporary workers, seasonal, apprentices. (Lerner, Manconi, and Sinibaldi 1978, 54–55).

The perception of being precarious made many student-workers and young graduates feel they were of the same type. According to surveys carried out by members of the movement in the Universities of Milan, Ferrara, and elsewhere, many students were precarians working in all sectors of production. Sergio Bologna, writing in March 1977 in the radical left-wing daily Lotta Continua, denounced the massive use of students “with part-time or fixed-term contracts who represent the true workforce in sectors called marginal only by mistake.”32 A persistent condition of precarity for this new generation had important repercussions for their psychological condition, delayed their entry into adult life, and generated anxiety. This condition was summed up perfectly by Silvio, a studentworker: “Now, I have given up this kind of precarious work completely, because I want to leave my family and put an end to this period of precarity. Precarity gives me a profound sense of anxiety” (Annunziata and Moscati 1978, 40). Precarity was tolerated the least by the members of this generation who saw it as the result of a system of exclusion that relegated young people to becoming a “stable precariat,” the only possible alternative to mass unemployment which was growing exponentially after the outbreak of the crisis. Again Silvio describes this perfectly: The current situation forces this life of precarity on us. We need to derive moments of unity permitting us to reverse the direction of this precarity within this situation. In any case, I would like to make it clear that I see nothing positive in this type of precarious condition into which they force us. (Annunziata and Moscati 1978, 50).

Although considered by some of its own members as “elitist,” the 1977 Movement saw mobility, irregularity, and job precarity as ways of liberating one’s self from the slavery of stable employment that sucked eight hours a day out of life in a factory or office. The 1977 Movement came up with various ways of contesting this kind of work (Falciola 2015): criticism of manual work, considered as a form of punishment, was accompanied by doubts over the allegedly ennobling character of work and sometimes even praise for creative idleness (Berardi 1970; Lafargue 1971). Claudio, a philosophy student from Turin, declared that “I will not give him eight hours of my life.” He explained his staunch refusal to take a traditional job: Sergio Bologna, Lotta Continua, March 1977.

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Personally, I, who have no job and need to work for a living, find that the idea of working in a bank maybe, makes me feel ill […]. Even if I could work in a bank, right now, I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather look for some other way to get by. And this is the general tendency (Benecchi et al. 1977, 20).

The different socio-economic conditions across the country had a profound effect on the attitudes of the youth movement towards work. As Gianni, a Neapolitan student of sociology pointed out, in the area of Naples there were organized committees of unemployed and precarious high-school and university graduates who had been fighting for years to obtain stable, secure jobs in the bank. In the latter context, work refusal was a totally secondary issue (Benecchi et al. 1977). The 1977 Movement considered precarity an issue capable of uniting the young of the north and south, the universities and the factories. Awareness of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon was to be found among the aforementioned fringes of the Movement. They reached beyond the condition of students to examine the stratification of the working class as a whole, portions of which had been overwhelmed by growing precarity, mirroring the growing precarity among intellectuals. If blue-collar workers could be defined as precarious, it is not surprising to find an interest in creating a dialogue between students and the working-class on precarity, as evident from a document drawn up jointly in March 1977 by the FLM and the students during the National Conference of Metalworker Delegates. “The struggle for employment and for stable work associated with the aspirations, the needs of young people against all forms of irregular precarious work” was one of the cornerstones of this document, which postulated a closer comparison between workers and students in schools, factories, and universities (Benecchi et al. 1977, 197–98). These aspects were taken up in the final document by the FLM on the “relationship between the student movement and trade unions,” writing that: as regards employment in the productive sector, the one fixed point—which clearly distinguishes us from any proposal to use young people as a precarious and flexible workforce—is that young people should enter jobs on the same conditions as those of the already employed workforce, both from a wage and normative point view.33

Archivio storico-sindacale Paolo Pedrelli (Paolo Pedrelli Trade Union Archives, hereafter ASP), Fondo FIOM, Serie Assemblee, b. 2.3, fasc. “IV Conferenza nazionale dei delegati FLM (Firenze, March 7–9, 1977),” FLM, “Documento della IV conferenza nazionale FLM sul rapporto sindacato movimento degli studenti (March 9, 1977),” supplement to Impegno Unitario, March 1977.

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Reactions against precarity were widespread and heterogenous. For individuals, the desire for stability could lead to processes of aggregation and to a rediscovery of the cooperative as a positive organization of labor for those dedicated to creative work or artistic craftsmanship. And on a broader level, it could lead to mass political action against precarity and youth mobilization beyond the boundaries of the universities and factories. This is how Diego, a law student from Bologna, summed up such activity in the Bolognese area: There is marginalization and there is the precarious work experienced at the mass level in various more subaltern forms. In this regard, as the Jacquerie collective, we had some precise proposals to make in Bologna, a city where precarious work is widespread. We proposed forms of organization of power, patrols against illegal and precarious work, regularizing those who found themselves in these conditions, young people from the neighborhoods getting organized (Benecchi et al. 1977, 13).

3.3.3 INTELLECTUAL PRECARITY BETWEEN SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES On the other hand, the lack of will to solve this last problem is confirmed by the failure to carry out the census of precarious personnel which the Ministry and the unions agreed upon. In these circumstances, the news reported by the press, whereby the government would consider the simple reopening of examinations for professorships accompanied by some measure of remunerative adjustment, free from the institution of full-time tuition and confirmation of the university precarians through a re-launching of the scholarship system, an urgent measure, appears even more serious. The trade unions reaffirm the urgent need for an organic reform of the university system and a need within this framework for some immediate legislative measures, including the stabilization of staff with precarious employment relationships, by establishing at least 12,000 places for researchers on contract […].34

In the seventies, universities and schools were not just a center for studentworker agitation in the 1977 Movement but also one of the main workplaces of many intellectual precarians. Teachers and researchers were identified as and identified themselves as “precarians.” It is not surprising then that students and temporary workers formed an alliance during 1977, with the goal of rethinking the role of the university and how it functioned, in opposition to the so-called “Malfatti” bill, a proposed reform under discussion in Parliament at that time.35 “Comunicato congiunto sull’Università,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, November 13, 1972. Chamber of Deputies, VI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the Minister for Education Franco Malfatti, jointly with the Minister of the Treasury Ugo la Malfa, the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning Antonio Giolitti, the Minister

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The fight for full employment means first and foremost a struggle for the immediate entry into permanent employment of current teachers, administrative staff, and non-permanent auxiliaries who find themselves in a condition of precarity and, above all, of exploitation.36

Precarians in the education sector started mobilizing well before the rise of the 1977 Movement. The “Hot Autumn” marked the first massive mobilization of school workers who took part in the general strike on December 3, 1969. The strikers advocated for the right to stable work for the “auxiliary,” “untenured,” and “non-qualified” university staff (e.g., workers who had not sat for or who had obtained insufficient marks at a national qualification examination), and positioned this demand not as a one-off issue, but as a key part of a broader platform of comprehensive reform of the school system. Those reforms were aimed at ensuring the full employment of teaching and non-teaching staff alongside students’ rights to education.37 The “army” of 160,000 untenured striking school workers took action in the summer of 1969, threatening not to grade students’ final annual assessments, demanding “permanent appointment and job stability.”38 Behind such a drastic protest, which was stopped by the eventual concessions of the Ministry of Education, were “160,000 untenured teachers, dismissed and rehired annually, transferred from school to school, subjected to continuous threat because of the arbitrary contractual powers of the head teachers.”39 Though the strike ended with the Hot Autumn, the mobilization of these workers did not. While Parliament was discussing Law no. 300, which was supposed to create “true job stability” (Mariucci 1979; Napoli 1980), school employees in the CGIL and the CISL trade unions began a national strike. In 1970, eight one-day strikes were announced: April 29–30, May 3–4, May 23–24, and June 3–4. Their focus again was on the problems of the “non-tenured” staff who demanded a block on dismissals, the organization of non-selective qualification courses, employment for all those already included in existing rankings, and tenure after one year of service or after obtaining qualification for teaching.40 for Public Works, Salvatore Lauricella, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decretolegge 1 Ottobre 1973, no. 589, recante misure urgenti per l’Università,” transmitted to the President of the Chamber of Deputies on November 26, 1973. 36 “Proposta di piattaforma rivendicativa per l’Università,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, July 25, 1970. 37 Domenico Lugini, “I problemi dell’Università nel quadro delle riforme,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, November 20, 1969. 38 Archivio nazionale federazione lavoratori della conoscenza (National Archives of the Knowledge Workers Federation), Fondo Sindacato nazionale Scuola Brescia, coll. 12-2-4-5, “Volantini sull’adesione e blocco scrutini Sindacato scuola CGIL, Sindacato Italiano Scuola media CISL, June 16, 1969.” 39 Ibid. 40 “Sciopero della scuola,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, April 25, 1970. “Proposta di piattaforma rivendicativa per l’Univesità,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, July 25, 1970.

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During the early seventies, there was a widespread activism among nursery, primary, and secondary school staff that became intertwined with the activism around university reform. In 1970, the Sindacato Scuola, established in 1967 as the education branch of the CGIL (Quercini 2011), lobbied for the “elimination of precarious working conditions within the framework of an organic reform.” A more detailed Proposta di piattaforma per l’Università (Proposal for a platform for the university) was published in July of the same year and called for measures aimed at stabilizing temporary university staff and abolishing completely precarious employment: permanent stabilization of all staff with at least one year’s service, however they had been hired and paid; definitive employment of the aforementioned personnel availing of university funds and recognition, for salary-level and career purposes, of the work previously carried out […]; the definitive abolition of all precarious forms of employment for both graduate and non-graduate staff (scholarship holders, contractors, etc.).41

The problem of “precarious working relationships” and the need to eliminate them was a crucial issue for all the three main trade union confederations (CGIL, CISL, UIL), which in the seventies unified their efforts in education. For example, precarity was the main issue of the first unified strike by the university branches of the CGIL, CISL, and UIL announced for June 23–25, 1971, following the rejection of the university reform bill by the Senate. The unions’ joint press statement clarified that “no legal provision was being made for the non-teaching staff functionally linked to the new university structures nor for the abolition of all precarious forms of work in the universities.”42 As the trade unions saw it, the problem of precarity in schools and universities was rapidly expanding due to the sharp increase in the student population during the sixties and seventies at all levels of education (Colao 2007; Preti 2009). The 1972 National Conference on the University43 published data revealing how, in order to cope with the increase in the student population (+110% elementary, +165% junior secondary, +235% senior secondary, and +279% university) and in absence of a proper recruitment plan, universities had taken measures that heightened precarity among half of university staff. The problem of precarious employment in universities was part of the overall de-qualification of the system due to the uncontrolled transition from a university system that catered to elites to one that catered to the masses (Romano “Comunicato stampa sulla legge universitaria,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, June 18, 1971. “Il convegno sull’Università,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, March 29, 1972. 43 “Proposta di piattaforma sui problemi universitari,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, November 13, 1972. 41

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1998; Brizzi, del Negro and Romano 2007). A disorganized recruitment policy in universities that furthered precarious labor relations was accompanied by a lack of university buildings, failure to change and update teaching methods, a widening student-to-teacher ratio, a move of scientific research to outside of universities, and growing intellectual unemployment and underemployment (Fois 2007; Figà Talamanca 2014a, 2014b). The fight against precarity and the demand for greater stability were at the focus of the trade unions’ agendas, but at the same time they also recognized that “in many universities a movement had recently emerged for the stabilization of precarious jobs, with the administrations as counterparts, on largely similar platforms.”44 The often complex and conflicting interactions between self-organized university committees and the trade unions, which deserves further investigation, prompted the unions to make more radical, inclusive, and egalitarian demands. For example, the 1972 platform of the school employees’ branch of the CGIL trade union called for placing precarians within a sole category of temporary workers awaiting new forms of recruitment.45 All precarians were to be eligible for admission to national examinations for permanent posts, where their acquired skills would be assessed by inter-union bodies set up by the Ministry along with the trade unions. The issue of precarity appeared again in a CGIL, CISL, and UIL document drawn up during the discussion of the reform in the Senate.46 On November 8–9, 1972, 400,000 education workers participated in a school strike and a second strike was planned for December. The document drawn up by the school and university workers’ branch of the CGIL, CISL and UIL in 1973, written between the general strike of January 12 and the national university strike of January 30–31, placed at the top of its list of urgent measures “the stabilization of staff in precarious working relationships (scholarship holders, volunteer assistants, tutors, etc.).” This would be done by creating 12,000 posts for researchers: all those who had worked at the university during the previous two years would have been eligible. As for researchers, their contracts were to have a duration of four years and their social security benefits the same as that of permanent assistant professors. Two thousand of the 12,000 posts were to be reserved for recent graduates. Transition from the status of researcher to that of professor was to follow examinations held annually, for which a training period was also considered.47 While the major social conflict in Italy between 1968–73 fizzled out, political activism within education continued throughout the seventies. As pointed Ibid. Ibid. 46 “La scuola come momento essenziale dello sviluppo economico produttivo. Documento CGIL, CISL, UIL sull’Università,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, December 5, 1972. 47 “Provvedimenti urgenti per l’Università,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, January 20, 1973. 44 45

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out by various scholars addressing the failure of university reform in the seventies, the thorny problem of precarity ended up being addressed by the subsequent governments through a series of emergency measures between 1973 and 1980 under relentless pressure by workers, trade unions, and often by the student movement (Romano 1998; 2007; Colao 2007; Fois 2007). Decree no. 580 entitled “Misure urgenti per l’università” (Urgent Measures for the University), which became Law no. 766 in 1973, was the first measure to stabilize employment within universities. It guaranteed permanent positions to assistants with at least three years of teaching experience and promoted auxiliary professors. It also planned to create 7,500 new chairships over three years. The same law introduced 3,000 “biennial scientific and educational training scholarships” open to all graduates, and 9,000 four-year contracts reserved for precarians already working at the universities as scholarship holders, volunteer assistants, tutors, etc. On the whole, in the wake of the 1973 law, about 12,000 people entered the Italian universities in precarious positions and for which no clear procedure was envisaged to become permanent. The permanent position of assistant professor was to be terminated and examinations were to be reserved for scholarship and contract holders (Figà Talamanca 2014a, 2014b; Romano 1998). The issue of the expiry of the above-mentioned non-renewable two-year study grants and four-year contracts, sometimes referred to as the “precarians’ time bomb,” was taken up by the student mobilizations promoted by the 1977 Movement, which took on, in some cases, the precarious researchers’ battle too. In April 1977, the Minister of Education, Malfatti, and the three trade union confederations, the CGIL, CISL, and UIL, reached an agreement providing for a one-year extension of contracts for precarious university staff and the creation of two ranks for professors, associate and full.48 The CGIL Sindacato Scuola had a positive opinion of the agreement, stressing that it would finally eliminate precarity in the university. The approval of a law that formalized the agreement took time: the proposal that entered Parliament on October 1, 1977, only extended one-year contracts following significant mobilization and a strike on the part of the universities.49 The agreement between the Ministry of Education and the trade unions was incorporated into the Pedini Decree of October 1978,50 but never fully became law. It was followed by a second decree that extended contracts further. There Law no. 808, “Norme sul decentramento amministrativo nel settore dell’istruzione universitaria e sul personale non docente, nonchè disposizioni relative ad alcuni settori del personale docente delle università,” approved on October 25, 1977 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 304, November 8, 1977. 49 Decree no. 642, “Provvedimento di transizione sul personale universitario,” approved on October 21, 1978 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 298, October 24, 1978. 50 “Riprendere l’agitazione nell’Università,” Sindacato e Scuola CGIL, November 26, 1979. 48

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was a heated debate following the decree among major figures in education and politics in which two clear opposing demands emerged: the need to find stable employment for the various precarians who for years had made the university function, and the need for highly selective criteria for university staff in order to implement stabilization of university employment without indiscriminately hiring thousands of potentially inadequate personnel (Bonini, 2007). The trade unions harshly criticized the slow progress of the reforms in Parliament and the abandonment of the Pedini decree, appealing to political parties and calling for a new mobilization at the universities.51 It was only in 1980 that a comprehensive reform of the universities was launched, beginning with a bill drawn up by the new minister of education, the liberal Salvatore Validutti, later continued by his successor Adolfo Sarti. The law triggered a process of profound revitalization of the university system, introducing doctorates into Italian legislation and setting up departments. As pointed out by Mauro Moretti and Ilaria Porciani (1997), the basic criterion underlying the provision was that universities should work only with permanent staff and without any precarious labor conditions. The provision was a response to the problem of precarity by introducing a true process of “stabilization” through the establishment of two types of professorships of equal and permanent status, a second level (associate) and first level (full), and a third position of researcher, which, ope legis, university precarians of all kinds (grant holders, scholarship holders, lecturers, etc.) would become to a large extent. Assistant professors, adjunct professors, and graduate technicians would have to take an exam to qualify for associate status. In the end, only a small number of those endowed with the requisites prescribed by the law failed to get a permanent position, because they had not taken or passed the necessary qualifying examination (Fois 2007). By the beginning of the eighties, the problem of precarity in the universities appeared to have been solved largely thanks to the process of “stabilization” enshrined in the 1980 law. The lack of reform in hiring during the seventies, however, alongside the massive introduction of stable personnel at the beginning of the eighties, had long-lasting negative effects on hiring practices during the following decades (Romano 1998).

Law no. 382, “Riordinamento della docenza universitaria, relativa fascia di formazione nonché sperimentazione organizzativa e didattica,” approved on July 11, 1977, and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 209, July 31, 1980.

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CHAPTER 4

THE MYTH OF FLEXIBILITY DURING THE ROARING EIGHTIES

Flexibility is “an academic industry” whose growth-rate shows no sign of slackening; it proceeds parallel to “a non-academic industry” of the same theme, the development of which is even greater (Salvati 1988, 3).

In the late seventies the labor flexibility model appeared, first in the United States and in Great Britain, and then later in Europe and Italy by the early eighties, when the debate on flexibility assumed an interdisciplinary and international character (Betti 2018). From the management perspective, the concept of flexibility seemed particularly useful for reducing the cost of production and labor and for recovering profit margins that had been lost during the 1970s crisis (Baldissara 2001). The flexibility model was contrasted with the alleged rigidity of the “Fordist” employment model in the major European and Western countries, like Italy and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain, the United States, and Canada (Harvey 1989; Masulli 2004; Kalleberg 2011). The massive industrial restructuring during the seventies, which led to less bargaining power for the workforce, favored managerial strategies based on the assumption that security and stability of labor relations were elements of rigidity that hindered economic growth and development (Breman and van der Linden 2014). In Italy in the early eighties there was certainly a marked shift in the balance of power from the labor movement to large companies as trade union power weakened and the consensus within them splintered (Bertucelli 2008). For both Italian companies and the Italian government, the flexibility model became an increasingly important creed that helped determine the organization of labor and employment policy, creating a different paradigm in how new jobs were created (Masulli 2009). In 1990, economist Michele Salvati outlined the existence of an “industry” built around labor flexibility as a topic, taking stock of the use of the concept and the debates it had generated. A few years later, labor lawyer Luigi Mariucci wrote that “flexibility” was the “magic word” of eighties international labor law (Mariucci 1990, 23). The issue of flexibility enthralled academics, entrepreneurs, and trade unionists and also appeared frequently in the economic and political

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documents of Italy’s five-party (pentapartito) coalition governments1 (Salvati 1988; De Michelis 1986). As flexibility was rising as a heuristic for understanding labor relations, job precarity was declining, though precarity was adopted as a concept in legislation on healthcare and education around this time, and taken on as a subject of historical analysis. Author Valerio Evangelisti used the term “precarity” in his historiographic studies as an analytical category to analyze both the peasantry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the industrial working class after World War II in the Emilia region (Evangelisti 1980). The same region had been the focus of much sociological study on the effects of the decentralization of production during the seventies, though this was less the case in the eighties. Other than in those few cases, precarity was on the decline as an analytical category and began to be inseparably connected, both in Italy and beyond, with flexibility. It was this close link between flexibility and precarity, theorized in the eighties, that caused the latter to be interpreted as a new phenomenon, deriving from the changes in the organization of work and production that followed the crisis of the seventies (Betti 2018b). This chapter will investigate how the paradigm of flexibility entered Italy in the eighties to become a major part of trade union thinking and government policy. Taking this process into account is particularly important when seeking to understand the origin and characteristics of the new wave of precarity, which emerged in close connection with the flexibility paradigm during the eighties. The few studies that have dealt with the debate over labor flexibility have generally considered only the twenty first century (Altieri 2009; Possenti 2012). In Italy, that periodization is generally thought to begin a little earlier around 1993, when the Protocollo sulla politica dei redditi (Incomes Policy Protocol) was signed and the Maastricht Treaty came into force, initiating the second phase of European integration in Italy, which had a significant impact on the following twenty years of national labor policy (Colarizi, Giovagnoli, and Pombeni 2014). Revising this timeline somewhat, this chapter highlights the centrality of labor flexibility in Italy in the eighties, and particularly points to 1980 rather than 1993 as the major turning point when this paradigm arose. The so-called “March of Forty Thousand” and the defeat of the trade unions during discussions with FIAT during the autumn of 1980 made that year a watershed in the history of Italian labor and industrial relations, marking the beginning of a massive process of change in the relationship between capital and labor that continued to develop over the course of the decade (Musso 2015). The eighties also coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States (Mammarella 1988) and the beginning of the economic policy nicknamed Reagan The coalition comprised the party Christian Democracy, the Italian Socialist Party, the Italian Social Democratic Party, the Italian Republican Party, and the Italian Liberal Party.

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omics which, like the policies championed by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom (Masulli 2014; Harvey 2005), had an immeasurable impact upon the social and labor policies of the European continent and of the Italian peninsula. The eighties have recently become the object of interest on the part of Italian historiography, which has focused on the profound socio-economic, political, and cultural transformations of the period (Colarizi, Giovagnoli, and Pombeni 2014; Asquer, Bernardi, and Fumian 2014), including labor relations (Gervasoni 2010; Colarizi 2004). From a political point of view, in Italy the two Craxi governments (1983–1986; 1986–1987) ushered in labor policies based around flexibility for the first time as a positive “challenge” capable of creating new jobs in a labor market that was considered “overly rigid” (De Michelis 1986). At that time, legislation was introduced to encourage the spread of “special employment contracts” (training and work contracts, part-time contracts, temporary contracts, and apprenticeships), which were seen as “incentives useful to employment” (Neri 1989; Frey 1995). Although less than in later decades, those early legislative measures in the eighties began to affect previous labor laws from the sixties and seventies. The spread of “non-standard” contracts was a direct consequence of new laws in the eighties, although more informal forms of flexibility (like home-based work, illegal work, contract work) were present in Italy in the seventies, as pointed out in the previous chapter. Unlike other European countries (Auer and Cazes 2003), where less restrictive labor legislation permitted the introduction of various types of flexible employment, Italy had to deregulate in order to make the labor market more flexible (Romagnoli 2002, 2003; Martelloni 2011). For this reason, I will investigate the Italian case as an example of the flexibilization of a state-controlled labor market, since every law on “non-standard” labor contracts inherited from the Fordist period had to be modified. Over the course of the eighties, the idea that flexibility was good for both male and female workers became increasingly popular. It was deemed useful to counter the alienation and hierarchies typical of the Fordist system and foster both “freedom from labor” (Cesareo 1985) and a more woman-friendly workplace. During the so-called transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist system, new information technologies established connections between flexibility, freedom, and autonomy (Berardi 2017). Numerous sociological studies found that the young generation’s new subjectivity made them prefer more flexible forms of work. In terms of working schedules, flexibility was considered by many to be a useful tool for reconciling women’s time at work and time for family duties.2 Certainly, accounts from many women at this time testify to this desire for flexible, part-time work, but this attitude was precisely the opposite of that which was taken by women’s associations and social movements of the seventies on the same issue (Bartoletti 1998; Basso 1998). “Il gruppo ‘La nostra flessibilità. I nostri tempi di lavoro,’” Rassegna sindacale, November 7, 1986.

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4.1 The flexibility paradigm in economicsociological thinking 4.1.1 FLEXIBILITY AND PRECARITY IN THE INTERNATIONAL DEBATE At the international level in the eighties, the debate over models of flexibility in all Western countries, including Italy, was influenced by a number of landmark studies (Koshiro 1992). Flexibility became a key part of companies’ workforce management strategies in this time period. It also became a principle for government employment policy and labor law. It also became a significant concept in industrial production, though this is beyond the scope of this study. “Flexible specialization,” coined by Charles Sabel and Michael Piore (1984), had a widespread impact, both internationally and in Italy, as it provided an original interpretation for the evolution of industrial capitalism based on the notion that there were two coexisting systems of production: mass production and flexible production. They saw the latter not only as a previously unrecognized structural feature of the capitalist system but also as a possible development alternative out of the crisis of Fordism. In workforce management the concept of flexibility was rooted in the concept of the “flexible firm” introduced into management studies by John Atkinson (1984; 1985). In this model the workforce was divided into two parts: the “central” and “peripheral.” Workers were recruited through “unstable” forms of work, like short-term and part-time work, and “training and work contracts”. In addition to its inhouse workforce, a company might, in cases of need, employ workers from outside the company as self-employed, sub-contracted, and temporary workers. In a report written during the mid-eighties, Atkinson (1985) argued that the situation of the labor market, which was now characterized by high rates of unemployment and a weakening of trade-union power, favored the adoption of such forms of flexibility. Returning to the subject some years later, he highlighted that the use of flexibility was mainly a way to reduce costs in a short timespan rather than a strategy to change corporate organization in the long-term. Almost a decade later, Michael Hammer and James Champy (1993) adopted the flexibility paradigm as an integral part of their recommended entrepreneurial strategies of their “managerial revolution,” alongside their “lean and mean” policy. In a study around the same time, the economist Bennet Harrison (1994a; 1994b) showed that the concept of flexibility, rapidly adopted by large corporations during the previous decade, had already produced “dark sides” that were adversely affecting working conditions and wages in the early nineties.

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[flexibility] refers to the ability of individuals in the economic system, and in particular in the labor market, to abandon established patterns and adapt to new circumstances. This depends in part on personal skills, in part on given conditions. Personal abilities depend sometimes on talents and skills acquired by people as well as on their willingness; the given conditions in question may be economic, social or political. We can therefore see and understand how flexibility is part of the greatest capacity of institutions, entrepreneurs and workers to adapt to change at both the economic and the social level (Frey 1995, 178–79).

The most influential theory of labor flexibility was presented by the OECD in a technical report written in the mid-eighties (OECD 1986a). Their very broad definition, described by Frey above (Frey 1995), made the concept of flexibility relevant to analyses of employment issues by economists of all political orientations.3 The OECD report played a central role in social and economic debates and in the labor policies of Europe by making a positive correlation between labor market flexibility and employment. Following the example of the United States, the OECD supported flexibility of the labor market as a possible solution to rising unemployment. That same year, a group of experts (OECD 1986b) led by sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf pointed out to the secretary general of the OECD that the flexibility of the labor market was a controversial issue. In Dahrendorf ’s view, the safety of workers and the need to establish a social pact between the various parties involved should be taken into due consideration. Other studies in the early nineties highlighted the negative aspects of flexibility internationally and the weak empirical evidence for the role of flexibility in the United States’ alleged employment “miracle” (Brodsky 1994). Following the wave of current and future automation, this system of full standardized employment is beginning to become less rigid and fray at the edges with the flexibilization of the three pillars upon which it rests: right to work, workplace and work schedule. Therefore, the boundaries between work and non-work have become fluid. Flexible and plural forms of underemployment are spreading (Beck 2000b, 203).

In the mid-eighties, the German sociologist Ulrick Beck in a volume on the “society of risks” (1986–2000) was one of the first scholars to tackle the issue of the de-standardization of labor and the impact of flexibility on both male and female workers. Beck described some of the adverse effects of increasing flexibilization that were already visible: the spread of underemployment and employment insecurity, and growing inequality in income distribution, social guarantees, and The OECD experts identified six categories of flexibility: labor costs, conditions of employment, work practice and work patterns, rules and regulations, mobility, education, and training.

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professional opportunities. In addition to Beck, another early scholar who criticized the flexibility paradigm was the British economist Guy Standing, who addressed the possible “dark sides” of flexibility in a number of working papers published in the mid-eighties by the ILO (Standing 1986), where he raised the question of whether flexibility was the cause of or the solution to unemployment. The economist Robert Boyer of the French “regulatory” school and the Italian Enrico Wolleb (Boyer and Wolleb 1987) took similar positions to Standing. The first studies to connect the spread of flexible labor with social precarity were also published in the eighties in France, as well as in a few places outside of Europe, including post-dictatorship Latin America (López-Cordobés 1984; Galin 1986; Galin and Novick 1990; Marshall 1990). Flexible accumulation, as I shall endeavor to call it, is characterized by direct comparison with the rigidity of Fordism. It rests on a certain flexibility regarding production processes, labor markets, products and patterns of consumption (Harvey 1989, 185).

According to David Harvey, Atkinson’s model of flexibility became the underlying principle of a new regime of accumulation, defined as “post-Fordist” and “flexible,” which had been triggered by the crisis and by the sunset of Fordism. In criticizing such developments in the eighties, Harvey pointed out that this new system was accompanied by high levels of structural unemployment, the rapid destruction and reconstruction of labor capacity, non-existent or very small wage increases, and the weakening of trade unions (Harvey 1989, 184–86). Already by the end of the eighties, the spread of “flexible forms of employment” had produced negative effects for the entire active working population, especially in terms of insurance coverage, pension rights, salary, and job security among peripheral workers. The “human cost” of the growth of flexible jobs was conceptualized in the late nineties (Gallino 1998; 2001; Sennet 1998). The first study dealing with “precarious jobs” as a problem tout court was Gerry and Janine Rodgers’ Precarious Jobs in Labor Market Regulations (Rodgers and Rodgers, 1989). The book was a collection of papers presented at a 1988 seminar organized jointly by the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the ILO. The introductory essay by Gerry Rodgers postulated the clear relationship between the re-emergence of certain forms of job precarity (which for him had always characterized wage labor) and the growth of “atypical” employment. Gerry Rodgers was also one of the first scholars to define “precarious employment” internationally (Rodgers 1989).

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4.1.2 THE FLEXIBILITY MYTH AND THE ECLIPSE OF PRECARITY IN THE ITALIAN DEBATE From the explosion of the old wage relationship to the longest economic recession of the post-war period (1981–83), the entrepreneurial reaction to the growth of trade-union power followed different strategies, for the sole incessant purpose of achieving flexibility. This is the condition required to regain control over the organization of labor and a recovery of profit. Flexibility, which also becomes the official objective of economic policy, with a view to adapting production to foreign competition and the greater cyclical instability of demand, has unequivocal effects upon power relations within the factory in terms of productivity, dismissals and wages. (Wolleb 1987, 79).

In the case of Italy, discussions regarding “flexibility” and “rigidity” were not new in the eighties. They had already very much been both a feature of managerial strategies and a subject of trade union debate since the late seventies. In 1977, the CGIL trade unionist Bruno Trentin pointed out how flexibility and rigidity reflected opposite ideological choices as employers sought to recover the flexible management of the workforce and unions tried to maintain their rigid control over the organization of work (Butera 1977). Within unions themselves, however, flexibility had been at the center of a contentious debate since the seventies (Bertucelli 2008). The “manifesto” of the Italian metalworker employers, published in 1976, clearly stated the need to reduce the cost of labor and improve productivity (Turani 1976). Walter Mandelli, president of Federmeccanica (the organization of metalworker employers) underlined a belief that was to become central to the public discourse on flexibility during the late seventies and early eighties: “the alternative to the specter of mass unemployment can only be that of the recovery of efficiency and competitiveness” (Ibid., 15). In 1976, INTERSIND (the trade union for state-owned companies)4 published a study of new forms of the organization of labor that were arising at that time in order to better understand the changes taking place in relations between companies and labor in Italy and Europe (Sampietro 1976). Although the authors of the study had not yet hit upon the concept of flexibility, they emphasized the companies’ attempts to find forms of labor organization that would make production “more adaptable to market trends”. The president of FIAT, Giovanni Agnelli, argued that it was necessary to “accept the principle of flexibility of labor from company to company,” in order to effectively transform production during the stagflation crisis.5 Founded in 1961 and active until 1999, the INTERSIND (Associazione sindacale delle aziende a partecipazione statale, The Trade Union Association of State-owned Companies) represented the IRI and EFIM companies during trade union negotiations. 5 M. Riva, “Intanto, industriali e sindacati cercano il dialogo: Intervista a Giovanni Agnelli e Bruno Trentin,” Corriere della Sera, October 26, 1974. 4

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Though flexibility was not a new concept in Italy by the eighties as it was elsewhere, the debate there over this new paradigm did evolve considerably from the positions companies and unions had taken in the seventies on the issue. The concept of flexible specialization was adopted in various studies about Italian “industrial districts” (Capecchi, Alaimo 1992; Brusco 1982, 1989), a category coined by Giacomo Beccattini in 1979 (Beccattini 1979, 1989). However, it was the concept of job flexibility, closely connected to the “flexible firm,” which had a particular impact on the corporate strategies and public policies of the eighties. In 1986, the jurist Enrico Wolleb summarized the rise and fall of the Fordist system in Italy, emphasizing how flexibility had become a shared goal of both employers’ strategy and public policy. During the early eighties, the “rediscovery of flexibility” by employers had produced, according to some scholars, higher unemployment and created a rift between adult workers who held permanent jobs and young men and women workers who worked in flexible arrangements (Wolleb 1986). In those same years, numerous articles and papers were published regarding the “Italian route to job flexibility” in various edited volumes, often the result of seminars and conferences that paid particular attention to Italy and France (Maruani, Reynaud, and Romani 1990). One volume produced by the International Labor Organization (Bruni and De Luca 1993) analyzed the correlation between the flexibility of work and unemployment in a variety of countries (Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom), and provided an interesting periodization of the spread of flexibility in Italy. While in the ten years between 1969 and 1979 a “silent demand for flexibility” had been conducted by spreading flexible forms of employment in small businesses, by the long eighties (1980–93) that quest for flexibility had become openly shared by companies and workers alike, albeit with clear differences in the degree and mode of its application (Bruni and De Luca 1993, 11). The Italian Association of Labor Economists (l’Associazione italiana degli economisti del lavoro) established in 1985, devoted its third scientific meeting to the topic of flexibility and the labor market, which produced a collected volume entitled Flessibilità & mercato del lavoro (Associazione italiana economisti del lavoro 1988). The economist Michele Salvati (1988), reconstructing the main trends emerging from the discussion, emphasized the polarization that had emerged between those who magnified the positive effects of flexibility and those who deplored its defective application. Salvati pointed out that the historical tendency towards greater flexibility in industrial relations had emerged in a multitude of countries because of a greater demand on the part of companies and a greater availability of labor. However, the route towards flexibility followed a varied course in different countries, making it difficult to compare effects on employment. For these reasons, Salvati openly questioned the supposed positive connection between increased flexibility and employment growth.

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Meanwhile, other studies focused on the effects of the spread of “flexible” and “atypical” contracts in Italy in the late eighties. One study, led by sociologist Francesco Garibaldo (1992), for example, compared the growth of these contracts in Italy to similar trends in other European countries. Garibaldo and his colleagues formulated the concept of “atypical work,” meaning “an employment relationship without one or more standard features of the full-time subordinate labor relationship,” which gained much traction among scholars writing on flexibility over the course of the next two decades. The legal implications of atypical work were analyzed by law experts in a special issue of the journal Democrazia e diritto (Democracy and the Law) published in 1990, in which various essays highlighted how the notion of a standard job had lost its centrality within public discourse following the popularization of atypical labor in both private enterprises and in state-run ones. The least protected forms of labor, those that cost employers the least and provided the lowest stability for workers, included training and work contracts, apprenticeships, and fixed-term contracts (Chiesi 1990a). Flexibility means, for example, being able to choose among several jobs on offer to us at a given moment: precarity means having to do the only job offered to us at a given moment. Flexibility means being able to perform a job within an acceptable span of time: when we feel like it, or when we are free from other commitments, or when we decide to carry it out with other people. Precarity means being available to work when others ask us to, as in the case of baby-sitters, delivery persons, cleaning women, and, at a certainly more rewarding though no less precarious level, like conducting interviews, carrying out market research, and distributing questionnaires. And yet, flexibility means being able to have a gap year, a study or research period abroad, while precarity means working when the Milan Fair is open or during the Christmas shopping season at La Rinascente, and there is no work available during the low season (Manacorda 1986, 55).

The concept of “precarity” held little significance in the social theory and economic literature of the long eighties. Though there was one exception at the crossroads between theory and political analysis that deserves mention. A booklet distributed in 1986 by Rinascita, the Italian Communist Party’s monthly magazine, presented the outcome of a discussion between the Labor Commission of the PCI, a group of intellectuals, and trade union leaders. It called for new policies to build full employment and to reduce labor precarity. In the booklet, Antonio Bassolino, then in charge of the Labor Commission of the PCI, wrote that he feared “the danger of the mass precarization of society,” if flexibility was increased solely to suit the needs of capitalist enterprise (Bassolino 1986, 3–11). The booklet’s existence demonstrated that intellectual work on “precarity” and “precariousness” continued into the eighties.

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These observations allow us to qualify more accurately the great transformation that the Italian labor market has undergone over the past 10 years. It was not a question of moving from a structure of full employment to one of unemployment, but rather of passing from a structure dominated by a system of guarantees to one dominated by precarity (Graziani 1986, 42).

The economist Augusto Graziani identified the new centrality of “precariousness” as one of the main transformations that took place in the Italian labor market in the seventies and the eighties, writing that the “increase of precarization at the levels both of employment and society represented two sides of the same scheme and tended to erase all forms of security, relegating the worker to the limbo of perennial uncertainty” (Graziani 1986, 42–43). Paola Manacorda, who had already published a number of critical studies of the effects of micro-electronics on work organization, saw flexibility as an “ambiguous word.” He pointed out how the concept of flexibility was closely associated with the less noble concept of precarity, and how weak the boundary between the two really was. They could only be easily distinguished in terms of the level of autonomy and the presence of additional opportunities in a given situation (Manacorda 1986).

4.2 Labor policies and legislative changes in the shade of flexibility 4.2.1 FLEXIBILITY IN PARLIAMENT: THE CRAXI GOVERNMENT’S REFORMS This means putting one’s hand to an active labor policy—that is, to the one at the basis of this Plan—which questions utterly the old “rules of the game” by focusing on a more flexible use of human capital. I am convinced, therefore, that our system needs to change the mentality of those entering the world of employment for the very first time. It is precisely due to the advent of new technologies, and, therefore, of the enormous transformations taking place, that the old logic of “stable jobs” or secure employment will have to give way to a sort of “diffused entrepreneurship” with which all will be obliged to measure themselves while professionalism will become one of the prerequisites indispensable for access to it (De Michelis 1986, ix–x).

The two Craxi governments (1983–86; 1986–87) played a crucial role in introducing and promoting labor policies centered on flexibility. The centrality of

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this paradigm was clear in the plan drawn up by the then Labor Minister, Gianni De Michelis, and published in 1986 (De Michelis 1986). The abandonment of the principles that had been the basis of government policy during the economic boom and the sixties became evident during the parliamentary debate preceding the launch of the new labor laws. By the eighties, job stability, once the cornerstone of labor and social organization in Italy of the sixties and seventies (Napoli 1980; Costa 2009), had simply lost its powers of attraction. In the early eighties, the Socialist Party played a central role in the discussion over the “modernization” of the labor market. This debate saw wide-ranging thinking about the strategic nature of the flexibility paradigm and the new labor policy able to promote “full employment.” Informed by the alleged US and Japanese “employment miracle,” the Socialist Party championed the introduction of flexible working relationships as the basis of the fight against uneployment.6 The Party’s primary goal was a new “labor pact,” as the socialist leader Bettino Craxi pointed out during the party congresses held in the early eighties.7 Leading Party members like Agostino Marianetti, Gianni De Michelis, Enrico Manca, and Gino Giugni worked on organically developing that pact during the conference entitled “Il lavoro nell’Italia che cambia” (Labor in a changing Italy) held in Milan from February 15–17, 1985. Labor law expert Gino Giugni,8 considered the “father” of the Statute of Workers’ Rights, played a primary role in the development of the Socialist Party’s new philosophy. During the presentation of Law no. 863 to the Senate in 1984 (discussed later in this chapter), Giugni spoke of the need to go not “against” but “beyond” his own Statute by building a system of laws and flexible guarantees that would overcome the rigidity of the Italian labor market in order to respond to the changing demands of production that had presented themselves over the past decade and a half.9 He held that the labor laws passed under the first Craxi government meant “going from the protection of the worker in the firm to a better protection of the worker in the market, that is, of the worker seeking employment.”10 It was with the “Lodo-Scotti” or “Scotti” agreement of January 22, 1983 that flexibility became an official part of trade union strategy and the Italian government’s labor policy. This was the first example of a three-part agreement between the government, trade unions, and employers, and it was a major turning “La proposta socialista. Per la pace, l’Europa, il rilancio economico,” L’Avanti, May 14, 1984. “Il rinnovamento socialista per il rinnovamento dell’Italia. Un messaggio di lotta, di fiducia, di speranza,” L’Avanti, April 23, 1981. 8 For the most significant writings regarding Gino Giugni from the eighties on, see Giugni, 1989; memoirs: Giugni, 2003; 2007; analyses: Cella, 2007; Grossi, 2007. 9 Luisa Benedettini, “Oltre lo Statuto, nuove regole flessibili. Intervista a Gino Giugni,” Rassegna sindacale, March 8, 1985. 10 Senate of the Republic, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 13, 1984: 6. 6 7

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point in Italian industrial relations in which the labor policies that had guided the country up to then were broken with (Pepe 2008; Gualmini 1998). Labor Minister Enzo Scotti’s goal with this agreement was to reach a compromise on labor costs between employers and employees, but also to extend the dialogue on unemployment, tax reform, and the fiscalization of social security to other social actors like unions (Pepe 2008). The atmosphere in which the Lodo-Scotti Agreement took shape was characterized by a very negative economic situation. In 1981, one of Italy’s darkest years economically, inflation was at an astronomical 20% and remained over 14% until 1983. The same year an international recession had caused a 1% reduction in Italy’s GDP and a shrinking of its industrial production rate by 3.4%. These trends, connected to the industrial restructuring process that had begun in the seventies and the introduction, between 1980 and 1985, of new technologies based on micro-electronics, led to massive layoffs among industrial workers (Bruno and Segreto 1995). The Lodo-Scotti Agreement “summed up numerous changes in the political arena, in the economic sphere, and in trade-union relations” (Mascini and Ricci 1984), an opinion shared by many commentators in the mid-eighties. It was a far-reaching agreement that covered taxation, family allowances, social charges, tariffs, health care, sickness and disability benefits, pensions and social security, absenteeism, working hours, solidarity funds, industrial disputes, and duration of contracts. One of the most significant parts of the agreement was the reform of the scala mobile (sliding wage scale),11 which underwent a reduction of 15% of the contingency plan (Pepe 2008). As far as the labor market was concerned, the government enacted the reform by introducing flexible labor arrangements, like part-time and temporary contracts for young people, mobility between companies, a reform to compulsory hiring procedures, and instituting community service jobs (Brunetta 1990, 191). Although the Lodo-Scotti Agreement had already introduced the main mechanisms for making the market more flexible, the “Valentine’s Day Agreement” made the next year (1984) was far broader in scope. This agreement, and the subsequent legislation to enact it, was a significant step in resolving a lengthy, heated dispute over the sliding wage scale and the true starting point of a labor policy based on the “flexibility” paradigm. The Valentine’s Day Agreement was the product of a profoundly different atmosphere than that of the Lodo-Scotti Agreement made only a year before. It was defined by the new goals of the Craxi government, such as reducing the inflation differential between Italy and other industrialized countries and “placing the incomes policy within a perspective of expansion” (Brunetta 1990, 191). A mechanism established in 1975 to automatically adjust salaries to the cost of living, in order to maintain workers’ purchasing power in a time of particularly high level of inflation.

11

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A number of important issues took place contemporaneously and in connection with these agreements, like the complex issue of the sliding wage scale and its effects on Italian industrial relations, the breakup of the coalition between the CGIL, CISL, and UIL unions, and the PCI referendum (Accornero 1992; Turone 1998; Pepe 2008), but these are beyond the scope of this study. The centrality of the sliding wage scale and youth unemployment issues within trade union discourse of that time tended to eclipse other important criticisms of flexibility that were also going on. A number of parliamentary discussions preceded the Valentine’s Day Agreement, in which there was a substantial convergence of opinion between the majority and opposition on the need to introduce flexible tools of governance to combat unemployment and promote new jobs. Yet despite the general sense of agreement in parliament over flexibility, some MPs did raise alarm about the risks greater flexibility might generate if not adequately controlled, though here opinions differed considerably. Legislative decree no. 726 certainly represents an urgent form of intervention, as regards measures adopted to support levels of employment; its aim is to carry out intervention within the area of the flexibility of the instruments regulating labor relations. […] These tools are functional, in part, to interventions permitting increases in the flexibility of the labor market and regard, in part, some dramatic, contingent moments in employment levels in this country.12

The route to the approval of the 1984 law entitled “Misure urgenti a sostegno e ad incremento dei livelli occupazionali” (Urgent Measures to Support and Increase Employment Levels)13 was particularly troublesome, as evident in the speech of the liberal deputy Giorgio Ferrari, who presented the bill in the Chamber. The bill was passed back and forth repeatedly between the government, the Labor Commissions, and the Assembly, making it necessary to issue four legislative decrees to deal with the delays created.14 A split within the majority occurred involving the Socialists and Christian Democrats, something which led the presenter of the bill, the Christian Democrat deputy Vincenzo Mancini, to resign. When the fracture within the five-party coalition (Pentapartito) was mended, the bill was finally approved by the Senate on December 13, 1984, only a week after it had narrowly passed by the Chamber (228 in favor, 193 against).15 In both houses of Parliament,16 the Communist Party voted against the bill, while Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 4, 1984: 21064. Law no. 863, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decreto-legge 30 Ottobre 1984, no. 726, recante misure urgenti a sostegno e ad incremento dei livelli occupazionali,” approved on December 19, 1984, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 351, December 22, 1984. 14 Ibid., 21007. 15 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 6, 1984: 21312. 16 The Italian Parliament is composed of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic, a total of 945 MPs. 12 13

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in the Chamber, the deputies belonging to the Democrazia Proletaria (The Proletarian Democracy Party) also voted against it too. Despite these dissenters, the discussion of the bill in the Chamber made clear some important convergences over the flexibility paradigm that broadly existed between the political majority and the minority in Parliament at the time: first, the need to introduce flexible tools to facilitate people’s entry into the labor market, and second, the importance of flexibility as a tool to combat unemployment above all else (especially for the youth). A sense of urgency was felt for these reforms among the Socialists, Christian Democrats, and Republicans alike. This was most evident in the positions of the PCI, crystallized in a speech before Parliament, by MP Antonio Montessoro, which underlined the need for a reform that would create “the conditions for a more flexible system of entry into firms” and a willingness to engage in “a serious confrontation to find these flexible, incentivizing measures.”17 Opposition to the bill came almost entirely from the Communist MPs who criticized the proposal as a confused set of regulations that would be worse than what already existed, and would be a low-profile scheme.18 The main Communist concern was that the result would be an “unbridled deregulation” of the labor market, which would eliminate important laws and state mechanisms of control over the labor market. They argued that a lack of public control over training and work contracts might result in exploitation and lead to the freedom to hire workers on demand, defeating the purpose of the public placement system. One of the aspects of the bill discussed most by the majority and opposition alike was a proposed change to job-entry mechanisms, which had already been the subject of Bill no. 665,19 submitted jointly by the Minister of Labor Gianni De Michelis and the Treasury Minister Giovanni Goria, and which became law in 1987. According to Franco Calamida of Proletarian Democracy, the hiring of workers through the public employment service was necessary “to guarantee the inalienable right of the citizen to aspire to employment,” but it had begun to come under attack by the Lodo-Scotti Agreement through the government’s new philosophy of flexibility. Parliamentarians of the Proletarian Democracy Party and the PCI focused primarily on this issue of public control over placement mechanisms (and therefore the labor market itself ) in their criticism of the proposed legislation to improve labor flexibility. The Christian Democrat Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 3, 1984: 21013. Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 6, 1984: 21310–21311. 19 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by Labor and Social Welfare Minister Gianni De Michelis, jointly with Treasury Minister Giovanni Goria, “Norme in materia di servizi di impiego, di mobilità dei lavoratori e di integrazione salariale ed effettuazione di esperimenti pilota in materia di avviamento al lavoro,” presented on October 18, 1983. 17 18

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deputies were willing to relent on these reforms of the public placement mechanism and proposed several amendments to the bill. In the Republican senators and deputies’ view, public placement was necessary to increase employment and “launch a new policy of flexible labor relations.”20 Labor lawyer Gino Giugni, presenter of the above-mentioned bill in the Senate, argued that a major reform to labor relations was required to go beyond the guarantees provided to job-holding workers and implement measures for jobless young workers and workers who run the risk of losing their jobs due to downsizing processes.21 It would do so by introducing part-time contracts, training and work contracts, and solidarity contracts. Although the law was passed in an effort at deregulation, the contracts it introduced were still strongly regulated compared to the following ones and can in fact be understood as a part of a “re-regulation” process, as pointed out by some of the Socialists like Agostino Marianetti.22 Another critical objection concerns the article related to temporary employment on which I confirm, instead, the full commitment of the majority. I believe I can speak in this case on behalf of the majority regarding the text presented here, because it is one directly aimed at achieving greater flexibility in this particular sector of the labor market by responding to a demand made by the workers’ confederations. I wish to point out, however, that the amendment presented by the Communist Group, while on the one hand, it maintains certain systems of guarantees we deem outdated, on the other, it liberalizes fixed-term contracts through referral to company bargaining on the matter. We felt we needed to exclude the latter because we believe that the possibility of [permitting] company contracts, especially in cases of small or medium-sized companies, is extremely dangerous from this point of view.23

The second major reform legislation of the Craxian government was Law no. 56 of 1987, “Norme sull’organizzazione del mercato del lavoro” (Norms Regarding the Organization of the Labor Market24). It expanded forms of labor flexibility significantly, starting with the liberalization of fixed-term contracts (proposed by Christian Democrat deputy Luigi Rossi di Montelera) in order to make “companies more efficient and, at the same time, create new opportunities for employment.”25 The law was a product of several proposals, the first of which was 22 23 24

Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 6, 1984. Senate of the Republic, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 13, 1984, 6. “La proposta socialista. Per la pace, l’Europa, il rilancio economico,” L’Avanti, May 14, 1984. Senate of the Republic, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of November 26, 1986: 50. Law no. 56, “Norme sull’organizzazione del mercato del lavoro,” approved on February 28, 1987 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 51, March 3, 1987. 25 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputy Luigi Rossi di Montelera, “Misure urgenti per rendere flessibili i rapporti di lavoro e incrementare l’occupazione,” announced on April 18, 1985. 20 21

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the De Michelis-Goria Bill of 1983,26 which also envisaged a reform of public job placement and employment services as well as reforms concerning workers’ mobility, redundancy and special unemployment benefits. The De Michelis-Goria Bill was discussed in Parliament together with a series of other bills27 on apprenticeship reform, internship contracts, and new “flexible” labor relations generally. The discussion took place in the Chamber’s Labor Committee and required 17 sessions, held between September 1984 and July 1985.28 A Select Committee drew up a new unified text based on the abovementioned bills, but ended up eliminating the De Michelis-Goria Bill29 on the grounds that it removed rules concerning job mobility and wage guarantees, something that needed to be addressed in the nearest future. The new unified bill was approved in March 1986 by a majority of the members of the Chamber’s Labor Commission, receiving support from the Socialist and Christian Democrat deputies, but was met with opposition by committee members belonging to the Communist Party, the Independent Left, and the Italian Social Movement (MSI, a right-wing party, considered neo-Fascist). The PCI members considered the new unified bill inadequate, arguing that it had lost its initial reforming character and that its new rules for apprenticeship were more backward than those already existing. They also criticized the bill’s proposed reforms concerning public job placement and regional employment Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by Labor and Social Welfare Minister Gianni De Michelis, jointly with Treasury Minister Giovanni Goria, “Norme in materia di servizi di impiego, di mobilità dei lavoratori e di integrazione salariale ed effettuazione di esperimenti pilota in materia di avviamento al lavoro,” presented on October 18, 1983. 27 Natale Carlotto et al., “Modifiche ed integrazioni alla legge 19 Gennaio 1955, no. 25, in materia di apprendistato nelle aziende artigiane,” (no. 115); Nino Cristofori et al., “Disciplina del contratto di tirocinio,” (no. 149); Ugo Martinat et al., “Norme per l’ampliamento dei casi di assunzione al lavoro con richiesta nominativa,” (no. 210); Angela Francese et al., “Norme per l’istituzione sperimentale delle agenzie regionali del lavoro,” (no. 376); Marte Ferrari et al., “Provvedimenti per l’apprendistato nelle imprese artigiane e nelle piccole imprese,” (no. 713); Girolamo Rallo et al., “Norme per l’apprendistato dei giovani diplomati e laureati,” (no. 900); Luciano Righi et al., “Misure urgenti per il rilancio dell’apprendistato e per favorire l’occupazione giovanile,” (no. 1740); Eriase Belardi Merlo et al., “Assegnazione di quote di occupazione alle donne nell’avviamento al lavoro nei casi di assunzione nominativa,” (no. 2526); Luigi Rossi Di Montelera, “Misure urgenti per rendere più flessibili i rapporti di lavoro e incrementare l’occupazione,” (no. 2819), approved in a combined bill entitled “Norme sul collocamento ordinario ed esperimenti pilota in materia di avviamento al lavoro.” 28 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XIII Commission, Sessions of September 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 1984; October 2–3, 1984; February 6, 20–21, 1985; May 16, 22, 23, 29, 30 May, 1985; June 12, 1985; July 24, 1985. 29 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill submitted by Minister of Labor and Social Welfare Gianni De Michelis, jointly with the Treasury Minister Giovanni Goria, following the elimination of articles 1 to 29, 12 to 25 and 51 to 53 of bill no. 665, “Norme sull’organizzazione del lavoro,” presented to the President of the Chamber on December 4, 1986. 26

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commissions. Despite voting in favor of the new bill, some of the Christian Democrat deputies were also critical.30 The bill passed to the Senate, where Gino Giugni acted once again as rapporteur. He stressed the importance of revising the regulations on fixed-term contracts, a stance shared by the Undersecretary of Labor.31 The bill passed with support from the Communist parliamentarians this time and was then approved by the Senate albeit with some initial opposition and a few amendments.32 In both houses of Parliament promoters of the bill spoke on several occasions about how this reform was necessary to promote labor flexibility. In all, it took four years for the bill to be approved, during which the needs addressed by the bill itself had changed. In the beginning, it was a commonly believed opinion that the bill that eventually became Law no. 56 should have been followed by a more widespread reform of income support and mobility mechanisms, along with some other elements that had been eliminated from the bill early on. Within the administration of the defense [ministry] absurd, unacceptable stubborn forms of precarity remain that need to be removed urgently. They concern, in particular, very large numbers of temporary staff employed by sub-contractors and cooperatives providing manual labor, administrative, technical, and accounting services, as well as personnel with individual contracts.33

Over the course of the 1980s, the Italian Parliament not only promoted flexible labor relations it also tackled the problem of the persistence and proliferation of precarious work in the public sector, paying particular attention to schools, healthcare, and law enforcement. This continued effort by the Italian government demonstrates that precarity was still treated as a serious concern in Italy, though the simultaneous shift toward pursuing flexibility dominates the historical memory of the decade. In 1982, a law was passed aimed at “adopting suitable measures to avoid the creation of temporary employment and for the stabilization of existing precarious staff ”34 in education, a result of a two-year-long parliamentary debate. Two years later, the government turned to healthcare with a law containing “urgent measures for precarious staff employed by the local healthcare Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XIII Commission, Session of March 12, 1986: 26–29. 31 Senate of the Republic, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of November 26, 1986: 50–51. 32 Senate of the Republic, IX Legislature, “Discussioni,” Session of December 13, 1984: 87–88. 33 Chamber of Deputies, X Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Gabriele Piermartini and Paolo Cristoni, “Norme per l’eliminazione di forme di precariato nell’Amministrazione della difesa,” announced on January 10, 1990. 34 Law no. 270, “Revisione della disciplina di reclutamento del personale docente della scuola materna, elementare, secondaria e artistica, ristrutturazione degli organici, adozione di misure idonee ad evitare la formazione di precariato e sistemazione del personale precario esistente,” approved on May 20, 1982 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 139, May 22, 1982. 30

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facilities.” In 1987, a bill was put forward to reduce the precarious employment of young people, reflecting the central importance attributed to work for the young in Italian politics of that time and generally to the issue of youth itself.36 A few years later the Parliament launched a parliamentary inquiry into the condition of the youth itself.37 In 1990, there was another bill to eliminate precarity within the defense ministry, “Eliminazione di forme di precariato nell’Amministrazione della difesa.”38 The bill’s promoters denounced the defense ministry’s abuse of precarious workers through employing cooperatives and outsourcing to various companies for manual labor, and administrative and accounting services. The two Socialist deputies, Gabriele Piermartini and Paolo Cristoni, who promoted the bill, emphasized the state of “distress and discomfort within this sector of precarious employment” due to the defense ministry’s lack of respect for the individual rights of workers and the right to collective bargaining, its failure to acknowledge workers’ professional roles, and its violation of various rules governing job security. The bill envisaged public competitions for defense ministry job postings open to all laborers, technicians, skilled workers, and administrators who had worked for the ministry for at least two years, even if not directly hired by the ministry itself. 35

4.2.2 LABOR LEGISLATION AND THE FLEXIBILITY CHALLENGE: ATYPICAL CONTRACTS In any case, it is clear that Italian labor law has played and continues to play a significant political role, albeit in terms of change of meaning. For a long period, this kind of action was carried out on the basis of traditional labor-oriented policies, recently transformed mostly into subjection when not into explicit assimilation of economist theses not infrequently assumed in a sole direction (Mariucci 2016a, 598). Law no. 835, “Conversione in legge, con modifiche, del decreto-legge 16 Ottobre 1984, no.672, recante misure urgenti per il personale precario delle unità sanitarie locali,” approved on May 20, 1982 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 344, December 15, 1984. 36 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Clemente Mastella, Antonio Ventre et al., “Norme la definitiva sistemazione del precariato giovanile,” announced on February 4, 1987. 37 Presided over by Socialist Deputy Nicola Savino, the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Juvenile Condition was set up by the Chamber of Deputies on June 1, 1988. Work was carried out between April 27, 1989, and March 21, 1991, for a total of 54 plenary sessions and 52 by the office of the president. Three volumes were drawn up at the end of the work. See Chamber of Deputies, “Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulla condizione giovanile,” 3 vol., Rome, 1989–1991. 38 Chamber of Deputies, IX Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Gabriele Piermartini e Paolo Cristoni, “Norme per l’eliminazione di forme di precariato nell’Amministrazione della difesa,” announced on January 10, 1990. 35

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This new legislation led to significant changes in the legal framework for labor relations. Their declared objective was to make people’s entry into the labor market more flexible and to eliminate those “rigidities” that many believed penalized Italy compared to Anglo-American countries. Those efforts to achieve “flexibility” against “rigidity” were still quite moderate during the eighties according to some scholars. Thanks to the so-called “neo-corporate” social pact, trade unions in fact had the power to bargain for flexible contracts (Regalia and Regini 1995; Giugni 2003). The years of “promotional guaranteeism,” which had seen their peak in the seventies (Stolfi 2017), were followed by a time of so-called “flexible guaranteeism” (Giugni 1982; Martelloni 2018), in which new types of contracts became widespread for increasing employment among women and the young. While the legal debate at that time focused on the “escape from employee work” (Ichino 1990) and on the new kinds of labor relations developing around it (Pedrazzoli 1989), the role of the trade unions proved relevant not only in co-managing these new flexible contracts but also popularizing them among male and female workers through grassroots campaigns. According to labor lawyers more recently (Cazzetta 2009), the eighties saw a broadening of the conceptual scope of labor rights in Italy thanks to the introduction of disguised forms of support to private companies and the destruction of standard employment contracts in favor of “atypical” (meaning fixed-term or part-time) ones. According to some interpretations, this decade brought a process of normalization and readjustment of the legal system to production and market needs, a “restoration” catering to the egalitarian legal claims of the 1968 movement and the severe economic crisis of the seventies (Ferraro 2008). Law no. 863 of 1984, Misure urgenti a sostegno e incremento dei livelli occupazionali,39 (Urgent Measures to Support and Increase Employment Levels), discussed above, introduced training and work contracts, part-time contracts, and solidarity contracts, all considered useful tools for promoting employment in an economic situation where unemployment was continuing to increase, especially among young people between the ages of 14 and 29. Between 1970 and 1980, youth unemployment rates doubled, from 7.7% to 18.9%. In the eighties it continued its rise, at its peak affecting more than a quarter of young people. This rampant growth was met with concern and led to a number of laws on youth employment and vocational training by the end of the seventies (Regalia and Regini 1995; Pugliese and Rebeggianini 1997). Yet this legislation proved ineffective and youth unemployment continued to grow, setting the stage for the Law no. 863, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decreto-legge 30 Ottobre 1984, no.726, recante misure urgenti a sostegno e ad incremento dei livelli occupazionali,” published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 35, December 22, 1984.

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substantial modification of entry into the labor market, based, as we have seen, on the flexibility paradigm. The young were the main target of the flexibilization of labor relations during the eighties. The tool used most frequently to promote youth employment was the training and work contract, an updated version of the one introduced experimentally in 1977.40 This type of contract, made possible by Law no. 863 of 1984, was reserved for young people aged between 15 and 29, had a maximum duration of 24 months, had a variable salary, and could only be used in private and public companies that were not undergoing restructuring or experiencing a business crisis. In this type of contract, work experience needed to be connected with vocational training courses organized mostly through regional government authorities. The use of these contracts was subject to approval by the Regional Commission for Employment, based on an application for the training project containing the description of the work and training activities and the methods and time schedule applied. This contract was attractive to employers because it saved on costs. The training and work contract was the “atypical” one most commonly used in the eighties and applied to around two and a half million young people up to the end of the decade. After 1990, its use dropped due to legislative changes (Law no. 407 of 1990) that made the training and work contract less advantageous for employers. The 1984 law regulated part-time work41 in Italy for the very first time, although this form of employment was by no means new, having already existed since the late seventies. The 1984 law formalized the possibility of working regularly for a shorter period than that foreseen by collective agreements or for fewer hours per week, month, or year. This law allowed for two types of parttime agreements: horizontal part-time (in which there were a less than standard number of working hours per day) and vertical part-time (a reduction of hours per annum). Workers who opted for part-time work could, while remaining enrolled in a job seeker’s list, also sign up on special lists as part-time workers. These part-time employment contracts needed to be drawn up in writing and could not be informal as they had previously been. The contract had to specify duties and time schedules (by day, week, month, and year). Yet, this contract was not particularly advantageous for employers, since wages and social charges borne by the company were not proportional to the hours actually worked: the cost of The training and work contract was introduced by the “Provvedimenti per l’occupazione giovanile,” Law no. 285, June 1, 1977. It could have a maximum (non-renewable) duration of 12 months and provided for alternation between cycles of work and professional training with a reduction of social charges for employers. 41 Law no. 863, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decreto-legge 30 Ottobre 1984, no.726, recante misure urgenti a sostegno e ad incremento dei livelli occupazionali,” published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 35, December 22, 1984. 40

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two part-time workers was greater by a third than that of one full-time worker. The part-time worker was not generally allowed to carry out work beyond that provided for in the contract. According to some studies (ISFOL 1998), these restrictions meant that the part-time contract was not as popular in Italy in the eighties as it was in other European countries. By the end of the decade, only 5.2% of all workers and 10% of women workers in Italy were part-time, compared to a European average of 13.7% and 28.8% (EUROSTAT 1995). Meanwhile, the solidarity contract42 was the last kind of “atypical” contract enshrined in the 1984 law; it was designed to incentivize the reduction of working hours in an enterprise in order to avoid redundancy (internal solidarity contracts) and favor the hire of new workers (external solidarity contracts). A given company and the most representative trade union among its workers had to come to a preliminary agreement on the recurrence of this kind of contract. For internal contracts, the Italian government paid 50% of the employee’s remuneration lost due to the reduction of the time worked.43 Of all the various solutions introduced in the eighties, there is no doubt that the solidarity contract was the one used least. When it became effective at the end of 1986, 23,803 became registered as solidarity contract workers (Neri 1989). Between 1986 and 1990, that number hovered at about 21,000 (ISFOL 1998). A region-by-region breakdown of the data shows that solidarity contracts were used mostly to deal with individual cases, not to resolve internal or external occupational crises, given how limited the numbers of workers involved in each such contracts were. There were practically no external work-sharing contracts at all (Gualmini 1998). According to Law no. 56 of 1987, collective agreements signed with unions belonging to the biggest national confederations could waive the strict regulations introduced in 1962 (no. 230), allowing the use of fixed-term contracts in additional circumstances. These collective agreements also contained clauses establishing the percentage of workers who might be hired on fixed-term contracts, rather than employed permanently (“quota clauses”). The exact number would be the result of innumerable discussions and mediation between different views, and of debates concerning the usefulness of this type of contract in promoting employment. The temporary contract was not very common during the eighties, fluctuating between 5 and 6% of all workers, according to OECD data, although it was twice that in the case of women workers. In any case, about half of part-time workers during the eighties were on fixed-term contracts (OECD 2002). Ibid. If the reduction in hours was more than 20%, employers benefitted from a 25% rebate of their social security dues, if it was over 30%, the rebate went up to 40%. In the case of external contracts, for each new worker taken on employers received a contribution from the state equal to 15% of the gross remuneration provided for by the collective agreement for the first year, 10% for the second year, and 5% for the third year.

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Another measure introduced to increase youth employment was a law on apprenticeship, no. 56 of 1987,44 second in importance only to the aforementioned training and work contract. It provided for the extension of direct hiring, raising the age limit for enrolling as an apprentice in the artisan register to 29, and also guaranteed that the employer could benefit from a tax reduction for one year after an apprentice became a permanent employee. Not even the law on youth entrepreneurship in southern Italy (1986) remained immune from the “flexibilization” process that had become so prominent in the eighties, as flexibility was the basis for the measures aimed at encouraging independent enterprise to the detriment of standard employment. The 1986 law provided financial incentives for the creation of companies or cooperatives involving mostly young people aged between 18 and 29 and privileged projects that aimed to employ women in particular.45 Another aspect of the flexibilization of labor relations in the eighties concerned the global reorganization of private and working time (Frey and Livragni 1998). The “policies of working time” were implemented through the creation of types of contracts that provided for shorter-than-“standard” working-time regimes (e.g., part-time and solidarity contracts), and the reshaping of schedules by introducing systems of large-scale work shifts. A possible reduction of overall working time was also advocated by the trade unions. Such policies made it possible to introduce time limits into labor contracts, including those designed to encourage youth employment. In the industrial sector, a reduction and reorganization of work schedules was introduced by the management to make factories more efficient and to make production more malleable to match the changing demand for products. In the services sector, the stability and uniformity of working time inherited by the Fordist era was to be eliminated in order to encourage consumption (Bergamaschi 1988). The trade unions also mobilized in favor of a reduction in working hours, an effort they considered essential, especially in the CISL. It was one of their primary issues at the negotiation table when bargaining against employer demands for greater flexibility. Looking back at flexibilization in the eighties, we can say that the various tools aimed at encouraging flexibility ended up mainly exploiting already disadvantaged workers trying to enter the labor market. This is evident in the very young ages of many workers employed in temporary jobs, as well as by the specific bargaining over contracts meant for young people. The changes in labor legislation brought about only a partial liberalization of the labor market, still far Law no. 56, “Norme sull’organizzazione del mercato del lavoro,” approved on February 28, 1987 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 51, March 3, 1987. 45 Law no. 44, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decreto-legge 30 Dicembre 1985, no.786, concernente misure straordinarie per la promozione e lo sviluppo della imprenditorialità giovanile nel Mezzogiorno,” approved on February 28, 1986 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 50, March 1, 1986. 44

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removed from that of countries such as the US and UK. It is not yet possible to establish whether or not there was a close link between work flexibility and precarity in the eighties, despite the fact that many workers were employed involuntarily in “flexible” forms of work. Ultimately part-time work tended to be associated the most with temporal flexibility because of the way it reduced working time.

4.2.3 BARGAINED FLEXIBILITY IN THE TRADE-UNION DEBATE AND COLLECTIVE AGREEMENTS OF THE EIGHTIES There exists a third possible way—one actually practiced already in numerous circumstances—in which the union decides to adopt the slogan of flexibility as its own, seeking to turn it, actually, into a union strategy. […] That is, there exists the possibility of joint bargaining; the union has every interest, in the current situation of power relations, to favor this option with respect to the alternative pursued by certain companies of unilateral regulation or attempts at establishing direct relations with the workers, bypassing their collective representatives. […] The assumption of the discussion on flexibility as a framework for action seems to be a more adequate strategy by which to defend workers in these new conditions, an important way by which to recover a somewhat deteriorated relationship with the traditional grassroots and above all a means by which to establish otherwise difficult relationships with new workers, young people, and women in particular (Regini 1988, 9–10).

The position of the trade unions on flexibility transformed considerably from the seventies into the eighties. As we have seen, during the late seventies, faced with the restructuring and decentralization of the Italian industrial system and employers’ desire for greater flexibility, the trade unions assumed a defensive attitude. In the eighties, the concept of “negotiated flexibility” kept coming up in trade union and employer deals, indicating a willingness on the part of the trade unions to co-manage the flexibilization of the labor market through bargaining and collective agreement. Even the European Parliament, while discussing employment problems in November 1986, adopted the concept of “negotiated flexibility,” in prevision of launching a new EU directive to protect workers on flexible contracts.46 In its column on the labor market called “Osservatorio sul mercato del lavoro,” the trade union magazine Rassegna sindacale published an article entitled “Flessibile sempre più flessibile” (Flexible, more and more flexible)47 that analyzed Raul Wittenberg, “Strasburgo per il lavoro,” Rassegna sindacale, November 21, 1986. Antonia Franceschini, “Flessibile sempre più flessibile,” Rassegna sindacale, November 21, 1986.

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the dynamics of the labor market two years after the approval of Law no. 863 of 1984. According to the article, the new contracts allowed by the law had grown by an aggregate of 25% between 1985 and 1986. That sharp rise meant there was a clear need to “increase the bargaining of all aspects,” to “obtain a true view of the bargaining being carried out,” and to “rethink all the so-called ‘horizontal’ regulations (maternity, social security, and pensions) at a legislative level.” At the end of the eighties, a balance was drawn up regarding the bargaining of flexible labor relations and forms of time flexibility (Perulli 1990); a balance that was crucial for some “atypical” forms of employment relations to be regulated exclusively by contract. Following the law of 1987, specific rules on fixed-term work came to be included in nine of the existing twenty-four national collective agreements. Collective bargaining also dealt with part-time apprenticeships, in some cases providing more favorable conditions than those provided for by the law of 1986, and regulated “training and work contracts.” The latter had been modified after a 1986 agreement: such contracts had been tacitly approved through training projects, while the classification of trainees was established at two levels below that of other workers. In the collective bargaining agreements of workers employed in the commercial, wood, textile, chemical, and metalworking sectors, rules were established regarding apprenticeships and training and work contracts, as well as various aspects of working-time flexibility. Changes were also made to annual and weekly working hours, both in terms of overtime and of fewer working hours (Perulli 1990). Nevertheless, there was still a major divergence of opinion over flexibility between trade unions and employers. According to the National Secretary of the CGIL Fausto Vigevani, this was due to the tendency on the part of employers to move towards “maximum flexibility and adaptability of work performance as the only functional variables,” without any consideration for the workers’ needs.48 There is much evidence of concern over the issue of flexibility in the CGIL’s documents between 1981 and 1991, a period during which the organization had three congresses (1981, 1986, and 1991) and saw three different leaders (Luciano Lama, Antonio Pizzinato, and Bruno Trentin). In the eighties, bargaining over flexibility focused both on entry contracts, which particularly concerned young people and women (Franceschini 1986; Perulli 1990), and on the management of time flexibility. The latter spread significantly in regional contexts like that of Lombardy, because of the requests formulated by factory managements to increase the use of industrial plants (Bergamaschi 1988). Scholars like economist Patrizio Bianchi postulated the need for an integrated view of flexibility capable of dealing simultaneously with both the technological Anna Avitabile, “Ma è la strategia che è rigida. Intervista a Fausto Vigevani,” Rassegna sindacale, December 12, 1986.

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and labor aspects of the issue (Bianchi 1986). According to him, the breakdown of the Fordist system and the desire for new forms of operational flexibility were causing important changes to the organization of labor. The decline of occupational stability was among the main risks of “the economy of flexibility” studied by Franco Butera (Butera 1986, 1987). The labor flexibility introduced in the eighties was still tightly regulated compared to that of later decades, since individual contracts contained restrictive clauses and sanctions in exchange for fairly modest incentives, leaving the determination of quotas for flexible contracts to the collective bargaining process. The full deployment of wage flexibility did not exist yet, except for “training and work contracts” and apprenticeships. The purpose of these was to reduce labor costs when workers entered the labor market, in exchange for the possibility that young people might follow a training course.

4.3 The utopia of flexibility between freedom and liberation from work 4.3.1 POST-FORDISM, FLEXIBILITY, AND FREEDOM The hypothesis of flexibility tends, therefore, to foreshadow a possible future characterized by an increase in freedom of personal choice: within this scenario, the “a la carte” method would prevail over individual action, permitting everyone to be able to choose “when” (as a young person, an adult, an older person) and “how much” (part-time, full-time) to work and study. This scenario is the point of arrival of a conceivable gradual process of the introduction of elements of flexibility into the social system: therefore, it represents a goal towards which to strive, one which was, realistically speaking, difficult to achieve, but to which, however, we can draw close. (Cesareo 1985, 18).

In the mid-eighties, sociologist Vincenzo Cesareo introduced the concept of the “flexible society” (Cesareo 1985), in which he applied the rigidity/flexibility binomial to societal forms, a concept that deeply influenced Italian thought on flexibility. Among his “indicators of flexibility” by which one could measure the flexible society, Cesareo mentioned changes in productive structures that were moving towards greater flexibility. Cesareo theorized that flexibility and personal freedom were associated, an idea that was particularly popular in Italy during the eighties, especially in women’s theory on liberation from work. This theorizing drew a fair amount of inspiration from the workerist theories of the seventies (Berardi 2017).

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In the late eighties and early nineties intellectual work on the relationship between post-Fordism, flexibility, and freedom flourished in Italy. This writing built on an international scholarly discourse of the time that theorized the transition between a modern age, whose final stage was represented by Fordism, and a post-modern one, where a new regime of flexible accumulation had become predominant (Harvey 1989). The concept of freedom was associated with new flexible forms of work whose task it was to “liberate” the individual from the alienating rigidity of the Fordist system.

4.3.2 THE FEMININIZATION AND FLEXIBILIZATION OF WORK Among the factors of flexibility that characterize the female workforce, we may consider both availability towards precarious work and adaptability during the performance of work. On the other hand, the factors characterizing their rigidity are an unwillingness to work long hours, to accept external mobility […] (Franchi 1990, 262).

While flexibility had long been considered a woman’s specificity and a characteristic typical of women workers (Bellavitis and Piccone Stella 2008), since the eighties it became a more generally positive value in the labor market. The feminization of work (Fontana 2002), which reached its peak in the eighties and nineties, represented not only a quantitative but also a qualitative change in employment and triggered a joint reflection regarding processes of feminization, outsourcing, and the flexibilization of labor (Altieri 2001). An important reversal of the negative trend in female employment began in the seventies, continued more markedly in the eighties, coincided with the expansion of the tertiary sector, and was fueled by the simultaneous growth of public administration, large-scale retailers, and new services to businesses. Of the approximately two and a half million jobs created between the eighties and nineties in the tertiary sector, around half were occupied by women, leading to an increase of feminization in public administration and large-scale retail. Despite this growth in female employment, female unemployment rates remained much higher than those of men. This meant that there was a greater propensity than in the past for women to seek employment outside of the home. However, they also found jobs more difficult to find (Pugliese 1995; Fontana 2002; Gasparrone 2000). Although women entered the labor market of the eighties mostly on standard contracts, they were, along with young workers, the ones most frequently in flexible jobs, including part-time work, which, during the eighties, involved a little under 800,000 workers, mostly women. The official introduction of parttime work, thorough Law no. 863 of 1984, marked the culmination of decades-long

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discussions involving various female associations, feminist groups, trade unions, and political parties. Part-time work had been opposed by the women of the UDI and trade unions in 1969, when they opposed the “Pirelli proposal,”49 which sought to introduce part-time work to help women in balancing paid work and family duties. Five years later, in the magazine Effe, feminists Danielle Turone and Grazia Francescato wrote an article entitled “Paga dimezzata fatica raddoppiata” (Pay halved for double the effort), which criticized the adoption of part-time work in industry in order to hire “students, the disabled, and women.”50 During the National Conference on Female Employment (1975), Minister of Labor Tina Anselmi presented a bill that was bitterly contested by the women’s movement.51 During the late seventies, the situation changed radically. Numerous bills were presented to regulate part-time work between 1978 (the year the Labor Commission of the CNEL drew up a report on the matter) and 1984 (the year the law on part-time was introduced). In 1978, the Christian Democrat parliamentarian Ines Boffardi, first signatory of one of the two Christian Democratic bills,52 underlined the need to abandon “agnostic attitudes” because of how widespread part-time work was, while her party colleague Nadir Tedeschi emphasized the need to modernize the labor market. Giorgio Almirante made the same point in a bill he proposed on behalf of the MSI party.53 Numerous other bills aimed at regulating part-time work were presented between the seventh and ninth legislatures. None of these made it to the floor for discussion in parliament, except for the latest ones which were included in discussions leading to the approval of Law no. 863. During the eighties, female and feminist thinking dealt with the theme of job flexibility, and part-time work in particular. Female trade unionists, politicians, members of women’s associations, and second-wave feminist groups all made significant contributions to this discourse. Most interpreted flexibility in terms of working time, as a way of going beyond the male-oriented organization of work, and of redefining one’s work-life balance. The sociologist Maura Franchi pointed out how the very concepts of flexibility and rigidity were applied UDI, “I tempi parziali e la piena occupazione femminile: Atti della conferenza stampa ‘perché diciamo no al lavoro a metà tempo per le donne,’” April 29, 1969. 50 Danielle Turone, Grazia Francescato, “Paga dimezzata fatica raddoppiata,” Effe, January 1, 1974. 51 Daniela Colombo, “Part-time uno strumento in più,” Effe, no. 4, April 1982. 52 Chamber of Deputies, VII Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Boffardi Ines e Martino Scovacricchi, “Norme per la tutela del lavoro a tempo parziale,” announced on March 16, 1978. 53 Chamber of Deputies, VII Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Nadir Tedeschi, Gerardo Bianco et al., “Disciplina del rapporto di lavoro a tempo parziale,” announced on April 5, 1978; Chamber of Deputies, VII Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Giorgio Almirante, Alfredo Pazzaglia et al., “Norme per la tutela del lavoro a tempo parziale,” announced on March 6, 1979. 49

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differently to women than to men. Women, however more penalized they may have been during the processes of reorganization of the industrial system, had actually emerged from the economic crisis of the seventies better off than men. They displayed greater flexibility when it came to making use of the opportunity to establish temporary or shorter-time labor relationships. Though as far as flexibility in the service industry was concerned, they were usually positioned in the weakest jobs within the labor market: in farming it is evident in the seasonality and, therefore, in the precarity of employment relationships; in the mechanical sector in the fact that the female workers in production have no access to the most qualified tasks connected with the use of complex machines; in the retail area women perform tasks in the sales department (Franchi 1990, 254).

In 1982, the magazine Effe published an interesting discussion between three female trade unionists from the principal confederated unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL) on the topic of part-time work.54 It was clear here how the CGIL, CISL and UIL agreed on the usefulness of part-time work as a means to remodel work schedules, as well as work-life balance for both women and men. Effe entitled the article “Part-time un diritto per tutti” (Part-time, a right for all), although women in some workplaces were still reluctant the trade unionists pointed out. Female workers and trade unionists were primarily concerned, first of all, about the matter of skills, the risk of being fired when crises arose, and that part-time work might be used instrumentally to relegate women to unskilled jobs. Voluntariness and reversibility of part-time work appeared therefore to be a priority for female trade unionists at the beginning of the eighties. In the Effe article, Annalisa Vittore, on behalf of the CISL, emphasized the change of opinion among women that had occurred between the seventies and eighties: “traditionally, part-time work was understood as a system used to institutionalize the precarity of women […] the union had to revise its position and place the topic of part-time within the more general strategy of work-time restructuring.” Patrizia Baratto, for the UIL, added that “it is possible to obtain a much more flexible management of working time.” While Doriana Giudici, for the CGIL, pointed out that “today, the economic and employment situation demands great flexibility so as to rearrange work schedules and the organization of labor.”55 The next year there was an international conference entitled “Produrre e riprodurre. Cambiamenti nel rapporto tra donne e lavoro e nel lavoro tra donne” (Produce and reproduce: Changes in the relationship between women Daniela Colombo, “Part-time uno strumento in più,” Effe, no. 4, April 1982. Ibid.

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and work and in work between women) (Turin, April 23–25, 1983), held by the Turin branch of the women’s movement (1984), which tackled in-depth thinking on the changes in the relationship between women and labor. In the mid-eighties the UDI also called for greater flexibility of both working and living time, in particular at an event held on this issue by the association in 1986. The trade unions’ analysis of the relationship existing between rigidity and flexibility in women’s work brought some interesting elements to the surface during the CGIL’s national conference entitled “Il lavoro delle donne: dalla realtà al progetto” (Women’s work: From reality to the project, Rome, June 21– 22, 1985). The conference underlined the main changes taking place in female employment, providing an account of women’s thinking regarding work. The final document of the conference addressed the issue of flexibility, highlighting the fact that given the crisis of the standard employment model, bargaining should promote “greater daily, weekly, annual flexibility, with periods of leave from work distributed over the year to meet different needs” (CGIL 1985). Here, flexibility was once again conceived as a way of reconciling life and work, production and reproduction. Flexibility is considered an aspect of the weakness reflected in certain types of contracts: fixed-term and part-time contracts, and seasonality are seen as synonymous with precarity within this kind of female work environment. Rigidity is often attributed to educational and training pathways and to constraints of a family nature; introduced, however, to justify reasons for the exclusion of women’s marginality from the labor market (Franchi 1990, 247).

Livia Turco, at the time head of the national female branch of the Italian Communist Party, returned to the topic of precarity in the volume published by the Labor Commission of the PCI (Bassolino 1986) discussed earlier in this chapter. She emphasized the fact that, in the mid-eighties, there were (still) high concentrations of women of all ages in precarious and irregular employment, with nothing new related to the feminization of work occurring within the tertiary and agricultural sectors. In agriculture, the problem of precarity was sharpened by the persistence of illegal hiring (caporalato) and under-payment (Turco 1986), which were subjects of a parliamentary inquiry taking place in the mid-eighties.

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CHAPTER 5

THE NEW EXPLOSION OF PRECARIOUS WORK BETWEEN THE NINETIES AND THE AUGHTS

Flexible jobs involve significant personal and social burdens, borne by the individual, the family, the community. These jobs are not just a different way of working, consistent with the needs of the new economy. They are a way of working, which, compared to “normal” work—which certainly had and has its costs for people—imposes burdens of an unusual nature, largely unexplored as yet. Similar costs cannot be overlooked, nor can it be taken for granted that they do not exist, on the pretext that a growing number of people, especially young people, now seem to accept them without any fuss or even declare liking them. First of all, there are many others, young and old, for whom intermittent work, on call, on the road, or simply precarious—these are some of the many names of flexibility—is perceived as a wound of their existence, an undeserved source of anxiety, a reduction of their citizens’ rights once taken for granted (Gallino 2001, 22).

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n the late nineties there was a dramatic growth in studies on the effects of flexible work, highlighting the human and social costs of the diffusion of “atypical” and “flexible” contracts in Western countries. Flexible contracts were one of the direct consequences of the changes in the structure of employment in post-industrial societies (Esping-Andersen 1990; 2000). Flexibility’s effects and the changing organization of labor around it became part of a broad debate within Italy and internationally during the late nineties over the crisis of wage-based society during the transition between Fordism and post-Fordism (Brunetta 1994; Castell 1995). From a legal point of view, this debate hinged on the crisis of the concept of “subordination” in employment relations (Ichino 1990; Giugni 1989). Criticisms of the transformation of labor in the Euro-Atlantic zone postulated the end, tout court, of the centrality of labor in contemporary society (Méda 1995; Rifkin 2002; Bauman 1998; Accornero 2000; Barcellona 2000). The relationship between the new working conditions of the post-Fordist era and social citizenship also became a focal point of these debates as employment structures changed, the welfare system fell into crisis, and labor law became rapidly

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deregulated and re-regulated (Esping-Andersen 2000; Ambrosini and Beccalli 2000). In many ways, this was a transition from an industrial society to a service society, which according to scholars like Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen led to a reduction in well-paid, guaranteed jobs in favor of “atypical” jobs, with lower salaries and fewer social rights. Esping-Andersen, whose studies were translated into Italian and widely discussed in Italy during the nineties (EspingAndersen 1990; 1995; 1999), criticized the notion that “flexibilization” would be a recipe for employment growth. He pointed out, in line with other scholars before him (Salvati 1988), that there was no empirical evidence of the link between unemployment trends and rigid regulation of the labor market. Concepts like the “human cost of flexibility” coined by the Italian sociologist Luciano Gallino (2001) and that of the “flexible man” conceived by the American sociologist Richard Sennet (1998) laid the groundwork for a radical criticism of job flexibility as not socially sustainable. In Il costo umano della flessibilià (The human cost of flexibility, 2001) and his earlier book Se tre milioni vi sembrano pochi (If three million seem so few, 1998), Gallino criticized the solutions that had been taken in the nineties to combat unemployment, like increasing the flexibility of the labor market. The effects flexibility was having on the personal lives and families of a growing number of workers was the core of the Italian sociologist’s thinking and the reason why his book achieved a considerable resonance in Italy in the early 2000s. Similarly, in his The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (Sennet 1998), translated into Italian as L’uomo flessibile (Sennet 1999), the American sociologist Richard Sennet examined the impact of work flexibility upon individual life and social ties, starting with the negative effects flexibility had on people’s personalities. It was through the work of such scholars that the more neutral concept of labor “flexibility” gave way to that of “precarity” in the economic and social theory of both the aughts and the crisis years (Betti 2018b). People in the Romance-speaking world were the first to introduce expressions equivalent to the Italian lavoro precario (“precarious worker”), in France emplois précaires, and in Spain trabajo precario. It was only during the late aughts that the neologism “precarious work” began to be used in English-speaking countries and internationally (Barbier 2002). In Europe, French scholars examined the concept of precarity most closely. Scholars like Jean-Claude Barbier (2000), Serge Paugam (2000), and Pierre Bourdieau (1998) addressed the problem of job and social precarization imposed by the hegemonic flexibility paradigm. The scholars Luc Boltansky and Eve Chiappello explored the relationship between flexibility, precarity, and the ongoing transformations of the capitalist system in their seminal book Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (The new spirit of capitalism, 1999). The German sociologist Ulrich Beck, in his book Schöne neue Arbeitswelt (The brave new world

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of work, 1999), translated into Italian as Il lavoro nell’epoca della fine del lavoro (2000), looked back at the “thousand worlds of precarious work,” addressing the impact of globalization on the processes of precarization in Europe. In Italy the debate over flexibility and precarity in the social sciences, which in this context was by no means new, grew enormously and entered into public discourse. Numerous scholars analyzed flexibility in terms of the “possibilities” it did or did not allow for the creation of new jobs, a premise that had been the basis of the European Employment Strategy in the late nineties. Other scholars critically examined the risks of “precarization” associated with the flexibilization of the labor market, exacerbated by the reforms of 1997 and 2003 (Altieri 2009). The first studies to refer explicitly to precarity in sociology were written by sociologists like Andrea Tiddi (2002), Roberto Rizza (1998), and Federico Chicchi (2001). In Italy, the relationship between job and social precarity became a topic of debate during the years between the nineties and aughts. In his book Precarietà del lavoro e società precaria nell’Europa contemporanea (The precarity of work and precarious society in contemporary Europe) historian Iganzio Masuilli (2004) postulates the relationship between the development of precarity in the nineties and aughts and the effects of the crisis of the capitalist system of the seventies. Similarly, the economist Andrea Fumagalli (2006) pinned the origins of this new wave of precarity in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism and of the development of new types of work that lacked the guarantees typical of Fordism.

5.1 Legislative changes and labor policy between the old and new millennia Such theories on the human and social costs of flexibility and the precarization of work had a limited impact on Italian and European labor policies in the same period. During the late aughts, some significant changes occurred in the perception and discussion of the problem of precarity, starting with the introduction of the concept of “precariat.” Thinking regarding transformations of labor legislation in the nineties and the aughts turned out to be relevant in the overall debate. Italian jurists contributed to an intellectual process that had begun during the late eighties, leading to the development of theories on the crisis of the employee labor relationship (Fondazione Giulio Pastore 1999). This included key Italian jurists and labor law academics like Gino Giugni, Pietro Ichino, Luigi Mariucci, Umberto Romagnoli, Massimo D’Antona, Giorgio Ghezzi, and others. The framework of the debate was

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largely established by Pietro Ichino in his emblematically entitled article “Fuga dal lavoro subordinato” (Escape from the employee labor relationship) in 1990 in the journal Democrazia e diritto (Democracy and law) (Ichino 1990). The initial stage of the debate foreshadowed the subsequent polarization between those who believed that the crisis of the employee labor relationship would favor a renewal of labor law and those who thought it would bring an irreparable crisis (Cazzetta 2009; Del Punta 2008), calling it the “great escape from labor law” (Martelloni 2018). At the center of the discussion was the idea, the function itself of labor law during the transition from the twentieth century—defined as the century of labor law par excellence—and the new millennium, where the status of the discipline still hung in the balance (Romagnoli 2002; 2009). In a special issue 10 years after the passing of Law no. 196 of 1997 known as the “Treu Package,” the journal Lavoro e diritto (La stabilità come valore 2007), addressed the issue of labor stability as a “value and a problem.” The journal’s aim was to map the existing forms of protection for stable jobs, while, at the same time, reflecting critically on stability as an issue.  Similarly, the French legal scholar Alain Supiot (1999) published a report comparing the changes in labor regulations in Europe generally, highlighting the paradox between, on the one hand, an ideal held by some in which the labor market would be fully deregulated and, on the other, the idealistic reaffirmation held by others of the traditional regime of job protection typical of the Fordist period. He argued that the changes in production urged a “return” to self-employment, despite the constant decline of this type of work during the twentieth century. The risk was that a growing number of non-employees would find themselves deprived of the social rights that still appeared to be the almost exclusive prerogative of employees. Self-employment had already in the late nineties become the focal point of debates in Europe over the reform of social security systems, deemed necessary to avoid the creation of new processes of precarization. The gap between formal freedom and economic dependence in atypical forms of contract was an unresolved problem according to Supiot, who proposed a series of measures to reform the European legal regulatory systems of the employment relationship (Ibid.).

5.1.1 THE EUROPEAN EMPLOYMENT STRATEGY AND THE FLEXICURITY MYTH Flexicurity can be defined as an integrated strategy to enhance, at the same time, flexibility and security in the labor market. Flexibility, on the one hand […] is not limited to more freedom for companies to recruit or dismiss, and it does not imply that open-ended contracts are obsolete. It is about progress of

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workers into better jobs, “upward mobility” and optimal development of talent. Flexibility is also about flexible work organizations, capable of quickly and effectively mastering new productive needs and skills, and about facilitating the combination of work and private responsibilities. Security, on the other hand, is more than just the security to maintain one’s job: it is about equipping people with the skills that enable them to progress in their working lives and helping them find new employment. It is also about adequate unemployment benefits to facilitate transitions. Finally, it encompasses training opportunities for all workers, especially the low skilled and older workers. (European Commission 2007, 5).

The 1999 Supiot report followed the launch of the European Employment Strategy (EES), which was agreed upon during a special session of the European Council held in Luxembourg in 1997 (Zappala 2011). It established that the pillars of the EES should be employability, entrepreneurship, adaptability, and equal opportunity. Since the nineties, the European Union has played a significant role in the formulation of national labor policies in Europe, which have been implemented differently from country to country (Leonardi 2009). After the 1997 EES the next major step in defining labor policy by the EU was the “Lisbon Strategy,” formulated during the Lisbon summit of the European Council in 2000, which laid out a ten-year plan to support “employment, economic reform and social cohesion within the context of a ‘knowledge-based economy.’”1 Later EU employment directives, approved between 1997 and 2002, established a link between labor flexibility and social security, the basis of what would become the “flexicurity” paradigm (Muffels 2008; Zappala 2011). Introduced by Danish and Scandinavian scholars regarding their countries’ employment systems (Wilthagen 1998; 2007; Madsen, 2004), flexicurity was a concept adopted by the EU to reshape the European Employment Strategy in the late aughts (European Commission 2006; 2007). A report for the European Employment Taskforce by a group of experts under the leadership of Wim Kok entitled Jobs, Jobs, Jobs (European Employment Taskforce 2003) had a significant impact upon the development of the EU’s employment guidelines prior to the 2008 economic crisis (2005–2008). The report suggested reducing protections for standard permanent workers in order to make atypical/flexible contracts less advantageous and avoid their proliferation. The report’s authors called on the EU member countries to revise the level of labor flexibility built into their regulations on standard employment contracts so as to avoid creating a two-tier labor market with one group of integrated, permanent workers and one group of excluded, temporary workers (including marginal and precarious workers of all sorts, and the unemployed). European Council, Lisbon March 23–24, 2000, “Conclusioni Della Presidenza,” http://www. europarl.europa.eu/summits/lis1_it.htm#a.

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Flexicurity made its first appearance in the European Commission’s green paper entitled Modernizing Labor Law to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century (2006), which became the basis of the new phase of the Lisbon Strategy, introducing the Common Principles of Flexicurity (December 2007). The need to “achieve more open and responsive labor markets, as well as more productive workplaces” had prompted the Commission and the member states to formulate the above principles, “to improve the adaptability of workers and enterprises,” and to face globalization. The definition of flexicurity used by the Commission, cited in the excerpt at the beginning of this section, centered on the desire for a “sustainable” flexibility through adequate social security systems. Flexible contracts were only one of the four components deemed necessary for the implementation of these policies. The others included integrated lifelong learning strategies, effective and active labor market policies, and modern social security systems capable of providing adequate income support while encouraging employment and mobility (European Commission 2007). The instability of employment relationships becomes a rule; security lies outside of the market, where active employment and public redistribution policies intervene. The document totally neglects the social and existential costs of a similar reallocation of the business risk: individually, the company is absent from the Green Paper or represented in paradoxical terms, as when it is assumed that the stability of the workplace would restrict the margins of maneuver and opportunities for workers, while atypical contracts would guarantee them more career opportunities and training, a better balance between family and professional life, greater personal responsibility (I giuslavoristi 2006, 4).

Over the last decade, flexicurity policies have led to growing criticism from scholars (Auer 2010) who warn that the adoption of employment instability as the basis of the labor system may lead to potential mass “precarization.” They put forward an alternative in which effective social benefits are anchored in the financial capacities of states (Muffels 2008; Tros 2012). During the years following the 2008 crisis, some scholars questioned the financial sustainability of flexicurity (Andersen, Lubanski, and Pedersen 2011; Heyes 2013). Others analyzed the shift of the European Commission from flexibility to protection and security (Tros 2012). In Italy, over 150 jurists, judges, and lawyers signed a public document criticizing flexicurity and the modernization of the labor law titled I giuristi e il Libro Verde (The jurists and the Green Paper, 2006). The stance of the document was “proactive in its opposition” to the European Commission’s 2006 green paper Modernizing Labor Law, criticizing it primarily for its “unilateral vision of the modernization” of labor law based on the “adaptability of legal rules to the

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market.” It pointed to the particularly problematic proposal of reducing regulations on standard contracts, which the EU Green Paper put forward as a way of promoting mobility, employability, and employment generally. The document was seen as highly controversial because “there is no proven correlation between the easing of restrictions on outgoing flexibility and an increase in the willingness of companies to hire” (Ibid.). The jurists also criticized the fact that the Commission’s green paper lacked any reference to the language of fundamental rights contained in the Nice Charter, which had been endorsed by the European bodies and member states. The subsequent application of flexicurity led to a heated debate. In Italy Sergio Bologna and Andrea Fumagalli (1997) and more recently Ilaria Possenti (2012) contributed to the discussion (Bologna and Banfi 2011). Possenti saw flexibility as a typical aspect of post-Fordist and neoliberal modernity, a “device,” in the Foucauldian sense of the term, which “built upon productive grounds, largely colonizes people’s existence” (Possenti 2012, 12). Italian “flexicurity” has been criticized because of its inability to combine security with flexibility, as its name implies. Some have derisively referred to it as “flex-insecurity” (Berton, Richiardi, and Sacchi 2009; Leonardi 2009), arguing that between 1997 and 2007 in Italy flexibility came hand-in-hand with insecurity and precarity due to the limits and shortcomings of the Italian social security system. Even if, according to OECD estimates (Brandt, Burniaux and Duval 2005), the flexibilization of labor relations has been effective, a wide-ranging reform of Italy’s social security network remains to be enacted, though some proposals have been put forward, like that of the “Onofri Commission”2 (Guerzoni 2008). It is no coincidence that “Italian flexicurity” has been called the “failed reform” of Italian social security, which before the 2008 crisis covered only a little over 30% of the country’s unemployed, compared with 70% in Germany and 80% in Belgium (Leonardi 2009). The protection gap between standard and atypical workers was clearly referred to as aggravating precarity, pushing many nonstandard workers into the poverty trap (Leonardi 2009; Berton, Richiardi and Sacchi 2009).

Senate of the Republic, Report of the Parliamentary Commission of Control Concerning the Activity of the Bodies Managing Mandatory Forms of Social Security and Welfare, “Riforma del sistema pensionistico e coerenza con le linee di sviluppo dell’economia,” presented on July 16, 1997.

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5.1.2 FROM THE 1992 PROTOCOL TO THE TREU REFORM (1997) The so-called “Pacchetto Treu” (“Treu Package”), (Law no. 196 of 1997), named after its promoter Minister for Labor Tiziano Treu, was considered the starting point of the flexibilization of the Italian labor market (Del Punta 2008), and, according to many, also the beginning of labor precarity in the country (Altieri 2009). As discussed in the previous chapter, the roots of flexibilization in fact go back to the eighties, but certainly flexibilization saw much development in the nineties, and this deserves a brief summary.  Between 1991 and 1995, before the “great reform” of the labor market, there were already a number of new laws that modified the labor system as it had been inherited from the eighties. This legislation was legitimized and corroborated by two trilateral agreements on labor cost in 1992 and 1993. The first, promoted by Giuliano Amato, was a major turning point in industrial relations, introducing an income policy aimed at reducing labor cost and inflation (Cella and Treu 2009; Regalia and Regini 1995).3 This 1992 agreement hinged on the flexibilization of labor relations as its main policy tool, aiming to provide for “the development, management and/or control of innovative tools […] for flexible working relationships” with the ultimate goal of creating new jobs.4 According to some critics (Pepe 2008), this placed a double burden on the future of labor relationships, reducing the dynamics of wages and intervening to reduce the alleged rigidity of the labor market. The following pact, drawn up a year later in 1993 by Gino Giugni and known as the “Ciampi Agreement,” aimed at making the 1992 agreement permanent by reaffirming its essential features. This second agreement pointed to the income policy in particularly as “an indispensable tool of economic policy.”5 The agreement entailed a partial reform of the regulations on training and work contracts, confirmed the importance of apprenticeship for youth employment, promoted job-sharing contracts, and proposed the use of fixed-term contracts to facilitate the reintegration of the unemployed. Employment agencies, in cooperation with local governments, were given the power to develop packages that combined flexibility and vocational training. Finally, the 1993 agreement put forward the idea of introducing temp work agencies in Italy, which were allowed a few years later. The most significant related law following the Ciampi The agreement, signed by the government along with unions and employers’ organizations, foresaw intervention in different areas: prices and tariffs, fiscal, contributory and investment policies, employment and the labor market, including vocational training and employment services. 4 “Protocollo sulla politica dei redditi, la lotta all’inflazione e il costo del lavoro,” July 31, 1992. 5 “Protocollo sulla politica dei redditi e dell’occupazione, sugli assetti contrattuali, sulle politiche del lavoro e sul sostegno al sistema produttivo,” July 3, 1993. 3

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agreement6 established a special fund for employment for a three-year period (1993–1996), which was used to promote extraordinary measures to create jobs in the country’s most disadvantaged areas, increase daily unemployment benefits, and incentivize “solidarity” contracts.7 In September 1996, Labor Minister Tiziano Treu and the social parties signed the “Patto per il lavoro” (Labor Pact). This agreement substantially revised both active and passive policy tools introduced in the eighties. This agreement became the base of the Treu bill (1996), which was later approved as Law no. 196, 1997 “Norme in materia di promozione dell’occupazione” (Employment Promotion Regulations).8 According to some observers, this law was only a small part of what would have been a very extensive reform project drawn up in September 1996, and the law ended up only introducing “more timid and limited measures than those originally agreed on by the government and the political parties” (Gualmini 1998, 231). In the Italian collective memory, the “Pacchetto Treu” is remembered as the reform that introduced temp agencies and facilitated the spread of coordinated and continuous collaboration contracts,9 known as “Co.Co.Co.” (Altieri 2009). The “Package” introduced the first exception to the ban on workforce brokerage, which had been on the books since 1960,10 by allowing for temp work. In this new system, one company could provide workers to another company, which would be required to pay the temp worker’s wages in the event that the former did not, in addition to social security contributions. According to some scholars (Ghera 2003), because of these features,11 this form of contract was one of the most strictly regulated tools among the new flexible labor relationships of the Law no. 236, “Conversione in legge, con modificazioni, del decreto-legge 20 Maggio 1993, no. 148, recante interventi urgenti a sostegno dell’occupazione,” approved on July 19, 1993, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 167, July 19, 1993. 7 Wage compensation was raised to 75% (previously 50%) of the salary lost because of the worker working a reduced schedule. Moreover, the company would receive a contribution equal to one quarter of the salary not paid because of the reduction of the time worked. Finally, greater flexibility was allowed for reducing working time, which might vary on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. The contracts became even more attractive in 1994, when non-incompatibility of the use of redundancy benefits within the same company was sanctioned. 8 Law no. 196, “Norme in materia di promozione dell’occupazione,” approved on June 24, 1997 and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 154, July 4, 1997. 9 Semi-independent workers (parasubordinati) that is, neither full employees nor fully self-employed. 10 Art. 1, co. 1, Law no. 1369 of 1960. 11 The workers were hired by the agency on a fixed-term or permanent contract. The agency was also required to pay their wages directly to them while paying their social security contributions to the company which availed itself of the workers’ services. A “contract for the provision of temporary services,” stipulated between the two companies, had to be in writing and contain all the specifications regarding the duties, hours, place, salary and the time limits in the case of “temporary workers.” 6

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nineties, which explains its scarcity: making up only 0.4% of overall employment during its first five years (Altieri and Oteri 2003). However, the Treu Package did not in fact introduce coordinated and continuous collaboration contracts. As Federico Martelloni has pointed out (2012), that type of contract had actually been introduced much earlier in a reform to the Italian Civil Code in 1973, which guaranteed the same protections to certain types of formally self-employed workers with legal contracts as standard employees enjoyed. That restriction had been established because coordinated and continuous collaboration, although formally independent, contained some of the typical features of the employee labor relationship like continuity, coordination, and the predominantly personal nature of the work (art. 409, n.3, CPC). For these reasons, Co.Co.Co was known in Italian as lavoro para-subordinato (Santoro Passarelli 1979). In the eighties, specific taxation measures were imposed on Co.Co.Co. workers and they were also obliged to pay social security taxes after the 1995 Pension Reform (Altieri and Carrieri 2000). In 1996, the introduction of mandatory social security contributions (set at 10% of income, two-thirds paid by the client, one third by the worker)12 brought to light almost one million jobs that had existed without the government’s previous knowledge. In 2002, those registered with the INPS 10–13% fund (known as Gestione separate, “separate management”) numbered 2,392,527. This type of employment underwent progressive feminization. For many women, the Co.Co.Co. was a means of entering the labor market and, frequently, of remaining there (willingly or unwillingly), especially in the south of Italy (Ibid.). By 2000, para-subordinate work had become an enormous category bringing together heterogeneous forms of employment. Only a quarter of Italian Co.Co.Co. workers were engaged in the industrial sector. More than 90% of them worked for only one client, suggesting that they were in fact really low and very low-paid employees. They earned on average 11,861.75 euro per annum, and 59% of made no more than 7,500 euro (Altieri and Oteri 2000). In the nineties, the very close correlation between the legislative changes in the regulation of atypical work contracts and their spread emerged in a significant manner. In the late nineties, there was an increase in less protected forms of contract (primarily Co.Co.Co.), which ensured low labor costs for employers. Flexibilization was a gendered phenomenon, hence the “feminization” of atypical employment concentrated in the tertiary sector (Altieri 2001; CENSIS 2000). The progressive liberalization of the regulations on flexible contracts introduced in the eighties, led to, in the view of many sociologists (Tiddi 2002; In 1998, this contribution was increased to 11.5% (plus 0.5% for maternity leave and family allowances). The 2000 budget brought this contribution up to 13%, of which 0.5% was earmarked for maternity leave and family allowances (Samek, Lodovici, Semenza 2001).

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Chicchi 2001) and social movements (Chaincrew 2001), a proliferation of precarious forms of work. According to some estimates, between 1992 and 2000 “atypical” work among the overall workforce rose from 10.6% to 15.2%, an increase of 45.2% (Altieri and Oteri 2000). Atypical work became the main gateway into the labor market for many people during the late nineties, replacing standard jobs. Between 1995 and 1997 as many as 97% of the newly employed were hired on atypical contracts, while between 1997 and 2000 their numbers exceeded 82% (Ibid.). As pointed out by various scholars (Gallino 2001 2007), this data does not permit us to claim that atypical work has contributed to a growth in employment tout court. Rather, the general “atypicalization” of entry jobs tended to increase the gap between insiders and outsiders. Several studies have highlighted the low degree of permeation between the typical and atypical labor market (ISFOL 1998). The CENSIS survey showed that there was very little communication between “old” standard and “new” atypical jobs: those entering the labor market on flexible contracts were very likely to remain in this situation for quite some time (CENSIS 2000). An OECD study on the mobility of both men and women working part-time, full-time, or unemployed between 1994 and 1998 (OECD 2002) confirmed how difficult it was for atypical workers to find stable jobs. Looking at women hired through part-time contracts after one year, 50% were still in the same position, 32% had full-time jobs, and 18% were no longer active in the labor market. However, for men the percentages were noticeably different. Only 28% of them were still in the same situation, 55% had full-time jobs, and 17% were inactive.

5.1.3 THE WHITE PAPER AND THE BIAGI LAW (2003) The debate over reforming the labor market between the 1990s and the 2000s was marked by high profile murders, the first of Massimo D’Antona in 1999 and then of labor lawyer Marco Biagi in 2002. In the early aughts the “labor laws blood-stained” by terrorists (Romagnoli 2002) marked an intense political struggle between the Berlusconi government and the opposition over the reform of the labor market. The debate gained a highly moralistic tone because of the memory of Biagi’s murder. Biagi had been the primary drafter of the “Libro bianco sul mercato del lavoro” (White paper on the labor market, 2001), which became the basis for Law no. 30 and the related Legislative Decree no. 276 (2003). The White Paper took flexibility as its guiding principle for creating new jobs, citing EU policies. It made central the “modernization of labor organization and relations” (Ibid., xii), alongside the elimination of obstacles that were

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thought to complicate or hamper the implementation of flexible contracts. The White Paper favored fixed-term and part-time contracts because they “guaranteed an active society,” and called for the reform of temp work to facilitate easier outsourcing for companies. The White Paper also envisioned the introduction of new types of contracts, thought to be capable of “cleansing” the labor market of improper labor relationships like Co.Co.Co. According to the White Paper, the growth in employment rates during the late nineties had benefited from greater job flexibility. The text referred to “the link between increased margins of flexibility and increases in employment” (Ibid., 3). According to the drafters, this was demonstrated by the prevalence of “atypical” work among newly hired workers. They argued that the growth in flexibility had not produced precarity as it had brought lower rates of involuntary part-time work in Italy and positive trends in permanent employment. On the negative side, it was noted that there was a discrepancy between incoming flexibility, mostly concerning young people, and outward rigidity, of which adult workers were the beneficiaries in most cases. To increase outgoing flexibility, the drafters recommended to revaluate and reduce the level of protection attached to standard employee status, and the creation of a multi-level system of protection for workers by drawing up a new “Statuto dei lavori” (“Statute of Works”). The government’s aim was to promote the “overall modernization of Italy’s employment system,” to go beyond the traditional regulatory approach and establish a “hard core” of fundamental rights, shared by standard and atypical workers alike (Ibid., 38–39). The White Paper was followed by the first draft of a law in November 2001,13 which suggested, among other things, modifying the regulations on firings, dictated until then by Article 18 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights. In 2002, the clash over the labor market reform reached its climax with the murder of Marco Biagi on March 19 by the terrorist group “Red Brigades.”14 Torchlight funeral processions were held all over Italy by the CGIL, CISL, and UIL jointly, however, divisions grew between the three trade union confederations.15 On March 23, 2002, the CGIL held an enormous rally in Rome of around 1 million people, according to the organizers.16 Neither the CISL nor the UIL took part in this event, now considered one of the Italy’s greatest demonstrations of the second Senate of the Republic, XIV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the president of the Cabinet, Silvio Berlusconi, jointly with the Minister for Labor and Social Policies, Roberto Maroni, with the Minister for Public Administration, Franco Frattini, the Minister for Community Policies, Rocco Buttiglione and the Minister for Regional Affairs, Enrico La Loggia, “Delega al Governo in materia di occupazione e mercato del lavoro,” presented on November 15, 2001. 14 “Torna il terrorismo: ucciso Marco Biagi,” la Repubblica.it, March 19, 2002. 15 “La CISL: “Per il sindacato è un brutto giorno,” la Repubblica, March 23, 2002. 16 Enrico Galantini, “Un milione di buone ragioni,” Rassegna sindacale, March 26, 2002. 13

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post-war period. The rally was followed by two general strikes, the first on April 16, 2002, the second on October 16 of the same year, also organized single handedly by the CGIL.18 In the summer of 2002, the split among the trade unions came to a head. On July 5, the government, the employers’ associations, the CISL, and the UIL19 all signed the inter-confederal agreement “Patto per l’Italia” (Pact for Italy), without the CGIL, which had abandoned the negotiations.20 The agreement dealt with macro-issues like income policy, welfare reform, investment and employment in southern Italy, and tax reform, underlining that 17

The competitiveness of the country’s entire system is achieved through the removal of obstacles against new employment, thus directing investments towards the innovation of products, the training of human capital, and the growth of enterprises.21

Among the pillars of the “welfare to work” model proposed by the government were the reform of employment services, with an emphasis on private agencies; the reform of the education system, aimed at creating an “education for employability” model; and the reform of active labor market measures. This last point entailed redefining and homogenizing the social safety net and controlling the “involuntary unemployment” situation periodically. Finally, the agreement called for a broad bill reforming the existing “Statuto dei Lavori” (Statute of Works) and a commission to draft it. Among the Pact’s most controversial proposals was “suspending” Article 18 for a three-year period in companies with fewer than15 employees22 that were hiring new workers.23 The Pact signed at Palazzo Chigi on Friday, July 5 is a truly bad, low-profile agreement. A neo-corporate pact totally in favor of the government, an agreement without qualities which does not help the country’s development and reduces workers’ rights. It sabotages article 18 which all the unions called upon Italian workers to defend and fight for on several occasions, up until the general strike on April 16.24 Andrea Di Nicola, “L’invasione colorata di piazza, ‘Mai così tanti,’” la Repubblica.it, March 23, 2002. 18 “La CISL: “Per il sindacato questo è un brutto giorno,” la Repubblica, March 23, 2002. 19 Ibid. 20 “‘Patto Italia’ raggiunto l’accordo sul lavoro,” Corriere della sera, July 5, 2002. 21 “Patto per l’Italia, contratto per il lavoro, intesa per a competitività e l’inclusione sociale,” July 5, 2002. 22 According to Law no. 300 of 1970, Article 18 was not applicable to companies with fewer than 15 employess. 23 “Patto per l’Italia, contratto per il lavoro, intesa per la competitività e l’inclusione sociale,” July 5, 2002. 24 Guglielmo Epifani, “Un accordo pessimo e di basso profilo,” Rassegna sindacale, July 16, 2002. 17

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These were the words of Guglielmo Epifani, future secretary general of the CGIL, as he began a new mobilization campaign against the proposed changes to article 18 and in favor of two other bills advanced at the grassroots level. The CGIL’s bills were aimed at increasing workers’ rights “starting from those who today enjoy fewer rights, that is, coordinated and continuous collaborators and those who work for firms with under 15 employees” (Ibid.). “Two yeses and two noes” was the CGIL’s slogan as they attempted to get five million signatures on a petition in July 2002.25 On March 10, 2003, 5,122,000 signatures were delivered to the Speaker of the Senate Marcello Pera and the Speaker of the Chamber Pierferdinando Casini. According to the daily newspaper la Repubblica, this was a record, “no one has ever succeeded before now,” the newspaper stated emphatically.26 In February 2003, the government proposed a new law (no. 30)27 that revised the regulations on employment services and tempwork (art. 1), reorganized training contracts and internships (art. 2), reformed part-time employment (art 3), introduced new flexible forms of work and revised existing ones (art. 4), established the “certification of labor relations” (art. 5), and attempted to rationalize labor inspections and social security (art. 8). The subsequent implementation decree (no. 276) of September 2003 sanctioned the reform and an increase in the forms of non-stable labor relations, like jobs on call, job sharing, and accessory work. Jobs on call were situations in which a worker could do extra work on top of their normal schedule in exchange for an indemnity. Job sharing meant two workers performing a single job and sharing its relative duties. Accessory work, reserved for only certain categories of workers, entailed occasional work, and was paid in vouchers at a rate of 7.5 euros per hour (5.8 after deductions) for an annual gross maximum of 3,000 euros.28 The liberalization of this type of work, and its massive growth shortly after, became the focal point of mass protests in the years of the Great Recession. These reforms also changed the regulations for apprenticeships, job placement, part-time, and coordinated and continued collaboration contracts. Collaboration contracts, defined by Law no. 30 of 2003 as “project work,” had to be in projects, programs, or phases of a commission, while casual collaboration, distinct from the former category, could not exceed 30 working days and 5,000 euros per annum, per client. The regulation of part-time work, considered Giuseppe Casadio, “Due sì e due no per i diritti del lavoro,” Rassegna sindacale, July 9, 2002. Riccardo De Gennaro, “Refendum CGIL 5 milioni di firme,” la Repubblica, March 11, 2003. 27 Law no. 30, “Delega al Governo in materia di occupazione e mercato del lavoro,” approved on February 13, 2003 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no.47, February 26, 2003. 28 Among the beneficiaries were people who had been unemployed for over a year, non-EU workers out of employment for over six months, pensioners, housewives, students, the disabled, and guests of recovery facilities. Among the activities allowed were private lessons, cleaning, maintenance, emergency work, and small domestic jobs. 25 26

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excessively rigid by the reformers, was liberalized: collective agreements (national, territorial, and corporate) and even individual contracts no longer required29 the consent of the individual worker to do additional work. This way, workers had to adapt to variations in work schedules (flexible clauses) and duration (elastic clauses) with only two days’ notice.30 This led to negative consequences for the workforce, especially for female workers, who comprised the majority of part-time workers. Law no. 30 also regulated outsourcing by abolishing the 1960 ban on it and overriding the 1997 law that had made temp work an exception to the ban. Outsourcing31 (including staff leasing, sub-contracting, company-branch transfers, etc.) were seen as a normal element of production organization and formally regulated, overturning the legislation from the sixties, which had already been eroded during the eighties and nineties. Employers could use workers employed by temp agencies by stipulating staff-leasing agreements, could use workers employed in a tender-contract project, could send their own workers temporarily to another company, and transfer them to different branches of the company. Such transfers were made more flexible as a company branch was no longer required to be independent in order to be outsourced. The so-called 2003 “Biagi Law” assumed a periodizing character in the analyses of the process of precarization of the labor market, as emerged from the analysis of the press of the aughties (Basile 2009; Altieri 2009). The center-left pointed to the discontinuity between the reforms envisaged by the Lisbon strategy, already put into practice under the first Prodi government (1996–1998), and the application of the neoliberal principles contained in the 2003 labor law (Gottardi, Damiano and Bortone 2004; Magistratura Democratica 2004). In this view, precarity was a structural feature of the government’s newfound tools for creating jobs. The decomposition of companies and the massive opening up to temp work agencies for reconciling labor supply and demand generated downward competition among sub-contractors, making temporary workers more precarious.

Extra work beyond that agreed on but less than that of the normal schedule stipulated by collective contract. 30 Law no. 30, “Delega al Governo in materia di occupazione,” published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 47, February 26, 2003. 31 Ibid. 29

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5.1.4 THE INQUIRY INTO PRECARIAT (2006) AND THE MISSED REFORM OF THE PRODI GOVERNMENT Precarity oppresses the lives of so many people, it does not allow them to plan for life. It contrasts with article 1 of our Constitution, according to which “Italy is a Republic founded on work,” but also with article 36, which recites that “remuneration must guarantee a free and dignified existence.” Those who are precarious are constantly blackmailed by their employers, they are perpetually insecure. Prime Minister Berlusconi himself, when he says, “better precarious than unemployed,” draws the profile of a worker who is only a variable within a firm, a subject who earns a wage and nothing else. On the contrary, we need to recover the concept of “redemption of work”: we have the right to work, of course, but not under any condition. Work cannot be bestowed as a favor by the firm, the need to work cannot be a pretext for being mortified and humiliated.32

During the second Prodi Government (May 17, 2006–May 8, 2008), Parliament paid significant attention to the problem of precarious work, as we can see from the various bills that dealt with labor precarity in one way or another. The parties most active on this front were the ones in government at the time, primarily the Democratic Left, the Communist Refoundation Party, and the Green parties. Despite this considerable interest in Parliament towards the issue of precarious work, no significant reform was passed during the second Prodi Government, as the legislature closed early. Proposals to set up inquiry committees to investigate the phenomenon, examined in this chapter, were also scrapped. In Italy during the mid-aughts precarious work was undoubtedly perceived as an emergency issue, at least by Italian politicians, but no coordinated way of tackling the issue could be agreed upon by the coalition government. The most immediate result is the increase in unemployment, which is becoming more and more structural, expanding the ranks of the precarians, the marginal, the marginalized, hidden unemployment, and the unofficially unemployed, thus “precarizing” the general quality of life.33

Between the beginning of the fifteenth legislature (April 28, 2006) and Prodi’s second inauguration (May 17), the bill “Istituzione del reddito sociale per il sostegno contro la disoccupazione e la precarietà del lavoro” (Establishment of a social income to support unemployment and labor precarity) was submitted to Parliament as a popular initiative. The bill was premised on a linkage between Stefano Rodotà, “Aboliamo la precarietà,” Il Manifesto, January 17, 2006. Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the deputy Pier Paolo Cento, “Istituzione del reddito sociale per il sostegno contro la disoccupazione e la precarietà del lavoro,” announced on May 3, 2006.

32 33

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social precarization and the globalization and financialization of the economy. Formulated with the help of the Center for Economic-Social Transformation (CESTES), it was supported by social movements and grassroots trade unionism. It had begun as a petition with 63,000 signatures in December 1999. The bill proposed a minimum social income of 8,000 euros a year for those who earned less than 5,000 euros annually34 and forms of indirect and deferred income (free access to basic services, a 50% discount on utilities, and sustainable rent for public housing). To finance the measure, a “labor tax” was to cover the first year (2.5% on corporate income), and for the following years structural measures were proposed: 30% taxation of public and equity securities, taxation of capital transfers abroad, and a tax on forms of technological innovation adopted by companies that caused a decrease in employment. The bill was returned to the Labor Commission, where it hit a dead end and was never discussed. We are now dealing with a true “precarity emergency.” A “labor precarity”—a multiplication of forms of contract which make the pathway of the individual insecure—and a “job precarity” meaning the fragmentation of the production cycle and of the firm (outsourcing, contracts, third-party entrustment, etc.). […] It is precisely in the pervasiveness of precarity—as a condition that does not spare anyone—that we find the most fundamental aspect of what the labor market of the last few years has gone through […].35

Shortly after the failure of that bill in May of 2006, the deputies of the Democratic Left (DS) submitted another bill entitled “Nuove norme per il mercato del lavoro” (New Labor Market Regulations). A critical reflection on the issue of precarity played a central role in the elaboration of the new bill. It was inspired by proposals advanced by the Comitato “Precariare Stanca” (Committee for the Precarized Weary), which had conducted a signature campaign for a petition launched by Stefano Rodotà demanding the abolition of the Biagi Law.36 That petition had emphasized the importance of eliminating precarity for the sake of Italy’s socio-economic future: the fight against precarity needed to be “the first course of action of the EU government and its parliamentarians.” The bill used the term “economically dependent worker” to indicate not only permanent and fixed-term workers but also all those engaged in “providing material and intellectual work to companies.” It reiterated the exceptional nature of the fixed-term contract and defined the cases in which it might be applied, with the And belonged to families whose income did not exceed €25,000 gross for 2 people, €30,000 gross for 3. 35 Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the deputy Gloria Buffo, “Nuove norme per il mercato del lavoro,” announced on May 4, 2006. 36 Rodotà, “Aboliamo la precarietà.” 34

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intent of ensuring employers were held responsible in the event of changes to the organization of labor due to sub-contracting. The bill also proposed rules for the stabilization of economically dependent workers hired by state public and central administrations (including Co.Co.Co.).37 Like the previous bill, it too was referred to the Labor Commission and never went further. The new capitalist organization of labor is increasingly characterized by an explosion of precarity, flexibility, and deregulation in forms never experienced by employees. For them, distress at work increases, along with the fear of losing their jobs and no longer having a social life, so much so as to dedicate all of it to work. It is the whole of social life that is undergoing this process of precarization. Indeed, flexibility does not aim at increasing employment, but at imposing upon the workforce acceptance of lower real wages and worse working conditions […].38

The next month, a group of deputies from the Communist Refoundation Party39 submitted a bill to stabilize workers employed in public administration. The bill criticized labor flexibility as the basis of the current system because of its inability to increase employment and the negative material and social consequences it had generated. According to the bill’s authors, this “amnesty for the precarious” in public administration was a potential starting point from which to begin reducing job precarity in Italy generally and overturn the legislation that had brought it about. This proposal, too, was sent back to the Labor Commission and ground to a halt there. Though these proposals were stopped, the 2007 national budget, drawn up in December 2006, contained a paragraph on the “stabilization of precarians working in public administration.” This put forward a fund for the permanent employment of staff currently on “precarious” contracts in public administration (like researchers, technologists, technicians, etc.), which entailed a massive plan for hiring university researchers allocating 7.5 million euros for 2007 and 30 million for 2008 to carry out this plan.40 The stabilization criteria were Ibid. Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill submitted by deputy Francesco Saverio Caruso, “Disposizioni per la stabilizzazione, attraverso la stipula di contratti a tempo indeterminato, dei lavoratori operanti nelle pubbliche amministrazioni con contratti di lavoro atipici, assegni di ricerca o similari, impegnati in lavori socialmente utili o dipendenti delle ditte e cooperative appaltatrici dei servizi pubblici,” announced on June 27, 2006. 39 Ibid. 40 Law no. 296, “Disposizioni per la formazione del bilancio annuale e pluriennale dello Stato (legge finanziaria 2007),” approved on December 27, 2006, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 299, December 27, 2006, art. 1, part 3, paragraph 518, “stabilization of non-permanent staff in the public administration for the year 2008,” and the following. The stabilization also included the police and the National Fire Brigade. 37 38

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differentiated according to categories of workers. For instance, employees in public administration had to have both worked three years (even non-continuous) prior to the approval of the measure and met some other selective criteria in order to be eligible.41 The next year’s budget reiterated this provision and also included the stabilization of Co.Co.Co. This enlargement of the number of potential beneficiaries of the stabilization process required several subsequent clarifications concerning the extraordinary nature of the provision and the persons excluded. Competitive, public exams were established as the only criteria for access to stable jobs in the public administration. In July 2006, the Greens proposed setting up a “Parliamentary commission of inquiry into undeclared and precarious work in Italy,” believing that “an indepth understanding of precarious and undeclared work—especially as regards females—is also fundamental and respect of our commitments with Europe a priority.”42 The commission was meant to “shed light on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the precarious and undeclared work present in our country,”43 measuring the spread and severity of contractual irregularities, identifying useful measures to combat them, promoting the rights and dignity of workers, supporting the activities of regulatory bodies, and protecting and monitoring discrimination and inequality in the workplace. This proposal, too, foundered, but in October that same year the Labor Commission of the Chamber of Deputies did call for a fact-finding inquiry into the causes and forms of precarity in the workplace, “Indagine conoscitiva sulle cause e forme del precariato nel mondo del lavoro,” (Exploratory Inquiry on the causes and forms of precariat in the world of work) which was supported unanimously, including by the opposition parties. The investigation will, therefore, have to try to verify, while taking into account the characteristics of precarious workers with reference to sex, age, educational qualification, productive sector, job description and contractual framework, the dimension of the phenomenon of precarity, […] the extent to which the forms of flexible work are functional to the proper functioning of the labor market, and represents, therefore, only the first stage of entry into the labor market for new workers […]; to what extent flexible working relationships become penalizing for the workers involved, who remain entrapped in precarious work moving from one fixed-term (even “atypical”) job to another, without benefiting, even after many years of temporary employment, from the stabilization of the relationship […].44 Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the deputy Camillo Piazza, “Istituzione di una Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sul lavoro sommerso e sul lavoro precario in Italia,” announced on July 5, 2006. 42 Ibid. 43 Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Commissioni in sede legislativa,” XI Commissione, Session of October 18, 2006: 147–48. 44 ISTAT, “Indagine conoscitiva sulle cause e dimensioni del precariato nel mondo del lavoro. 41

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Understanding the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of precarity as well as the relationship between flexibility and precarity was one of the main goals of this new inquiry. The Labor Commission considered precarity a degeneration of flexibility, while they defined precarious employment as a “labor relationship lacking the stability ensured by a permanent employment relationship.” The Commission held various hearings on the matter over their 17 sessions between November 2006 and May 2007. Luigi Biggeri, president of ISTAT, emphasized the “statistical confusion” generated by the almost interchangeable use of the concepts atypicality, flexibility, and precarity and how, in the absence of a statistical definition of precarity, it was related to contractual flexibility under certain conditions (like poor social security coverage, lack of a social safety net, difficulty in moving towards stable contracts, fragmentation of career pathways, shortness of contracts, under-classification, and permanent situations of contractual uncertainty). While emphasizing the existence of a “historical kind of precarity” due to the freezing of permanent contracts and the constraints placed on turnover by a series of budgets cuts, the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI) highlighted the dimension of precarious labor in the country’s municipalities, resulting in the following figures: 19.60% in health care services, 16.36% in schools and universities, and 52% in local and regional governments. According to ARAN (Agency for bargaining representation of public administration), there were about 243,000 in public administration, and a further 246,000 non-permanent teachers (temporary workers) in the schools.45 Precarization has been “multiform” because it has affected the whole world of labor, not only this or that segment. To this end it has used different modalities and tools. Thus, the use (and abuse) of Co.Co.Co. and “atypical” labor relations instead of ordinary permanent employment relationships, has been directed mainly against young people, denying them a rewarding job, or at least, a satisfactory living and working condition.46

In December 2006, another bill aimed at fighting precarious work entitled “Norme per il superamento del lavoro precario” (Norms for overcoming precarious work) was presented to Parliament, and presented again, unaltered, in January 2007, with the support of over 70 parliamentarians on the radical left (Communist Refoundation Party, Green, Italian Communists). This bill was Audizione del presidente dell’Istituto nazionale di Statistica Luigi Biggeri,” XI Commissione, Chamber of Deputies, November 7, 2006. 45 ANCI, “Audizione su indagine conoscitiva sulle cause e le dimensioni del precariato nel mondo del lavoro—Documento Anci,” Chamber of Deputies, XI Commissione, February 15, 2007. 46 Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the deputy Augusto Rocchi, “Norme per il superamento del lavoro precario,” announced on December 13, 2006, and presented again on January 27, 2007.

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aimed at eliminating precarious labor, which the bill’s promoters believed had worsened the living and working conditions of the younger generation and adult workers as well. They made a radical critique of the Biagi Law, holding it responsible for having put people on a “path to precarization.” The declared goal of the bill was the reunification of the world of labor, overcoming distinctions between employees and Co.Co.Co., addressing the economic dependence of the worker, and extending the contractual and legislative protections for permanent employees to Co.Co.Co. workers. To achieve this goal, the bill proposed new regulations for fixed-term contracts, temp agency work, and outsourcing, along with a ban on entry, on-call, and job-sharing contracts. On the 60th anniversary of the Italian Constitution, the Presidencies of the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, the Republic, and the CNEL (National Council for Economics and Labor) agreed to form an inter-institutional inquiry called “Il lavoro che cambia” (Changing work). On September 26, 2007, a technical-scientific committee, chaired by Pierre Carniti and composed of 18 experts, was set up and met at the CNEL offices in Rome. They submitted the results of the survey to the Chamber of Deputies in February 2009. Among their reports, one dealt directly with temporary jobs and the transition from precarious to stable work (Dell’Aringa 2009). This report confirmed the widespread use of temporary jobs as a means of entry into the labor market and highlighted the difficulty of moving towards a “stable job,” particularly for older workers. The connection between undeclared work and precarious work was addressed in the report written by committee member Enrico Pugliese. The sociologist highlighted the coexistence of new and old forms of precarity existing in local labor markets, in particular that of southern and inner Italy (Pugliese 2009).

5.1.5 THE “STATUTE OF WORKS”: FROM THE IDEA TO THE BILL (1997–2006) Again, during the second Prodi government, deputies from Forza Italia submitted a new bill, which envisaged the drafting of a “statute of works,”47 the reorganization of the social safety net, income support measures and employment incentives, as well as the establishment of an agency for industrial relations. Chamber of Deputies, XV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by the deputy Sestino Giacomoni, “Delega al Governo per l’emanazione di un testo unico delle leggi relative alle tipologie contrattuali in materia di lavoro, denominato ‘Statuto dei lavori’, e per il riordino della disciplina in materia di ammortizzatori sociali e di incentivi per l’occupazione e per il collegamento tra salari e produttività, nonché istituzione dell’Agenzia per le relazioni industriali,” announced on May 3, 2007.

47

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Although not explicitly cited, the bill was no doubt inspired by a parliamentary report, Schema di legge delega (Outline of an enabling act), presented two years earlier by Michele Tiraboschi.48 The decade before the 2008 crisis had seen the drafting of another bill for the reform of labor legislation, called the “Statute of Works.” That bill was based on a previous draft drawn up by Marco Biagi and Michele Tiraboschi in 1997–98, which had been commissioned by the then Minister of Labor Tiziano Treu. For Biagi and Tiraboschi, the Statute of Works was to act as “an instrument aimed at guaranteeing greater legal certainty in matters of labor relations.”49 The certification of labor relations by administrative offices and the reform of the protections for both the self-employed and employees were the pillars of the proposal. Starting from the constitutional norm, a “core of fundamental rights, unavailable in administrative negotiations,” needed to be defined, including the protection of the worker as a person, which included the following: freedom of organization, association, and membership in a trade union; occupational healthcare and safety; the right to life-long training; anti-discriminatory rules; equal opportunities; protection of maternity rights; free access to information about the labor market and employment services; a minimum salary established by law; a minimum dismissal provision; and gradual protection in the event of the dissolution of the contract. These fundamental rights were to be accompanied by actions aimed at the reducing the “strong” protections enjoyed by conventional employees. During the second Berlusconi government (2001–2005) the proposal was further implemented and in 2004 a new commission was established to study the state of the labor market. Chaired by Michele Tiraboschi, the commission followed a course that had been laid out by the 2001 white book on the Italian labor market, Libro Bianco del Governo sul mercato del lavoro in Italia, and the 2002 Pact for Italy (Patto per l’Italia). The commission’s goal was “to complete ongoing reforms by defining a Statute of Works in the shape of a consolidated text of labor laws” (Statuto dei lavori 2005). The starting point was the “Biagi Drafts” (which had been prepared by Marco Biagi between 1997 and 2002) and the “Carta Amato-Treu” (Amato-Treu Paper),50 which was formerly a bill entitled “Carta dei diritti delle lavoratrici e de lavoratori” (Charter of male and female workers rights) put forward by Giuliano Amato and Tiziano Treu in 2002.51 The Study Commission for the Definition of a “Statute of Works,” final report by the chairman of the Commission on the “Statute of Work,” Professor Michele Tiraboschi, delivered to the Minister of Labor and Social Policies on March 19, 2005. 49 “Ipotesi di lavoro per la predisposizione di uno Statuto dei lavori,” care of Marco Biagi and Michele Tiraboschi at the behalf of the Minister for Labor, Tiziano Treu (1997–1998). 50 Study Commission for the Definition of a “Statute of Works,” final report, cit. 51 Senate of the Republic, XIV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill submitted by senators Giuliano Amato, Tiziano Treu et al., “Carta dei diritti delle lavoratrici e dei lavoratori,” presented on December 4, 2002. 48

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Amato-Treu Paper called for a corpus of “fundamental rights guaranteed to all economically dependent male and female workers […] and employees.”52 The commission operated between April and December 2004, organizing a total of nine meetings and three hearings with the social partners. In the commission’s final report, the positions of the main trade union confederations appeared as differentiated. The CGIL opposed the reshaping of workers’ protection, proposing a different set of reforms. The concept of “economically dependent employment relationship” was, nevertheless, considered by the CGIL as useful for extending the protections enjoyed by standard employees to atypical workers. Both the CISL and the UIL supported the idea of a statute of works, though the former emphasized the importance of collective bargaining and of reducing the so-called “collaborators” in order to prevent the abuses generated by Co.Co.Co. work, and the latter emphasized key concepts like “negotiated flexibility” and “participation” for labor reform. Even the employers’ associations were generally approving of the Statute of Works, assuming the proposed division between the so-called “citizenship rights” for workers and “safeguards” to be modulated according to the type of contract. They desired a flexible system of safeguards, which defined the kind of protections that should apply to each type of contract. The employers’ associations opposed the concept of “economically dependent work” and the extension of “protection without any form of modulation.”53 The Confesercenti (Retailers’ Association) maintained a similar position, believing that a convergence between employee and self-employed status was not desirable. Meanwhile, the Confartigianato (an artisans’ association) asked for a revision of the regulations of employee contracts by changing the existing Statute of Workers’ Rights. And the Casartigiani (a different artisans’ association) also insisted that the prior Statute was no longer adequate. The commission never managed to draw up “one or more hypotheses for a legislative framework” as it had planned due to a lack of time, too many commissioners, the disagreements they had over the state of industrial relations, and the overlap between the work of the commission and the implementation of Law no. 30 of 2003. However, the commission did produce some guidelines and ideas, like the outline for a Statute of Works by Lorenzo Zoppoli, Rosario Santucci, and Antonio Viscomi. They wanted “to provide workers with the universal safe Among the fundamental rights mentioned were: personal dignity and freedom of expression; intangibility of the personal sphere; protection against harassment and persecution; protection against discrimination; health and safety; guarantee of full and good employment; active labor policies; continuous, life-long education; protection against illegitimate suspensions of jobs; work-life balance; fair compensation for work; a fair pension; voluntary health-care payments; the right to receive notice; the right to join professional associations; and a prohibition against the establishment of labor relations for anti-union purposes. 53 Study Commission for the definition of a “Statute of Works,” final report, cit.: 26–31. 52

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guards necessary to achieve full individual and collective negotiating capacity.”54 They reaffirmed the normality of the permanent contract but provided ample opportunity to define special norms through collective bargaining, such as those governing training, fixed-term and part-time work, and project-based contracts. Michele Tiraboschi’s Schema di delega al Governo per la predisposizione di uno “Statuto dei lavori”55 (Government Enabling Act for the Preparation of a “Statute of Works”56) proposed harmonizing the Statute of Workers’ Rights and Law no. 30, starting from the distinction between fundamental rights/universal safeguards and flexible protection. “Genuine job stability,” as guaranteed by Article 18, was to be reconfirmed, along with additional social protection and a wider social safety net. When dealing with the Statute of Works, all these parties only mentioned the problem of job precarity marginally, often in relation to workers’ social exclusion. For the parties, precarity should not be confused with flexibility, considered a pillar of the new organization of labor and production. The thinking on this issue was aimed at creating a basic set of rights for all workers and a system of protection lower than that of full-time employees. Here, the ideas that went into the Statute aligned with the European Unions’ flexicurity-based employment strategies discussed earlier.

5.2 Precarious subjectivity and new forms of selforganization in the aughts 5.2.1 A “NEW” SOCIAL CLASS? FORMS, DIMENSIONS, AND DEFINITIONS OF PRECARIAT Guy Standing’s 2011 book The Precariat instigated an international debate on the relationship between precarity, the precariat, and class. Standing defined the precariat as “a class in the making,” endowing it with a potentially revolutionary character, hence the book’s subtitle “the new dangerous class,” a reference to the nineteenth-century concept of dangerous classes (Chevalier 1958). This definition has been critiqued by Marxist scholars, who argue that precarity is a constitutive condition of the entire working class itself ( Jonna and Foster 2016), as well as by postcolonial scholars, who argue that the concept is Eurocentric and not applicable to the Global South (Breman 2013; Munck 2013). Ibid.,19–24. Ibid., 20–24. 56 Ibid., 20–24. 54 55

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Yet as this book has shown, Standing was not the first scholar to come up with the concept of the precariat in Marxist studies of social classes. The Italian economist Paolo Sylos Labini in 1974, and later Valerio Evangelisti in 1982, had already brought the concept of precarious labor into class analysis. During the seventies, various Italian social movements and intellectuals had also already taken on the concept of precarity in their labor activism, discussed in chapter three. In Italian politics of the late nineties and early aughts, there were many studies on precarity, precariousness, and precarious work, which highlighted the emergence of a growing group of workers at the crossroads between different forms of work, without the protection provided to standard employees. The development of the so-called “second generation of self-employed,” conceptualized by Sergio Bologna and Andrea Fumagalli (1997), was rooted in the crisis of the Fordist system and the emergence of the so-called post-Fordist flexible accumulation paradigm. This new paradigm had led to the fragmentation and precarization of labor relations within the broader context of the crisis of employee status, and accelerated the growth of self-employed workers (Fumagalli 2006; 2015; 2017b). Various authors, following the launch of the Treu Package, addressed the issue of the lack of protection for the self-employed, something which was partially solved only in 2017 with the approval of the socalled “Statute of the Self-Employed,” after almost twenty years of political mobilization on this issue. The relationship between the local and the global within the process of precarization already emerged in analyses carried out in 1997. This topic was later taken up in a volume by Luciano Vasapollo and Joaquin Arriola, entitled L’uomo precario nel disordine globale (The precarious man in the global disorder, 2005). According to the authors, the transformations brought on by “neoliberal globalization,” both in the capitalist production mode and the international division of labor, had produced a combined process of precarization, flexibilization, and deregulation. This process had increased the number of precarious workers (often poor in addition) and fueled the proliferation of formally self-employed but substantially dependent forms of work. Vasapollo and Arriola examined the relationship between atypical work and poverty as one of the effects of the transition to the post-Fordist system, along with the individualization of labor relations and the shrinking of social security. Theories about precarity and the precariat, considered a category/social class, emerged within a context where there were no existing statistical or legal definitions of precarious work (Carmignani 2009). In the nineties and aughts, the need to calculate the number of precarious workers caused public and private research institutes to provide estimates using statistics on atypical work as a basis. The Institute of Economic Social Research (IRES) of the CGIL established a department for the study of atypical work at the end of the nineties, which produced

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reports periodically (Altieri and Oteri 2000; 2002; 2003). In the aughts, the reports published by the Mestre branch of the Association of Craftsmen and Small Businesses (CGIA) provided estimates of the size of the precariat which were particularly significant. In this period, studies that employed the concepts of precarious work and precarity to investigate the spread of non-standard labor multiplied. The national statistics office, ISTAT, did as well. They used both concepts in several of their annual reports from 1999–2014 (e.g., ISTAT 2014). The sociologist Aris Accornero, writing in the journal Il Mulino (2006a), questioned these statistics on precarians, claiming that the generalized precarization perceived by Italian workers was only partly endorsed by figures. According to Accornero, underneath this increased feeling of precarity among workers lay the notion of “endless precarity,” or the sensation that the younger generations’ possibility of getting a stable contract was half of what it used to be. The social security system was totally inadequate to meet the economic changes taking place (Accornero 2006b). For Accornero, precarization was not the natural consequence of flexibility but primarily the result of a lack of social security. Other scholars, like Emilio Reyneri and Luca Ricolfi, contested both the growth of precarization and the concept itself (Ricolfi 2006; Reyneri 2006). Also writing in Il Mulino, the politician Giuliano Cazzola countered Accornero, taking up the problem of “the numbers of precarious workers” and defending the Biagi Law (Cazzola 2006). According to Cazzola, a former CGIL trade unionist and executive at the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, the Biagi Law had not been responsible for deregulating the labor market. He pointed out how the problem of Co.Co.Co. work had not begun with the Berlusconi government’s labor reforms but much earlier. Precarity in the late nineties and the early aughts was largely associated with Co.Co.Co., but also to some extent with forms of work like fixed-term contracts and self-employment (partita iva [VAT number] and freelance workers). A 2006–2007 survey also made it clear that calculating the number of precarians in Italy was an extremely complex operation given the lack of common definitions, which were generally multifactorial and not easily turned into statistical indicators.57 In fact, Italian and European social movements contributed significantly to the definition of precarians and precarious jobs. The precarians working in the field of culture, the so-called “intellectual precariat,” have been called potential revolutionaries of this millennium (Neilson and Rossiter 2005; Standing 2011; Lorey 2015). In the early aughts, precarious knowledge workers became a symbol of exploitation under advanced capitalism, replacing the subjects that had ISTAT, “Indagine conoscitiva sulle cause e dimensioni del precariato nel mondo del lavoro, Audizione del presidente dell’Istituto nazionale di statistica Luigi Biggeri,” XI Commissione of the Chamber of Deputies, November 7, 2006.

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been traditionally exploited in earlier phases of capitalism, like Mario Tronti’s “mass worker” or Antonio Negri’s “social worker”58 (Bologna and Fumagalli 1997; Berardi 2001; 2017). Through such visions of precarity, either heroic or melancholic, precarians in the new millennium became a new social subject (Ciccarelli 2015; Foti 2004; 2017a), despite a lack of statistical and legal categories by which to define them.

5.2.2 FROM MAYDAY TO EURO MAYDAY: A EUROPEAN MOVEMENT AGAINST PRECARITY We are the post-socialist generation, the generation of the post-Cold-War era, of the end of vertical bureaucracy and of control over information. We are a global and European movement, which carries forward the democratic revolution which emerged from the world of sixty-eight and the struggles against neoliberal dystopia today at its height. We are eco-activists and media activists, we are the libertarians of the Net and the metroradicals of urban spaces, we are the transgender mutations of global feminism, we are the hackers of terrible reality. We are the agitators of precarity and the insurgents of the cognitariat. We are anarcho-syndicalists and post-socialists. We are all migrants in search of a better life. And we do not identify with you, gloomy and tetragon stratifications of political classes defeated already in the twentieth century. We do not recognize ourselves in the Italian left.59

When tracing the genealogy of movements against precarity, it is clear that Italy has played a leading role in Europe (Betti 2018b). The earliest groups of self-organized precarians began around the turn-of-the-millennium when the Milanese ChainWorkers Collective (1999) was founded, which was explicitly inspired by the anti-globalization movements in Seattle and Genoa around the same time (ChainCrew 2001). The role of the internet appears to have been central in the birth of the movement. The ChainWorkers Collective saw the webzine chainworkers.org as a strategic tool for mobilizing temporary workers in Italy (Choi and Mattoni 2010). The ChainWorkers targeted in particular those who worked in large-scale retail and food service, considering them to be the first truly global workers. Later they also organized precarians in the fashion industry through a provocative parade run by Serpica Naro, a brand created by precarians to oppose major fashion brands (Gherardi and Murgia 2015). On May 1, 2001, the ChainWorkers Collective, in collaboration with activists from the “Deposito Negri and Michael Hardt collaborated in writing the Empire-Multitude-Commonwealth trilogy (Hardt, Negri 2000; 2004; 2009). 59 “Manifesto Bio/Pop del Precariato Metroradicale,” (2004) in Tari, Vanni 2005.

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Bulk” community center and the Milanese branch of the Comitati Unitari di Base (Unitary Grassroots Committees, CUB), organized their first May Day Parade in Milan. About 5,000 people took part in the parade, filling the streets of Milan with floats, jugglers, and acrobats, starting a new form of protest which in later years would symbolize the political mobilization of precarious workers in Italy and abroad (Doerr and Mattoni 2014). Starting from the following year, the May Day Parade took the name of “1 Maggio del precariato sociale” (First of May of the Social Precariat) in order to distinguish itself from the traditional May Day celebrations promoted by the three trade union confederations (the CGIL, CISL, and UIL) and foreground their precarious subjectivity (Foti 2004; 2017b). The ChainWorkers and other collectives appropriated the concepts of “precariat” and “precarious” in their publications, and soon these labels spread to a broad network of activists organized on the internet (Doerr and Mattoni 2014). They campaigned to legitimize precarious workers as a political and social subject in the eyes of the public through cultural products and specific languages (Foti 2017b). In 2004, during the “Precog assembly” held in Trento, the figure of “San Precario” was conceived by the attendees as a “patron of male and female precarians,” “representing [their] intelligence.” 60 The “saint” was depicted on banners and was given his own web page. The saint was used during campaigns, becoming the pop icon of the precarious generation after his public consecration during the May Day parade of 2004, with 100,000 people in attendance. (Tari and Vanni 2005). In October 2004, activists from all over Europe drafted the Middlesex Declaration of Europe’s Precariat at the University of Middlesex,61 aimed at establishing a trans-European network of movements and collectives fighting against precarity. 2005 marked the precarious movement’s becoming a broadly European phenomenon through the organizing of the Euro MayDay Parade (May 1, 2005) in 19 European cities, 28 the following year (Foti 2017b). Between 2004 and 2006, the Euro Mayday Parade was broadcast live, thus providing an account of the parallel demonstrations occurring in the various European countries. The cities of the new millennium became the privileged places of the action of the precarious movement. This was related to new theories connecting the analysis of labor to the processes of precarization and marginalization of the urban population (Petrillo and Paone 2012; Gli insubordinati 2002). The creation of the EuroMayDay network, comprising a transnational network of activists in all the main European and Western countries, contributed significantly to the identification and acknowledgement of precarious workers as new See the website: http://kit.sanprecario.info. See the website: https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/10/300042.html.

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social subjects, even before Guy Standing presented his theory of the precariat in 2011. The network produced a significant number of reflections on precariousness in online publications, pamphlets, multimedia resources, surveys, and self-surveys conducted by precarious workers themselves. Scholars like Alice Mattoni and Annalisa Murgia (Mattoni 2012; Zambelli, Murgia and Teli 2013) highlighted how media practices and activism had created opportunities for exchanging and sharing data at the national and international level. This process was supported by an intense commitment to the translation of writing on precarity into various European languages in online journals and on websites. One of the most interesting publications was the multi-lingual DVD Precarity. Some special issues of magazines like Mute and Fibreculture Journal62 were also very significant, and in Italy, the publication series Quaderni di San Precario was particularly important.63 There was even a board game called, fittingly, Precariopoli.64 Studies on the precarious movement (Mattoni 2015; Della Porta 2015; Murgia, Armano and Bove 2016) have highlighted the variety of people organized in Italy during the early aughts around the San Precario Network. That network also gave rise to physical places like the Punti San Precario (San Precario Points), where people could go to receive legal and political assistance or to discuss, plan, and engage in collective action. Among those who consulted the Points were the air hostesses of the Sea Group (serving the Milan airports of Malpensa and Linate). The principles of self-organization, self-protection, and mutual aid were at the core of the San Precario Network’s activities, implemented through protests and political rallies, as well as through demonstrative performances in the workplace (Murgia and Selmi 2012; 2014). The San Precario Network, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, developed, became more heterogeneous, and joined with other self-organized professional groups during the years of the Great Recession. Among those groups were the Network of Precarious Editors, who defined precarity as labor’s lowest common denominator, and the Precari Atesia Collective, named after a callcenter based in Rome where its members worked, and various others (Mattoni 2010; Murgia and Selmi 2012; 2014). During the crisis, the Chambers of the Self-employed and Precarious Labor (Camere del lavoro autonomo e precario) were founded (2013) with the goal of organizing and encouraging the self-organization of people as yet unorganized, including temporary and casual workers, interns and trainees, and unemployed and low-income partite iva (VAT-number holders). These new movements organized around precarity, blending methods from traditional associations and trade unionism, and took as the cornerstone Mute: http://www.metamute.org/; Fibreculture Journal: http://fibreculturejournal.org. Quaderni di San Precario, available at: https://quaderni.sanprecario.info. 64 Precariopoli: http://www.euromayday.org/milano/precariopoli.html. 62 63

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of their movement the acquisition of rights and welfare for those who had none (starting with the right to a basic income) and the promotion of new forms of solidarity and mutualism against the fragmentation and loneliness of unorganized workers.65 The European movement against precarity, of which the Italian branch was a fundamental and decisive element, was permeated and enriched by the thinking of groups who dealt with migrants, such as the French sans papier, and various feminist collectives, who worked on the nexus between gender and precarity, like the Spanish Precarias a la Deriva (Casas-Cortés 2014), as well as various other Italian groups.

5.2.3 PRECARITY THY NAME IS (ALSO) WOMEN: FEMINIST SUBJECTIVITIES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM The reasons for the low fertility rate that has long characterized our country are complex and multifarious. There is no doubt that in this, the quality of employment and the issue of precarity play a leading role, alongside the insufficient provision of services for the family (in particular nursery schools). A reading of the low fertility rate, and its association with low female employment rates, should induce us to question the difficulties that the young generations, particularly women, encounter during all stages of their transition into adult life, including the achievement of a stable job capable of ensuring their independence through work (Villa 2010, 356).

The concept of “flexibility with a human face,” capable of balancing life and work time, was introduced already in the eighties but it was only in the nineties that this very idea became questioned by sociological studies adopting a gender perspective to study the effects of atypical work (Altieri 2001; CENSIS 2000). Various studies highlighted the increasing feminization of atypical jobs over the course of the nineties and aughts, and how the flexibilization and feminization of labor were interwoven (Fontana 2002; Nannicini 2002; Morini 2010). The three most widespread forms of atypical work in Italy before 2002 (part-time, Co.Co.Co. work, and fixed-term work) had a decidedly higher quantitative and qualitative impact upon female workers. More and more women were engaged in non-standard forms of work, and generally remained in those jobs longer than men (Betti 2016). Levels of education, age, and geographical location significantly affected the way women slid into and remained in precarious employment, which was increasingly bound to poverty (Ruspini 2000).  On this, see http://www.clap-info.net/chi-siamo.

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Since the late nineties, a series of interviews and questionnaires investigated the experiences of women, tracking their needs and their anxieties regarding flexibility (Altieri 2001; Saraceno 2002; CENSIS 2000; Ferrari and Veglio 2006; Murgia 2010). Unlike the utopian image of flexibility that had been common in the eighties and nineties, by the 2000s it was becoming one of the most burdensome aspects of female employment. Rarely was the individual worker allowed to decide whether to work part-time or full-time, or to refuse overtime after the 2003 labor law. Flexibility coincided, more and more, with large-scale availability, which had been supported legislatively through the introduction of intermittent and oncall work. According to international scholarship, the involuntary part-time rate was an indication of forced flexibility and a slide into forms of precarity and it grew considerably during the period being considered here.  In the 2000s, Italian women’s associations organized around the problematic linkage they had noted between precarity and maternity, and their ideas were circulated internationally thanks to the presence of scholars who were grassroots Italian activists abroad. Many women’s groups and associations, including second and third-wave feminist groups and the Union of Italian Women (UDI), addressed the relationship between precarious work and self-determination in the private sphere (Tarantino and Dini 2014). It was precisely this focus on precarity that seemed to most characterize Italian feminism since the 2000s. For example, this was evident in a special issue of Feminist Review on “Italian feminism” (2007). In the issue, Laura Fantone underlined how, starting from the concept of precarity, the so-called “third wave” feminist movement had claimed an independent space, different from that of second-wave feminists in the seventies, who were still active and culturally influential in Italy at that time (Fantone 2007). Feminist Review included the perspectives of numerous female groups who had been actively working intellectually and politically on precarity, like Sexyshock, A/matrix, Sconvegno, and Prec@s (Fantone 2007; Scarmoncini 2015). Prec@s arose as a discussion list in the wake of the Fifth European Conference for feminist research (2003), which discussed the evolution of Women and Gender Studies in Italy and launched an inquiry “to investigate gender specificity within the ‘precognitariato’” (Fantone 2007). The feminist collective Sconvegno began in Milan in 2002, following a meeting entitled “Lo Sconvegno: What Kind of Feminist Subjectivity Today?” (Milan, May 4, 2002). The collective was organized on the suggestion of second-wave feminist Lea Melandri, but with the participation of feminists from both the second and third wave (Cirant 2003). Studying the transformation of work and daily life, the theme of precarity/flexibility became one of Sconvegno’s main political and intellectual themes and the basis of a number of in-depth studies. The “Sexyshock Project,” started by women from the Bologna area already active in self-organized groups, began after a demonstration on June 30, 2001,

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which saw about 3,000 women invade the streets of Bologna to defend public consultants and Law no. 194 on abortion. Within the Occupied Polyvalent Theater of Bologna (TPO), Sexishock was founded as “a political workshop open to women providing a public space for discussion and development” of issues of sexuality and more. In 2004 the group chose to open its own premises, Betty & Books, a shop selling sex toys, books, and various designer objects. The theme of precarious work, along with sex work and the contemporary collective imagination, was one of the distinguishing points of the activity of the group.66 The most influential group of Italian second-wave feminists, the so-called “feminism of difference,” addressed the topic of precarity within a broader discussion on the effects of neoliberalism. Here, the Women’s Bookshop in Milan played an important role, creating a “Work Group” in 1994 to “reflect on work from the point of view of women” and listen to “women’s working experiences within the context of the structural transformations of labor and the economy.”67 In 2005, the publication series Quaderni di Via Dogana (Notebooks of Dogana Street) hosted the first issue of the New Labor Series, edited by the labor group (Parole che le donne usano 2005). The Second Notebook (Tre donne e due uomini 2006) focused on the feminization of labor and post-Fordism, in which the issue of women’s work flexibility/precarity did emerge clearly. The “double yes” to work and motherhood, was discussed in the third issue (Lavoro e maternità il doppio si 2008), which addressed the topic of work-time organization, emphasizing that women of the twenty-first century should not be obliged to choose between motherhood and work. Since 2008, the magazine has hosted a supplement edited by the Women’s Bookshop Work Group called “Pausa lavoro” (Work break). An account of the group’s writing was published in 2009 in the manifesto Immagina che il lavoro (Imagine that work) (Sottosopra 2009), in which the concept of precarity appeared, although it did not play a central role. The UDI also focused on the topic of precarity, an issue the association had been dealing with since the sixties. On March 8, 2006, it launched the campaign “La precarità rende sterili” (Precarity make us sterile) whose slogan was “We want to be free to create lives, cohabitation, and democracy.”68 The campaign testified not only to the continuous commitment of the UDI to female job stability, but also to new developments in the concept inspired by both second-wave feminist thinking and new generations of women who were experiencing the consequences of job precarity directly. The campaign was the result of broader intellectual work on the link between precarity, self-determination, and mother Sexyshock: http://www.ecn.org/sexyshock. Information on the groups foundation can be found on the website of Libreria delle donne di Milano: http://www.libreriadelledonne.it/category/immaginacheillavoro. 68 ACUDI, “La precarietà rende sterili, vogliamo essere libere di creare vite, convivenza e democrazia,” Manifesto, March 8, 2006. 66 67

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hood, developed during the national conference “Generare oggi: tra precarietà e futuro” (Generating Today: Precarity and the Future) (Rome, November 19, 2005). The conference gave rise to the development of a political platform on the same subject (UDI 2005). In 2011, at the behest of various Milanese feminist groups, the “Agorà del lavoro” (Agorà of Labor) was founded as a place for meetings and discussions, open to men and women, with the goal of placing labor and the economy at the center of public debate, but heavily influenced by feminist thought. Labor as a concept needed to be reconceived, starting with rethinking the dichotomies of life and work, production and reproduction, money and recognition, independence and dependence, and individuality and relationships.69

5.3 Precarity between artistic-cultural portrayals and political-trade union reflections  5.3.1 THE CULTURE OF PRECARITY The precarian is a person who is in a subaltern position of a temporary nature, he is forced to pay for a job, a house, a meal. In my country, in recent years the term has often been associated with work, but today when we talk about precarity we mean a general condition of the individual from which he often thinks he shall be unable to escape (Mileschi 2015, 53).

Around the turn-of-the-millennium, precarians—the invisible workers of postindustrial metropolises—became an icon of contemporary Italian literature and cinema (Salmieri 2012). The political appropriation of precarity by intellectual precarians and anti-precarity social movements led to new art, literature, theater, and films that took labor and social precarity to be their raison d’etre (Contarini, Jansen, and Ricciardi 2015).  The Italy of the twenty-first century saw the flourishing of a true “culture of precarity,” fueled by aesthetic forms employed to formulate an alternative response to economic and existential precarity. The latter, according to some, was an antidote to the pervasive feeling of uncertainty (Contarini and Marsi 2015). Artists, writers, and directors—young and old—have produced narratives about new forms of labor and the widespread emergence of a fluid precariat ( Jansen 2014), contrasting it with the rigid “working class” of the Fordist era.  See the website https://agoradellavoro.wordpress.com/about.

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Numerous works have attracted the attention of both the public and critics. The list includes: Mi spezzo ma non m’impiego: Guida di viaggio per lavoratori flessibili by Andrea Bajani (2006), a half serious tourist guide set in a wonderful universe of flexibility populated by temp agencies; Aldo Nove’s Mi chiamo Roberta, ho 40 anni, guadagno 250 euro al mese (2006), fourteen real-life stories of precarians of the aughts (aged between 25 and 40); Generazione mille euro by coauthors Antonio Incorvaia and Alessandro Rimassa (2006), a novel born as a reality book that turned into a blog and a forum where reality has outstripped fiction; and Michela Murgia’s Il mondo deve sapere: Romanzo tragicomico di una telefonista precaria (2006), set in the world of call centers and told from the point of view of a precarious telephone operator, who was victim of mobbing and abuse. Within this artistic scene centered on precarity, the figure of the writerwitness stands out, particularly in theater on precarity, where actors are witnesses par excellence of the condition they portray (Salmieri 2012). Among one of the best performers of precarity is Ascanio Celestini, whose plays, like Fabbrica (2003) and Scemo di Guerra (2006), as well as his documentaries, like Parole sante (2007), and feature films, like La pecora nera (The Black Sheep, 2010), investigate precarious work from multiple perspectives. Celestini presents with extreme clarity the ultimate meaning of precarity in the labor market: “it does not depend on the nature of man. A tool to manage, at times, even to enslave workers (but not as workers, but as living human beings).” (Ibid.) Italian cinema, too, has contributed significantly to public perception of precarity in the aughts. The relevant movies ranged from films like Santa Maradona (dir. Marco Ponti, 2001), where precarity emerges subtly from the biographies of the characters who are in a state of eternal transition, to tragicomic films like Tutta la vita davanti (Your Whole Life Ahead of You, dir. Paolo Virzì, 2008) and Fuga dal call center (Escape from the Call Center, dir. Federico Rizzo, 2009), where precarity is grounded in the alienating and oppressive environment of the call center. The movies Generazione mille euro (Generation 1000 Euros, dir. Massimo Venier, 2009) and Lavoratori pronti a tutto (Workers—Pronti a tutto, dir. Lorenzo Vignolo, 2012), both film adaptations of novels, interrogate precarity and its aggravation in the years of the Great Recession. Precarious and unemployed characters, marginalized by a system that forces them to invent survival strategies barely within or outside of the law, stand out in the comedies in the wake of the 2008 crisis, like Figli delle stelle (Unlikely Revolutionaries, dir. Lucio Pellegrini, 2010); L’intrepido (Intrepido: A Lonely Hero, dir. Gianni Amelio, 2013); Scusate se esisto (Do You See Me? dir. Riccardo Milani, 2014); Smetto quando voglio (I Can Quit Whenever I Want, dir. Sydney Sibilia 2014); The Pills: Sempre meglio che lavorare (dir. Luca Vecchi, 2016); and Sono tornato (I’m Back, dir. Luca Miniero, 2018); as well as the comic science fiction Addio fottuti musi verdi (Adios Freakin’ Monsters from Venus, dir. Francesco Capalbo, 2017).

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The role of art that centers on precarity and precarious workers has become important in Italy because they are popular and have drawn the attention of politicians. The barely legal precarious working conditions experienced by workers, especially women and people in call centers, has become highly visible because of this art. Call centers were the focus of stabilization efforts by the Labor Minister Cesare Damiano between 2006 and 2007. Out of approximately 300,000 employed in the sector, over 20,000 were stabilized following the application of the “Damiano” instructions, according to the data provided by the CGIL.70 Even if this did not solve the problem of precarious work in call centers, it reveals at least that precarity has become recognized broadly as a social crisis.

5.3.2 FROM INVISIBLE TO SOCIAL EMERGENCY: THE PRECARIANS IN THE PUBLIC DEBATE Historical studies on the Italic civilization of the third millennium have taken an important step forward with the discovery of the diary of an unknown man who lived during the first decades of that era. A preliminary examination of its contents has led us to consider it the work of a “flexible man,” a vast category of the period. We already possess a considerable corpus of documents relating to the Cult of Flexibility drawn up at the time. […] In every sector of social, cultural, political, and even economic life, they seemed to place this cult before any other commitment or thought. In truth, researchers have failed, so far, to ascertain whether Flexibility was believed to be, or had to be believed to be, a spirit, substance, person, collective archetype, or an advertising logo. This diary of a man who apparently practiced Flexibility, out of conviction or obligation, allows us nonetheless to understand better the impact it had in daily life.71

In September 2006, an article in the Bolletino Adapt of the Marco Biagi Center for International and Comparative Studies, expressed fear about the existence of an “ideological crusade against precarity” (Una crociata ideologica contro il precariato) in the wake of the debate generated by the “Damiano” instructions on stabilization in call centers. The concept of precarity emerged late in public discourse and in the Italian political debate about flexibility, the magic word, which from the eighties on, had been central to economics, sociology, law, and politics. Rossella Basile (2009) emphasized in a study how during the decade prior to the 2008 global economic crisis, the public debate on flexibility/precarity had undergone a significant evolution closely related to labor CGIL, “Verso la Prima Conferenza Nazionale dei lavoratori dei call center in outsourcing,” February 23, 2008, http://www.cgilvicenza.it/comunicati/637/la-prima-conferenza-nazionale-dei-lavoratori-dei-call-center-in-outsourcing. 71 Luciano Gallino, “Diario Postumo di un flessibile,” la Repubblica, February 20, 2002. 70

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reforms and macro-economic trends. Looking at two of Italy’s main national daily newspapers, la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, it is clear that during this period there were multiple definitions of flexibility. In the period following the launch of the Treu Package (1998–2000), flexibility was represented by the Italian press as “necessary” and “useful” for the creation of new jobs, following the Anglo-American model (Basile 2009). The Italian press encouraged trade unions to accept the introduction of labor flexibility because “precarious work is better than no work” and because “the market will force you to be flexible.” The positive employment dynamics of the early aughts were seen by the press as a clear sign of the ability of atypical contracts to combat unemployment, despite numerous criticisms at the time, discussed earlier, which highlighted the absence of empirical proof of the relationship between increasing flexibility in the labor market and employment growth (Ibid.). As the twenty-first century dawned, flexibility began to be increasingly associated with the concept of “sustainability,” to avoid the risk of precarization. It was during the early aughts that the “double face” of flexibility emerged (Basile 2009). In the aftermath of the Biagi Law and the feared amendment of Article 18 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights, the press seemed ambivalent as the debate over flexibility became polarized between those who supported increasing flexibility and those who highlighted the costs of “bad, deregulated” flexibilization. Scholars like Luciano Gallino, Aris Accornero, and Maurizio Ferrera took part in the debate in the press, writing articles that had a significant impact on both public opinion and that of the trade unions. Exchanges between the different areas of discourse (theoretical, media, and political) on flexibility/precarity became visible. One article, “Diario Postumo di un flessibile” (The posthumous diary of a flexible man), from which the above excerpt is taken, was published in la Repubblica in February 2002,72 less than a month after a huge demonstration organized by the CGIL in defense of Article 18. The approval of Law no. 30 of 2003, the Biagi Law, exacerbated the polarization between those who supported and opposed flexibility. The press reported on the heated political and trade union debates that led the center-left and the CGIL to disagree with the reform. Precarity and the precariat appeared increasingly as synonyms for the various kinds of flexibility introduced by Law no. 30, as the journalist Eugenio Scalfari put it in la Repubblica (2003). Writing in Corriere della Sera, the political scientist Maurizio Ferrera criticized the incomplete reform of the social safety net, which should have associated increased flexibility with greater security, like the Scandinavian flexicurity model. 2003 marked a turning point in the public debate, while the years following the reform saw numerous contributions aimed at either magnifying its effects or highlighting its limitations. The Confindustria (an employers’ association), the Ibid.

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CGIL, CISL, and the UIL all took sides in either wanting to defend, repeal, or reform the Biagi Law, in a battle of opinions that saw much misuse and abuse of statistics. In the absence of a solid legal and statistical definition for precarious work, people used more or less arbitrary methods of measuring it that generated a “statistical confusion,” later noted by the president of ISTAT (Biggeri 2006). The second Prodi Government, which began in May 2006, sparked renewed debate on precarity in a changed political scene. The “precarity of work and life was seen increasingly as a genuine social emergency” by the press in the late aughts (Basile 2009), while data on the growth of fixed-term contracts no longer aroused the same optimism as it had a few years previously. “More protection and less precarity” and “restore dignity to work” were common slogans brandished in la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. Numerous voices were raised against “precarious work that is becoming permanent,” like by the sociologist Luciano Gallino, the jurist Pietro Ichino, the journalist Ilvo Diamanti, and even Pope Benedict XVII. The voices of the young precarians began to be reported by the press in surveys on what they were beginning to call the “flexible generation” or the “flexible race.”

5.3.3 REPRESENTING THE PRECARIANS: THE BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATYPICAL WORKERS’ TRADE UNIONS In this context, the union can play a double role, which implies, however, a profound transformation of the current structures. On the one hand, there is a need to defend models of guarantees and solidarity for the growing number of workers employed in the underqualified tertiary sector, the “non-laboring manual workers” as they have been called, who risk becoming the victims of deregulation. On the other hand, the challenge to build systems of protection is not limited to dependent employment alone (Chiesi 1990b, 10–11).

In the late nineties, concerned about the effects of the “new youth issue,” as precarity was considered at the time, trade unions began to make some interesting experiments regarding non-standard workers. The crisis of the employee status and the proliferation of “atypical” jobs, which lay outside of standard, full-time, permanent employment contracts, had already led to criticism of the relationship between new forms of work and trade union representation (Carrieri and Feltrin 2016). Antonio M. Chiesi (1990) explained the challenge that the trade unions faced due to the increasing fragmentation of labor and changed composition of the workforce. In the nineties and aughts, various scholars contributed to the debate on the critical issues of trade union action which, according to many observers, continued

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to focus mainly on standard workers, excluding atypical ones. Aris Accornero (1992), Mario Regini (1981 and 2003), Mimmo Carrieri (2012), Ida Regalia (2002), and Luciano Gallino (2012) were particularly important in this regard. In 1999, the sociologist Salvo Leonardi explained the crisis of social representation experienced by trade unions in the face of flexible work. According to him, differentiation and reconstruction were the two opposite sides to be integrated into trade unions’ future strategy. Trade union thinking of the period was increasingly open to such an integration. The national congress of the CGIL held in 1991 highlighted the “possibility of reconstructing a unitary vision and new forms of solidarity in a world of diversified labor” (CGIL 1993). Shortly afterwards, CGIL leader Bruno Trentin (1994) acknowledged the crisis of permanent employment contracts and the need to include atypical workers in collective bargaining as an integral part of trade union strategy: It is a matter, therefore, of deciding whether the protection of all these different types of contracts (overcoming all forms of “exorcism” or deliberate blindness) needs to become an integral part and priority of trade union commitment, first of all through national and local collective bargaining on the rules, the duration, the purpose of their salary, and regulatory parameters (Trentin 1994, 45–46).

It was only after the launch of Law no. 196 of 1997, the Treu Package, that the three largest trade-union confederations decided to create separate federations for atypical workers (Mattoni and Choi 2010). In 1998, the CGIL-NIDIL (New Labor Identities), the CISL-ALAI (Association of Atypical and Temporary workers), and the UIL-CPO (Employment Center) were founded to represent “non-standard” workers, not yet called precarians. Of the three federations, only the NIDIL still exists today in the same form; the CISL-ALAI merged with the CLAPS (Coordination of Autonomous Commercial and Service Workers) in 2009 to create the FELSA (Federation of Atypical Self-employed Workers). And the CPO changed its name to UILTEMP (Atypical Temporary Self-employed Workers). The federations of atypical workers were established thanks to “organizational bricolage” (Ballarino 2005), the grafting of new experiences on to old ones. The NIDIL stemmed from a Milan-based, self-organized group of collaborators and associate consultants, the CCA (Ibid.). Other groups like Tempi Moderni (Modern Times), an association of the unemployed and precarians of left youth, also joined the NIDIL, while the Unemployed Information Center of the CGIL had already set up various local Chambers of Labor (Colella 2015). This “organizational bricolage” was neither simple nor without conflict because of the complex relations between the above-mentioned groups and the

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trade union officials, on the one hand, and between the newborn NIDIL and the other union federations, on the other. The ALAI came out of the Catholic associations and CLAPS, bringing together about a dozen small unions of self-employed workers (taxi drivers, newsagents, street traders, etc.), while the UIL expanded its unemployed section, the CPO, enlarging it to include atypical workers (Ballarino 2005). These new trade union federations were created based on the premise that people should be represented based on the type of contract they had (Pirro and Accornero 2014). Since their creation in the aughts, the strategy of separating atypical workers from other workers has become the center of a serious debate within the federations themselves, as the perception of job precarity grew along with its spread into new sectors. The negative relationship between precarity and union membership, which worsened towards the end of the aughts, has been the frequent subject of studies in Italy and Europe generally (Keune 2011; 2015). Studies on the phenomenon in Europe have pointed to labor fragmentation, shorter contracts, and the isolatedness of atypical workers, as well workers’ fear of joining unions due to hostility and threats from employers, and the negative perceptions of the trade unions themselves, which were considered distant and incapable of protecting the interests of the precariat and the unemployed (Ballarino 2005). What should also be considered in this context are the difficulties unions have encountered in organizing meetings with atypical workers employed by different clients, as in the case of temp agency workers, as well as the lack of formalization of trade union rights, like with Co.Co.Co. workers. Furthermore, in the case of partita iva workers, the ambiguity of their status led them to a position between that of trade-unionism and potential entrepreneurial representation (Ibid.). Over the last fifteen years, trade unions and scholars have frequently pointed to the problem of integrating the interests of employees with those of atypical workers (Choi and Mattoni 2010). In a special issue of the journal Sociologia del lavoro (Sociology of Work) on atypical workers, the sociologist Gabriele Ballarino (2005) pointed out that their presence in the workplace was perceived by activists and officials as a symbol of the defeat of trade unionism itself. This, according to Ballarino, mirrored the attitude common among unions from the nineties onward that “removed” and “rejected” atypical work, choosing not to integrate the latter into trade union strategy. The difficulty experienced by traditional trade unions in representing non-standard workers was examined in the research project entitled Nuovi soggetti del lavoro e forme di rappresentanza,73 coordinated by Enrico Pugliese See the website: http://prin2009.blogspot.com/2011/10/bozza-di-verbale-della-prima-riunione-e.html#more.

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(2011). The project resulted in the book Rappresentare i non rappresentati (Representing the unrepresented) (Pirro and Pugliese 2015) and a special issue of the journal Sociologia del lavoro (Beccalli, Pugliese, and Mingione 2015). The researchers interviewed NIDIL officials and noted their self-criticism and change in perspective with respect to their earlier strategies towards atypical work, summed up very clearly by Claudio Treves in the following way: From 1998 to 2002, in the NIdiL there was a contrasting logic (between stable and unstable workers) that did not lead to much. The very same birth of the NIdiL itself assumed that the dimension of non-standard work was limited. These were the times of the “Treu Package” when it was thought that non-standard workers needed to be protected but that soon traditional forms of labor would return to prevail […] Today, we are already beyond this philosophy. (Quoted in Colella 2015, 55).

In the aughts, the Italian federations of atypical workers bargained at both the national and company level, with a particular interest in protecting temporary and fixed-term workers, as well fighting against improper atypical contracts, first and foremost, as well as Co.Co.Co. contracts. They also wanted to stabilize atypical workers, though they achieved mixed results in this regard (Ibid.). While bargaining proved to be a tool atypical workers could use, the strike, a traditional form of worker protest, presented a number of problems for them both because of the types of job they worked (often not regulated by a work schedule) and the different subjectivity of the workers. In 2001, the three trade union federations of atypical workers represented only 46,202 members, of whom 22,373 belonged to the NIDIL. Overall, they accounted for fewer than 1% of non-standard workers (Ballarino 2005). In 2014, their ranks had quadrupled with 73,413 in the NIDIL, about 70,000 in the UILTEMP, and about 44,000 in the CISL-FELSA (Colella 2015), but unionization among atypical workers remained low. Following both the ongoing debate in Italy and the global campaigns over precarity advanced by the FEM (European Metalworkers’ Federation, today INDUSTRIALL Europe),74 Italian trade unions also promoted specific action against precarity. On June 1, 2006, the FIOM-CGIL launched an ad hoc campaign against precarity, holding a conference entitled “Il valore della contrattazione contro la precarietà che invade i tempi di lavoro e di vita” (The Value of Bargaining against Precarity which Invades Work and Lifetime).75 On November 4, 2006, the metalworkers’ unions jointly held a national rally called “Stop FISM, “Comitato centrale della FISM. Azione globale contro il lavoro precario. Proposte delle organizzazioni affiliate,” 2007. 75 “Contro la precarietà per riavere un futuro,” PuntoFIOM, May 31, 2006. 74

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Precarity Now,” the idea for which had begun during a public assembly in Rome’s Brancaccio Theatre the previous summer. The main goals of the demonstration were: the abolishment of Law no. 30 of 2003, which was responsible, according to the metalworkers, for their increased precariousness; a new economic and social policy; and the “return to the normality of permanent employment.” Following the rally, the metalworkers’ union conducted an inquiry into the conditions of metalworkers in Italy, involving over 100,000 workers, of whom around 20,000 were women (Como 2008). Particular attention was paid to precarization and its impact on gender. About 10% of the workers who took part in the survey were defined as precarious. The percentage rose to 16% in the case of workers below the age of 35, while one in five female metalworkers turned out to be precarious. 76

76

“Stop precarietà ora,” PuntoFIOM, October 31, 2006.

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CHAPTER 6

THE NORMALIZATION OF PRECARITY DURING THE YEARS OF THE GLOBAL CRISIS

6.1 Precarity and global crisis: A necessary periodization

A

ccording to the principal economic observers, in 2018 the world economy showed its first signs of recovery since the 2008 crash. By 2018, standard employees in Italy numbered over 23 million and the employment rate was close to 58%, its level prior to the crisis (58.6% in 2008). In the same year, however, the unemployed reached 2.9 million, a growth of 44% since 2008, when they were only 1.6 million. In the decade after the crash, the unemployment rate rose from 6.7% to 11.2% and the potential workforce reached 6 million (ISTAT 2018). Although the employment rate and the working-age population were similar to that of 2008, the numbers of those seeking jobs were greater, while the quality of work was lower. In the decade since the outbreak of the first major economic crisis of the twenty-first century, which according to some has generated this century’s stagnation,1 numerous studies have tried to analyze the transformations that the crisis has produced everywhere (Andreotti, Benassi, and Kazepov 2018). A recent book by the British economic historian Adam Tooze (2018) has helped historicize and periodize the decade of the “first economic crisis of the global age,” tracing not only its causes but also exploring its socio-economic, political, and geopolitical consequences. The description of the 2008 economic crisis as the “Great Recession” is now an established feature of economics and social theory and is often related to the Great Depression of 1929 (Grusky, Western, and Wimer 2011; Harvey 2010). Numerous analyses have explored the similarities between these two great economic crises, while others have instead compared the 2008 crisis to the

1

Lawrence H. Summer, “La tesi della stagnazione secolare trova sempre più conferme,” Il Sole 24 Ore, February 18, 2016.

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stagflation crisis of the seventies (Kobrak and Wilkins 2013; Kocka and van der Linden, 2016). The relationship between economic crises and transformations in labor relations and working conditions has been addressed at various levels, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective (Masulli 2014). Already in 2004, the sociologist Luciano Gallino coined the concept of the “globalization of precarity” to address the spread of precarious forms of labor globally (Gallino 2004), which grew exponentially after 2008. Correspondingly, trade unions in Europe ran both national and international campaigns to fight precarious work in the aughts (Betti 2018b). Young people, and other social groups, have politically mobilized around the problem of job precarity. Various Europe-wide institutions have also taken initiative around the issue, like the European Parliament’s Resolution on Precarious Women Workers.2 Prior to that, the European Parliament had commissioned an investigation into precarious work in Europe (European Parliament 2016), which found that the concept of precarious work had become central after the 2008 crisis and had become frequently employed by European institutions when describing the transformations taking place within the EU labor market. During the years of the crisis, stable jobs were often replaced with precarious work, a tendency which had begun in the nineties and grew exponentially in the aughts (Alboni, Camillo, and Tassinari 2009). From 2008 to 2010, the share of fixed-term employment in the 27 EU member states dropped on average due to the failure to renew over 1.7 million contracts, revealing the extreme vulnerability of “non-standard” workers. During the brief recovery that took place in 2009 and 2010 in various countries including Italy, fixed-term contracts increased again (by 850,000). New jobs were almost exclusively appearing as unstable contracts. Part-time work, increasingly associated with precarious work due to its involuntary nature and low wages, grew between 2008 to 2010 both in Italy and the EU in general (European Commission 2012). This growth concealed the reduction of working time, which was particularly widespread in the crisis years and closely linked to companies’ desire to broaden their arbitrary use of power when hiring. In July 2011, a document issued by the European Economic and Social Committee3 showed that forms of precarious work were being used more and more often by companies to avoid conforming to collective bargaining agreements. This was primarily done through subcontracting, outsourcing, and false self-employment, none of which met the minimum standards established in See the European Parliament, Resolution of October 19, 2010 on Precarious Women Workers (no. 2010/2018). 3 European Economic and Social Committee, “Eu crisis exit strategies: more precarious or sustainable jobs,” opinion of European Economic and Social committee CCMI/079, July 13, 2011. 2

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collective bargaining agreements. The EESC document also pointed out how, from the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, the number of companies attempting to avoid collective bargaining agreements through these mechanisms had increased significantly, exacerbating the exploitation and precarization of workers. The gradual sliding towards precarious working conditions not only involved so-called outsiders but also insiders, namely workers already in the labor market with stable contracts before the crisis and not previously affected by precarization. The global economic crisis that began in 2008 brought both more precarity and a change in its perception. In 2015, the International Labor Organization pointed out how the economic crisis had increased job insecurity globally, trapping more and more workers in precarious jobs in the Global North and Global South (ILO 2015). Job precarity in the aughts was also accompanied by poverty, as the number of working poor, and inequality in general, increased. During the crisis, the European Commission (European Commission 2012) stressed that workers with temporary and part-time contracts were at the most risk of falling into poverty. The Commission considered temporary employment to be one of the direct causes of poverty. On average, workers with a fixed-term contract earned 14% less than permanent employees, especially in countries like Italy which had a high number of involuntary temporary jobs and few temporary jobs that turned into permanent jobs. The effects of the crisis in Italy were far-reaching, with an unprecedented expansion of inequality and poverty. In 2015, over 20% of Italy’s population was poor. That year, the highest level of absolute poverty since 2005 was reached, peaking at 4,598,000 people living under the poverty line (7.6% of the population), while those living in “relative” poverty numbered 8,307,000 (13.7% of the population). According to several studies, inequality and poverty were fueled by the growth of unemployment, which increased by 7% between 2007 and 2014, precarization, and a reduction in social spending (ISTAT 2015). Italian newspapers and blogs appeared with headlines like “Di precariato si muore, Suicida perché precario” (People die of precarity, Suicide because of being precarious) the day after the suicide of Michele, a Venetian boy who, in a farewell letter to his parents, denounced the living conditions of precarians in the years of the economic crisis.4 Italian contemporary fiction during the crisis was imbued with a sense of economic and existential precarity, continuing the dystopian tale of labor which had begun a few years earlier. The concept “La lettera di Michele che si è ucciso a trent’anni perché stanco del precariato e di una vita fatta di rifiuti,” Messaggero Veneto—Edizione Udine, February 7, 2017; “La lettera prima del suicidio. Michele, 30 anni: ‘Questa generazione si vendica del furto della felicità,’” Il fatto Quotidiano, February 7, 2017; “Di precariato si muore. Il suicidio di Michele e i commenti che infieriscono sulla generazione precaria,” RadioCittàFujiko, February 9, 2017.

4

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of “crisis,” applied to the so-called “thousand-euro generation,” has created a collective imaginary marked by ambivalent values and diverse narratives between the North and the South. Stories of working conditions and social exclusion, already told by Italian literature and cinema in the aughts, continued during the crisis. Precarity, unemployment, and loss blend together in films that often bring workers and employers together in a quest for salvation, like in l’Industriale (The Entrepreneur, dir. Giuliano Montaldo, 2011), or which turn the “privileged of yesterday” into today’s unemployed, as in Il capitale umano (Human capital, dir. PaoloVirzì, 2013). The global economic crisis, according to some, has also accelerated the transformation of labor law already begun by the European Commission’s 2006 green paper, which focused on the necessity to adapt workers to the needs of business. Some measures, discussed but not yet adopted during the early aughts, found fertile ground during the crisis, namely, the exemption from national collective labor agreements and the increasing of company agreements; the weakening of restrictions on dismissals; the raising of worker’s retirement age; and the expansion of the notional defined contributions pension scheme (Perulli 2015). The increasing flexibilization of the labor market and the reduction of public spending became the pillars of the austerity policy adopted by the EU and Italy to overcome the crisis. Critiques of flexibilization in the labor market, which had begun in the eighties, further developed in the aughts, particularly during the crisis. As the statistician Giorgio Tassinari stressed recently (2014), there is no empirical evidence of a positive correlation between the unemployment rate and the level of legal protection of work, which has been confirmed by various OECD studies in the aughts and 2010s. Other scholars have highlighted how government policies of the past 30 years have tended to reduce wages and increase flexibility, with the goal of making Italian industry more competitive as industrial production has drastically declined (Pizzuti 2015). Labor law reform aimed at eliminating “rigidity,” first and foremost, targeting Article 18 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights as the primary target. According to many, the Fornero Law (2012) and the Jobs Act (2014–15) marked the peak of flexibility policy and of labor market precarity due to changes in the rules governing temporary contracts (fixed-term work and temp agency work) and dismissals (Mariucci 2016b; Perulli 2016a; 2016 b; Romagnoli 2016). The Libro bianco per il Piano del lavoro 2013 (White paper for the labor plan, 2013), edited by economist Laura Pennacchi (2013), addressed the problem of the global economic crisis from a diachronic and synchronic point of view, highlighting the failure of neoliberal policies and the need to rethink a new development model placing “full and good employment” at its core. The 2013 labor plan, launched by the CGIL, referenced the labor plan of Giuseppe

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di Vittorio from the end of World War II, which aimed at fighting unemployment and extreme poverty. The framework of a “European New Deal” placed state intervention at its center, aiming to bring about a combined recovery of the economy and work, while remaining aware that the crisis had caused a true job catastrophe (Pennacchi 2013). The next section will cover some key points in the evolution of labor precarity during the decade of the global economic crisis, paying close attention to continuities and discontinuities in labor relations brought to light by public discourse, labor law, and forms of resistance. Some sectors (e.g., education and research), practices (e.g., illegal hiring), and issues (e.g., blank resignations) are examined here, among others, in an attempt to find the fil rouge with previous decades when they were topical.

6.1.1 NEW FRONTIERS OF PRECARITY AMID EXPLOITATION, UNEMPLOYMENT, AND UNPAID WORK In the years of the crisis, scholars studying precarity intertwined it with unemployment and unprecedented forms of exploitation and self-exploitation. Among these “free work,” examined by scholars like Emiliana Armano, Francesca Coin, Federico Chicchi, stands out (Coin 2017b; Armano et al. 2017; Chicchi 2012), as does studies of the gig economy, investigated in depth by Marta Fana (2017), Vincenzo Maccarone, Arianna Tassinari (2017), and others (Weiss 2016). The latter, though, is not taken into consideration in this volume. The debate over free work in Italy exploded between 2014 and 2015, when Marco Bascetta, editor of Manifestolibri, addressed the issue in Il manifesto, kickstarting the discussion on the so-called “political economy of promises.”5 The results of the ensuing debate, which involved several scholars and intellectuals who had already worked on precarity, like Giuseppe Bronzini, Roberto Ciccarelli, and Cristina Morini, were published in a book entitled L’economia politica della promessa: Contro il lavoro gratuito (The political economy of promises: Against free labor) (Bascetta 2015). This radical critique of the free labor model hit the headlines following the trade union agreement reached during Expo 2015. The agreement ratified that 18,500 unpaid volunteers would assist visitors, while only 800 temporary paid workers, including those with fixedterm contracts, apprenticeships, and internships, would be hired. The economist Andrea Fumagalli (2017a) emphasized the substantial differences existing between “voluntary work,” as regulated by the 1991 law, and the “free work Marco Bascetta, “L’economia politica della promessa,” Il Manifesto, October 22, 2014.

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phenomenon” which exploded in the aughts, showing how the latter constituted the arrival point of the “institutionalization” of precarity. Tracing the genealogy of the concept of free work, the magazine Sociologia del lavoro (Armano et al. 2017) recalled the dissolution of the standard employment model of the twentieth century, but also the anthropological change occurring in the organization and perception of work in late capitalism. The loss of the centrality of employee status was counterbalanced by the self-activation of individuals who were willing to structure their lives around the principle of “creativity” to the point of carrying out unpaid work. Many forms of free work, in particular among the so-called knowledge precarians, created a passionate attachment to work up to “putting life itself to work” (Armano et al. 2017). The case studies examined here show how the creation of transferable skills in order to become “employable” did not merely constitute a discursive stratagem favoring free work but was often seen as a life-long project by precarians themselves. The importance of non-monetary paybacks appeared central to precarians, often a priority, in the absence of pay. The promise of a stable job prompted precarians to take on unpaid work, as was the case for researchers in Italian universities (Ferri and Murgia 2017) or those who worked for free at Expo 2015 (Leonardi and Chertkovskaya 2017). The increase of unpaid labor for precarians, examined by Cristina Morini, fueled a sort of “blackmail of income,” which grew smaller and smaller as unpaid work spread (Morini 2017).  The sociologist Francesca Coin (2017b) pointed out why unpaid or free work may no longer be considered an obsolete category of the history of labor, but constitutes an important structural element of the current labor market, which has been accentuated by the 2008 crisis. According to Coin, this kind of employment has assumed new dimensions and characteristics, since precarity has become the norm and the specter of mass unemployment has led to continuous downward competition, thanks to increases in the speed and quantity of work. Unpaid work is increasingly a prerequisite for access to paid employment for freelancers, artists, publishers, authors, and editors, but also a way to avoid being expelled from the market (e.g., workers who carry out unpaid overtime) or ensure transition from education to employment (e.g., interns and trainees). The relationship between unpaid work, training, and precarity has been the subject of several publications in recent years, following the launch of the Italian dual learning system called the “School-work alternance.”6 The latter, made On July 13, 2015, the Italian government adopted a reform of the national education and training system called “La buona scuola” (The good school), emphasizing alternance between classroom work and periods of workplace training. The reform and operational guidelines provide definitions and rules for schoolwork alternance (alternanza scuola/lavoro). See: Cedefop, “Developments in vocational education and training policy in 2015–17 Italy,” 2018, https:// www.cedefop.europa.eu/files/italy_-_vet_policy_developments.pdf.

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mandatory in Italy by a law passed in 2015 called the “Buona scuola” (Good School), led to the proliferation of surveys regarding the conditions of trainees, interns, and student-workers (Cillo 2017a). The increase in interns was not unique to Italy or Europe. Rather, studies have shown internships have seen a global growth. In Italy, in 2015 the number of internships reached 1,330,000, an explosion which could indicate a lack of proper training measures for many of them (Cillo 2017b). Other studies have shown how the use of internships in large-scale retail and tourism has accentuated precarization and helped spread free or semi-free work, both in the public and the private sectors (Bernardini 2017; Cillo 2017c; Dorigatti, Gruning, and Fontani 2017). Not being considered true labor relationships, internships have caused a reduction of both other training schemes (e.g., work and training contracts and apprenticeships) and traditional jobs. During the crisis, the internship model was extended in Italy to any unemployed person over thirty-five to be hired as interns, usually in repetitive jobs lacking any training content. In 2009, the online magazine la Repubblica degli stagisti (The republic of interns) was founded. It took its cue from the provocative quip by Beppe Severgnini “Italy is a Republic based on internship,” and it aimed at investigating the internship issue in Italy in depth, while giving interns themselves a voice. In 2010, the editor of the magazine, Eleonora Voltolina, published the book la Repubblica degli stagisti: come non farsi sfruttare (The republic of interns: how not to be exploited), which became quite popular. She followed up with a second book, Se potessi avere mille euro al mese: l’Italia sottopagata (If I could have a thousand euros a month: Underpaid Italy, 2012). This explosion in the number of internships and free work during the years of the crisis led to the drafting of the Carta dei diritti dello stagista (Interns’ Charter Rights) and to a series of demonstrations against precarity. The founding of this magazine was followed by the CGIL’s guerrilla marketing campaign “Giovani non più disposti a tutto” (People No Longer Willing to Do Just Anything), the first campaign of that sort to be run by a union federation. During the years of the crisis, the CGIL had tried to organize precarians, who had previously been considered for a long time barely unionizable if not entirely so. Precarians were given specific spaces within the Labor Chambers.7 The aim of the campaign was to take advantage of the internet and social media to overturn the popular understanding of young Italians, often portrayed as unemployed or precarious because of laziness (Ibid.). In 2010, a fake employment agency, calling itself “Giovani disposti a tutto” (Youngsters willing to do anything) Luca De Zolt, “Giovani e sindacato: la campagna Giovani NON + disposti a tutto,” Rassegna Sindacale, no. 12, 2013, special issue, “Organizzare i non organizzati. Idee ed esperienze per il sindacato che verrà,”: 42–48.

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proposed to solve the unemployment problem by promoting workers’ full availability and spamming the internet with unacceptable job ads. These ads quickly resonated in the media and fostered collective action, inspired by the principle of “unavailability” to accept indecent job offers (Ibid.). This campaign matured during a time when young people, both precarians and jobless, were reacting to the lack of social security provisions. Late 2010 saw the political mobilization of researchers and students against the Gelmini Law, followed by a national demonstration on February 13, 2011, entitled “Se non ora quando?” (If not now, when?) organized by the related women’s movement. Various networks, associations, and groups of precarians, freelancers, and partita iva workers created a “network of networks,” namely the Committee “Il nostro tempo è adesso: La vita non aspetta” (Our time is now: Life does not wait), with the aim of holding a protest on April 9 that year. Thirty thousand people marched through the streets of Rome and tens of thousands more in other Italian cities. For some time, the Committee became an important political actor, making its voice heard in the press and through the media, with the aim of representing the vast, heterogeneous world of the precariat.8 In 2011, the CGIL undertook a new campaign, “Non più stage truffa” (No more bogus internships), together with university student organizations like the UDU (Unione degli Universitari) and the UDS (Unione degli studenti), as well as organized groups of secondary-school students. The campaign denounced the abuse of workers through unpaid and irregular internships, advocating for job-placement apprenticeships instead (Cillo 2017b). The Monti government passed a law in response to these protests (Cillo 2017b),9 which established a mandatory stipend for training and placement internships, the amount of which was to be established regionally. Among the political campaigns organized during the Renzi government (2014–2016), the one against school-work alternance appeared to be the most closely associated with the question of free work and precarity. Since its beginning in 2015, compulsory school-work alternance has been strongly contested by students, whose slogans like “sfruttati o bocciati” (“exploited or flunked”) testify to the potential exploitation and lack of training in the ways school-work alternance is being applied. Secondary-school students frequently took to the streets to demonstrate. On October 7, 2016, they held rallies in fifty cities from Milan to Palermo, forming a truly national student movement against school-work alternance. Demonstrations were held in seventy cities in October 2017, when Claudia Pratelli, “Giovani, precari e professionisti si coalizzano: l’esperienza del comitato ‘Il nostro tempo è adesso,’” Rassegna Sindacale, no. 12, 2013, special issue, “Organizzare i non organizzati. Idee ed esperienze per il sindacato che verrà,”: 48–53. 9 Law no. 92, “Disposizioni in materia di riforma del lavoro in una prospettiva di crescita,” approved on June 28, 2012 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 153, July 3, 2012. 8

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students wore overalls in protest against school-work alternance, and refused to work.10 In February 2017, a network of secondary-school students launched a national campaign with the slogan “Vogliamo diritti! In bilico tra studio e lavoro, oltre precarietà e sfruttamento” (We want rights! In the balance between study and work, beyond precarity and exploitation). The students were clearly aware of their increasing precarization.11 They presented to the Parliament a document on the improper use of school-work alternance based on 4,000 interviews with boys and girls in secondary-school. Only half of the students interviewed had a positive experience with school-work alternance, and 33% were strongly critical of it (Rete degli Studenti Medi 2017). Since 2015 the press has reported on a number of scandals relating to the injury, harassment, and improper use of students for unskilled labor, casting a shadow on school-work alternance’s public image. An agreement between the Ministry of Education and McDonald’s to use 10,000 unpaid student laborers nationwide in the fast food chain, which had a total paid workforce of only 20,000, led to strong criticism, including from trade unions like the CGIL.12 There are no estimates on the company’s hiring practices before and after the school-work alternance agreement, which is crucial for understanding whether or not the students were really being trained for future employment, or just being used to replace paid labor.

6.1.2 THE NORMALIZATION OF PRECARITY: THE PUBLIC DEBATE AND THE LABOR MARKET According to Fumagalli, during the years of the Great Recession Italy acted as Europe’s “laboratory” for normalizing precarious work as a replacement for stable employment (Fumagalli 2017a). “Meglio precari o disoccupati?” (“Better to be precarians or unemployed?”) asked the Rai Storie Vere TV program (2012–13), a question often echoed in the political debates of the 2010s. However, workers did not always answer positively to the above question. “Meglio disoccupati che precari” (Better unemployed than precarians) responded nineteen employees of the Tuscan Lime Italy company, who were no longer able to tolerate the cassa integrazione regime13 that required them to work only a few days a month, “as if on “Alternanza scuola-lavoro, studenti in sciopero: cortei in 70 città italiane. Tensioni a Milano e Palermo,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, October 13, 2017; Corrado Zuino, “‘No all’Alternanza’ scuolalavoro, gli studenti tornano in piazza,” la Repubblica, October 13, 2017. 11 Platform “Vogliamo diritti: in bilico tra studio e lavoro, oltre precarietà e sfruttamento,” http://www.retedeglistudenti.it/alternanza-scuola-lavoro. 12 Alex Corlazzoli, “Alternanza scuola-lavoro, accordo tra Miur e McDonald’s. CGIL: ‘Perso connotato didattico di questo aspetto formativo,’” Il Fatto Quotidiano, October 28, 2016. 13 Cassa integrazione guadagni is a wage guarantee fund for companies undergoing a business 10

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a job-call contract.” A feeling of precariousness, regardless of one’s contractual position, became widespread during the crisis even for permanent workers, who experienced a new kind of uncertainty caused by the instability of companies in crisis. In 2013, reports were that since 2008 redundancy had affected one million workers, an unemployment-rate leap of 12.8%, the worst since 1977.15 Employment precarity in the context of mass unemployment was presented more and more often as a lesser evil, if not an outright normal condition. According to various scholars, the concept of crisis has become a popular “tool of government” to legitimize austerity and economic tightening imposed in a situation lacking alternatives (Zappino 2014; Coin 2017b). The importance of political and trade union communication of/at work at the time of the Jobs Act was studied by Francesco Nespoli (2018), who emphasized how communication affects not only the perception of a job provision but also its implementation. In the years of the global crisis, new jobs appeared more and more temporary while those lost had often been stable. The crisis triggered new forms of precarization involving all age groups, even those not previously affected by precarity. More and more elderly workers who lost their jobs were forced back into work on precarious contracts, the only possible alternative for them to unemployment (ISTAT 2014; European commission 2012). Since Italy has no general income support system, the permanently unemployed are not included in mobility or redundancy plans and therefore do not receive any kind of unemployment benefits or job-seekers’ stipend. During the crisis, precarity no longer solely impacted people with atypical contracts. In a context where the risk of companies closing down was high because of market trends, the rate of job retention in companies decreased, while turnover increased. Researcher and activist Marta Fana published the book Non è lavoro, è sfruttamento (It’s not work, it’s exploitation) in 2017, which expertly argues that the deterioration of the quality of work is synonymous with exploitation and precarity. The book, which has become a best-seller, provides a detailed picture of the normalization of precarity during the crisis, highlighting the effects of the Jobs Act. The worsening of the quality of work and the increase in exploitation were clear in the statistical and economic reports she included, which showed decreasing wages and worsening legal and contractual conditions (Fana, Guarascio, and Cirillo 2015). 14

crisis, which usually have paid a special contribution. It can be considered an income support measure for employed people, according to which workers receive a monthly allowance by the state and are required to work less than the normal working hours (even 0 hours). 14 Carlo Bardini, “‘Meglio disoccupati che precari.’ La richiesta di 19 dipendenti Lime,” Il Tirreno—Edizione Pistoia, October 20, 2016. 15 Eugenio Occorsio, “I licenziati hanno superato il milione. L’Italia è il paese della disoccupazione,” la Repubblica, June 17, 2013.

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According to the Observatory of Labor Consultants (2018), in 2018 workers appeared to be more precarious and poorer than in 2008 due to the longterm effects of the crisis in the labor market. This despite the fact that permanent contracts had returned to their level prior to the 2008 crash, and both fixedterm contracts (up by 438,000) and part-time contracts (up by 1 million) had increased, along with the median age of the Italian workforce. While workers over the age of 54 increased by 1.8 million, workers between the ages of 25 and 34 decreased by 1.4 million. There was an 81% increase in the number of parttime adult workers aged between 45 and 64, of whom 63% were involuntary, indicating an overall deterioration in living conditions. In 2008, the Precarity Observatory (INPS 2018), set up in 2015 by the Italian National Insurance Agency (INPS), provided precise data on the new labor relationships. From 2015, the year when tax reliefs were applied by the Italian government, to 2017, permanent contracts decreased while fixed-term, seasonal, and apprenticeship contracts increased. Stabilization also decreased. During the years of the crisis, Italian male and female workers became increasingly hired and paid through vouchers, as demonstrated by Gianluca De Angelis and Marco Marrone in their book Voucherizzati (De Angelis and Marrone 2017). The dossier produced by INPS on the evolution of voucherbased work16 showed how the number of payments in vouchers had grown from 15 million in 2011 to 115 million in 2015. Overall, 1.4 million workers were paid by voucher in 2015, while there were only 25,000 such workers in 2008. The “continuous, rapid, widespread, territorial, and sector-based” growth in voucher work (INPS 2016) was fueled by the progressive liberalization of the applicable requirements, leading to an expansion to the number of clients using vouchers, the categories of workers hired and paid through vouchers, and of the means of acquiring and cashing the vouchers themselves. According to the INPS, the vouchers used to work at a second job were marginal and it was not possible to monitor vouchers to detect tax evasion by employers. In the opinion of many experts, the explosion of voucher jobs marked the culmination of precarization during the 2010s, because of how effectively it replaced more regulated forms of work. For example, numerous reports were made of the abuse of vouchers in agriculture.17 A political mobilization in favor of a national referendum to abolish voucher-based work was launched by the CGIL in 2017. Ultimately voucher-based work was abolished by a decree in March 2017, so the referendum was never held.18 Voucher-based work was introduced for the first time in 2003. Annamaria Capparelli, “FLAI E UILA in piazza contro lavoro nero e voucher,” Il Sole24 Ore, November 26, 2014. 18 Law no. 25, “Disposizioni urgenti per l’abrogazione delle disposizioni in materia di lavoro accessorio nonché per la modifica delle disposizioni sulla responsabilità solidale in materia di appalti,” approved on March 17, 2017 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 64, March 17, 2017. 16 17

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6.1.3 ITALY SEEN FROM ABROAD: PRECARITY AND EMIGRATION During the global economic crisis, a new wave of Italian emigration became more visible, one that was diverse and heterogeneous, and constituted a more complex phenomenon than the so-called “brain drain” that had frequently made headlines in the early aughts, and led to the introduction of a specific law to promote “brain re-entry” (2003). Despite the emphasis placed on the emigration of “brains” in 2014, only one third of Italian emigrants had a degree and it is unknown how many of them actually required it abroad. Some studies have underlined that outside of the country Italian graduates often end up performing ordinary, unskilled jobs (like salesperson, waiter, dishwasher, and call center employee) that do not require any degree, which testifies to the general difficulty of entering the market for qualified work in a foreign country (Gjergji 2015). This new wave of Italian emigration can be traced back to the late nineties (Pugliese 2018), but the onset of the global economic crisis produced an upsurge, caused by the growth of unemployment and underemployment as well as job loss for many precarious workers. This relationship between precarity and emigration appears to have been particularly significant in the 2010s, as demonstrated by recent academic studies and journalistic investigations into both the “brain drain” and the “hands drain” (Gjergji 2015). Enrico Pugliese (2018) defined Italy as a “migration crossroads,” because of the high degree of immigration, emigration, and internal migration. Labor and social issues such as unemployment, underemployment, inequality, and impoverishment are some of the main causes of emigration, revealing a close continuity with the past. The most common foreign destinations of contemporary Italian emigration are the same as they were in the twentieth century: Northern Europe (particularly the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and France), the Americas (particularly the United States, Argentina, and Brazil), and Australia. Though there are also new destinations like China, South Africa, Angola, and Mozambique. Italian emigrants include young and old alike; more women than in the past, although men still account for 57.4%. There were 82,000 Italian emigrants in 2013, an increase of 20% from the previous year. Those leaving the country were mainly between the ages of 20 and 45, largely from urban areas. During the crisis there was a greater proportion of young Italian emigrants, due to characteristics considered typical “of young people” but also due to their limited ability to start families in Italy. Southern Italy is the one area where the effects of this new wave of emigration have been most visible and are causing, according to Svimez (Association for the Development of Industry in Southern Italy), a “demographic desertification.” During the 2010s Italian emigrants were mostly well-educated young people from southern Italy (Svimez 2012). There, emigration from the country is

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compounded by internal migration of southern Italians to northern and central Italy. One project, Rapporto sulle migrazioni interne (Report on internal migration) has been studying Italian internal migration since 2014, with data on different categories of workers (like caregivers, factory workers, and farm laborers).19 Labor and migration are traditionally linked, as Michele Colucci and Stefano Gallo (2017) remind us, although now the high level of qualifications and quality-of-life issues may inform the choice of those migrating temporarily or permanently. Job precarity can also be connected with the phenomenon of the so-called “teachers with a suitcase” (Colucci and Gallo 2017): state-school teachers who travel all over the Italian peninsula, especially from the south to the center and north, usually for temporary school jobs and rarely stable ones. As Colucci and Gallo point out, there is a very close correlation between mobility and precarity: “the mobility of school staff increases parallel to the precarious nature of working conditions in schools and to the growing length of the time required to become permanent” (Ibid. xiii). Precarity has typically been seen by Italians who have left but also by those who have stayed in the country as a social plague, a phenomenon that has pushed an entire generation of young people to go abroad to seek work in other European countries and beyond. Reports on Italian emigrants and their own accounts are common in the Italian Press and present a stereotype of a young Italian who has been denied a career in Italy and forced to find stable work abroad (Cucchiarato 2010). If precarity is not new and is global,20 what are the peculiarities of “made in Italy” precarity during the economic crisis? Some recent studies of Italian emigrants to the United Kingdom (MacKay 2015), particularly London, show how diverse Italian emigration during the crisis years was, and how it generated a different perception of Italians in British public opinion. The new migratory wave that began in the years of the economic crisis was composed mainly of students and young workers, who accepted difficult living conditions with low wages and a high cost of living, especially in London. About 30,000 Italians emigrated to the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2011, about the same number as migrated between 1961 and 1990. Among southern European countries, Italy ranks highest for increasing emigration in the UK (+52%). Enrico Pugliese (2018) underlined how the dynamics triggered by the economic crisis have generated an ambivalent image of the “Italian emigrant,” who is required to flexibly fit both low and high-skilled jobs. Researchers, technicians, and media experts are particularly sought after, but only a small part of the educated workforce in Italy finds skilled jobs. Increasingly education has mattered For an overview of these studies, see https://migrazioninterne.it. For example see the websites: http://www.italiansinfuga.com; columns: “Italiani all’estero,” la Repubblica.it, http://racconta.repubblica.it/italiani-estero; “Cervelli in fuga,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/cervelli-fuga.

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less and less in terms of the quality of job people actually get. Emigration from Italy became particularly significant after 2010, when continental and northern Europe began showing signs of recovery while southern Europe continued to suffer the effects of the crisis. The demand for labor in northern European countries was for medium-skilled and unskilled jobs and Italian immigrants typically found employment in the latter category. The low-skilled workforce is continuously required to be flexible, especially in construction, food service, and healthcare. The boom of Italian workers in food service in countries like Germany and England demonstrates how economic patterns in Italy were replicated abroad. Pugliese highlights how poor and precarious labor expanded in the years of the crisis, and that workers who sought to escape precarity by leaving Italy only found the same conditions abroad. Precarity has been a constant for Italian workers abroad, often employed in legal forms of precarious employment like zero-hour contracts, common in Britain. Disappointment, a lack of confidence, and low prospects for the future appear to be common among Italian precarians abroad. According to Pugliese (2018), precariousness is a condition shared by new Italian migrants, both the highly skilled and the low-skilled: only a small number of them gain access to full-time permanent jobs. Given the lack of opportunity abroad and at home, one of the main questions of social scientists today about Italian precarians is: “If they simply move from precarity to precarity, why do they leave?” (Gjergji 2015). Certainly, social conditions in Italy do appear to be worse than abroad. “At home it was worse” is the answer of most Italian emigrants, who belong largely to traditional areas of Italian emigration. It is precisely this “relative deprivation” that pushes young people to seek better opportunities abroad. Precarity in Italy and a desire to find a good standard of living abroad acts as a strong generational driver.

6.2 Precarity and legislative reforms during the crisis years: An assessment The belief that greater flexibility of work, implemented through ever shorter and more insecure contracts, increases or has ever increased employment, is equivalent, in terms of empirical foundation, to the belief that the earth is flat. Nevertheless, if one affirms today that the earth is flat, there is little consensus, while the belief that flexibility favors employment is still shared by politicians, ministers, jurists, labor market experts, economists, despite the disastrous data circulating on the incessant increase of precarious workers and of the conditions in which they live or survive (Gallino 2014, 54).

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As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the 2008 economic crisis had a dramatic impact upon labor law during the 2010s (Caruso 2014). As the jurist Federico Martelloni pointed out, the relationship between the modernization of labor law and the crisis in employment was defined by a permanent “state of exception” during the crisis. This helped redefine employment, depriving it of its “set of rights and safeguards which, at the dawn of labor rights, had fostered the notion of employment allowing it to assert and consolidate itself in public and scientific debate” (Martelloni 2018, 78). The relationship between economics and labor legislation mentioned by Luigi Mariucci (2016) is central to understanding the legislative reforms of the thirty years, which ended with the global economic crisis and are addressed here. A particularly important role was played by econometrics, which was used to measure the performance of labor policy. Those labor policies, according to many, were particularly questionable because of the primacy they attributed to statistics rather than to rights (Bergonzini, Borelli, and Guazzarotti 2016; Lyon-Caen and Perulli 2008) and the way in which they adopted an abstract notion of labor, which failed to take into account the quality of jobs (Martelloni 2008; 2018). Two measures are particularly noteworthy (many more could be mentioned, but are beyond the scope of this study) because they have had a direct impact on the levels of precarity/instability Italian male and female workers experience and because they have triggered significant debates and political mobilizations against them. The long debate over the rigidity and flexibility of the labor market, once the center of public discussion during the eighties, returned to the forefront during the recession, primarily because of the rampant growth in unemployment. Despite promises to promote permanent contracts, the measures implemented all failed to reach that goal. These reforms advanced previous reformist projects, which were easier to receive parliamentary approval in the context of the crisis. It were precisely the constraints and guidelines imposed by the European Commission, as emerged in the parliamentary debate, that played a major role in the approval of the above-mentioned reforms (European Commission 2017). The reform of layoffs, in particular, was the subject of heated debates and political struggle during the early 2010s, when it was at the center, as we have seen, of numerous programmatic documents issued by the EU and supranational bodies. A few reform measures are worth mentioning briefly, like Article 8 of Law no. 148 of 2011, introduced by the fourth Berlusconi Government (2008–2011). This law, which led to widespread debate among labor lawyers, trade unionists, and politicians, introduced the possibility of deviating from both national collective labor agreements and previous laws by introducing company bargaining that could worsen existing national regulations and industry-wide regulations. According to its critics, this law exposed male and female workers to a drastic

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deterioration of working relationships and conditions (Romagnoli 2013a; Scarponi 2016). During this same Berlusconi government, parliamentarians belonging to the Democratic Party presented a bill aimed at promoting “measures against precarity,” a goal still considered fundamental in 2010, in order to “identify and regulate tools capable of assuring the minimum standards of civilization in a Republic founded on labor.”21 The bill’s aim was to reduce the differences between different types of contracts by: equalizing pay for standard employees and Co.Co.Co.; expanding maternity leave and benefits to all workers; abolishing more precarious contracts, like on-call jobs; limiting accessory work; restricting fixed-term contracts; and facilitating the conversion of permanent contracts. The bill also proposed strict regulations for internships, with a greater system of controls over them by both educational institutions and the Labor Inspectorate. It also proposed training courses for the unemployed through “job-seekers’ contracts.” Delivered to the Labor and Social Security Commission of the Senate in January 2011, the bill was not discussed by either the Burlesconi government or later by the Renzi Government.

6.2.1 THE FORNERO LAW (2012) The bill “Una riforma del mercato del lavoro in una prospettiva di crescita,”22 known as the Fornero Law, was presented to Parliament in March 2012 as a reform to foster employment and economic growth and was approved in June 2012 by the so-called “technical government” led by former European Commissioner Mario Monti (2011–13). In Italian collective memory, the name Elsa Fornero became inextricably linked to the pension reform she introduced in the 2011 national budget, when she was the Minister of Labor and Social Policies. The law raised the pension age, eliminated early-retirement pensions, and accelerated the transition of the pension system from an earnings-related scheme to a notional defined contributions scheme. It gave rise to the huge problem of the “esodati”: thousands of people who suddenly found themselves without either pay or pension. The law blocked early retirement applications that had already been accepted under previous legislation.23 Senate of the Republic, XVI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill “Misure di contrasto alla precarietà del lavoro,” presented by Rita Ghedini et al. on October 28, 2010. 22 Senate of the Republic, XVI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill “Disposizioni in materia di riforma del mercato del lavoro in una prospettiva di crescita,” presented by Labor and Social Policy Minister Elsa Fornero on April 5, 2012. 23 “Quanti sono gli esodati? Fornero: stima difficile. Il tavolo tecnico: dati in 7 giorni,” Il Sole 24 ore, April 3, 2012. 21

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Law no. 92 of 2012 reformed the social safety net by creating new subsidies for employees who had lost their jobs and who had paid contributions for 52 weeks (ASPI) of the previous 2 years, or 13 weeks during just the previous year (mini ASPI). The mobility allowance was, instead, abolished. The law also reformed flexible contracts to hinder the improper use of forms of employment like partita iva (VAT-number holders), which were suspected of being fake self-employment.25 It also incentivized and simplified apprenticeships by applying certain mandatory stabilization quotas, revising fixed-term contracts,26 and making it mandatory for employers to notify workers of changes to working schedules compulsory for part-time or on-call contracts. According to some analysts, though the law formally reiterated the centrality of permanent contracts, it undermined their stability, increasing outgoing flexibility by changing the regulation of dismissals for companies with more than 15 employees. It also modified “blank resignations.” The discussion on the Fornero Law27 was conditioned by EU expectations and constraints, which many parliamentarians brought up in their motions for or against the bill. Benedetto della Vedova (from the party Futuro e libertà, Future and Freedom) cited Prime Minister Mario Monti’s promise to launch a new reform of the labor market by May 2012. Others pointed out that the reform had been requested by the EU, though MPs had long been calling for this reform themselves. The soon-to-be Minister of Public Administration and Simplification, Marianna Madia, author of the pamphlet “Precari. Storie di un’Italia che lavora” (Precarians: Stories of an Italy that works, 2011), considered the law a “big step forward” in fighting precarity, as it acknowledged “that flexibility without rules fails to bring about growth and development, and that precarity must be countered.” The debate in Parliament (and in the country) focused not on the impact of the reform on precarity but on the revision of Article 18 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights and was polarized between people who thought the reform was excessive and those who thought it was not enough. The association Magistratura Democratica was one of the most critical of the Fornero labor reform (Palombarini and Viglietta 2011). In its commentary on the law, the Magistratura Democratica called it “a law for businesses” (Amato and Sanlorenzo 2012). The association noted how the crisis and the EU constraints had contributed to the approval of the law and that the law undermined important achievements in labor legislation of the twentieth century like 24

Law no. 92, “Disposizioni in materia di riforma del lavoro in una prospettiva di crescita.” With the provision of stabilization if 80% of the work was commissioned by the same client. Ibid. 26 With the elimination of the justifications for the first fixed-term employment contract for a maximum of 12 months. 27 Chamber of Deputies, XVI Legislature, “Discussioni,” session of June 27, 2012. 24 25

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Article 18, which gave unlawfully fired workers the right to get their jobs back. They insisted that there was no empirical evidence for a relationship between the deregulation of firings and increases in employment. According to the association, the amendment of Article 18 simply completed the ongoing process of the commodification of labor. Regarding income flexibility, they also criticized the liberalization of fixed-term contracts in a worker’s first year in a job, pointing out that the reform did not limit the spread of precarious contracts as it only repealed the placement contract. Other critics of the law argued that the reformers’ desire to fight “bad flexibility” and precarity was not done in the interest of providing steady jobs or stabilizing workers on temporary contracts, but rather was solely focused on the implementation of employability as a major strategy (Faleri 2012). Criticism of the Fornero law was abundant and there was plenty of attacks by journalists too who investigated the first negative effects of the reform. In September 2012, the weekly magazine Espresso published an article with the sharp title “Fornero, primi disastri” (Fornero, first disasters), which highlighted the strong opposition to the reform in the workplace.28 Trade unions were also concerned about the management of company crises after the suppression of the mobility scheme. One of the aspects of the Fornero law that would prove the most controversial was the deregulation of the criteria applied to the use of vouchers, the only limitations to which were an annual gross cap of 5,000 euros and an hourly value of 10 euros gross. It was this liberalization that caused the explosion of the use of vouchers in the following years. Finally, it is worth noting that though there was significant criticism of the labor reform by trade unions, the issue was considered secondary to the much more contentious debate over pension reform going on at the same time. The debate, which led to significant political mobilization, aimed at finding a solution to the problem of the esodati, as only half of these roughly 350,000 people would receive protection according to the new legislation.29 6.2.2 THE JOBS ACT (2014) The rights of those who work, the rights of those who seek a job: after a serious discussion which we respect, we cannot vote in favor of the Jobs Act. […] Some measures become effective immediately: they end the possibility of reintegrating those laid off without just cause, while a pathway is provided for specific, though as yet undefined, types of disciplinary violation. It is a solution which penalizes the newly hired, on the basis of a logic where the lack of a Michele Azzu, “Fornero, primi disastri,” L’Espresso, September 12, 2012. Salvatore Cannavò, “Esodati, raccontateci la vostra storia,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, March 20, 2012; Paola Pica, “Fornero: ‘Esodati sono 65 mila,’ CGIL, ‘Dati sballati, il governo scherza con il fuoco,’” Corriere della Sera, April 12, 2012.

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certain deadline, after three years for example, of full protection contradicts the concept of “increasing protection.” We are concerned about the cultural surrender to the idea that freedom of enterprise coincides with constraints that need to be abolished in order to authorize “the right to dismiss.” We are aware of the social value of enterprise, but this value lacks a connective tissue where the legality, rights, and responsibilities of the market’s different actors are never divorced. […] The part charged with enlarging rights and protections is still generic and lacks resources: the “deforestation of the jungle” of precarious contracts is postponed until a mapping to be carried out in an unknown time and without having identified any binding objectives.30

A little over two years after the approval of the Fornero Law, on December 10, 2014, the Senate passed a new (and hotly disputed) labor reform known as the “Jobs Act,” with 166 votes for, 112 against, and one abstention, after the government requested a vote of confidence to unite the majority.31 The law had already passed in the Chamber on November 25 with 316 votes for, 6 against, and 5 abstentions. As many as 303 deputies left the chamber or did not take part in the vote in protest. Deputies of the Northern League, Forza Italia, the Five Star Movement, and the Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom) openly opposed the provision, and 40 deputies from the Democratic Party voted against the bill, which had been put forward by their own party. Of these 29 were signatories on a document entitled “Perché non votiamo il Jobs Act” (Why we won’t vote for the Jobs Act), of which an excerpt is provided above.32 Exponents of the so-called “SinistraDem” (Democratic Left) had taken part in a demonstration organized by the CGIL against the bill (on October 25, 2014) and proposed that the Labor Commission amend the text. Other members of the same group, including Pierluigi Bersani and Guglielmo Epifani, voted in favor of the proposal, after their party, the Democratic Party, reached an agreement concerning some changes. It was the radical change to Article 18 in particular that led to disagreement among the parliamentarians belonging to the Democratic Party.33 “Perché non votiamo il Jobs Act,” http://sinistradem.it/perche-non-votiamo-il-jobs-act. Law no. 183, “Deleghe al Governo in materia di riforma degli ammortizzatori sociali, dei servizi per il lavoro e delle politiche attive, nonché in materia di riordino della disciplina dei rapporti di lavoro e dell’attività ispettiva e di tutela e conciliazione delle esigenze di cura, di vita e di lavoro,” approved on December 10, 2014, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 290, December 15, 2014. 32 The signatories were Roberta Agostini, Tea Albini, Ileana Argentin, Rosy Bindi, Massimo Bray, Francesco Boccia, Marco Carra, Angelo Capodicasa, Susanna Cenni, Eleonora Cimbro, Gianni Cuperlo, Alfredo D’Attorre, Gianni Farina, Stefano Fassina, Paolo Fontanelli, Filippo Fossati, Carlo Galli, Monica Gregori, Maria Iacono, Francesco Laforgia, Gianna Malisani, Mrgherita Miotto, Michela Marzano, Michele Mognato, Barbara Pollastrini, Maria Grazia Rocchi, Alessandra Terrosi, Giuseppe Zappulla, and Davide Zoggia. 33 For a chronicle of the debate see “Accordo su Jobs act,” la Repubblica, November 13, 2014; “Jobs act, Camera approva testo. Fuori dall’Aula Fi, Lega, M5s e 40 deputati Pd,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, November 25, 2014. 30

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According to the jurist Luigi Mariucci (2015), labor legislation during the Renzi government became the object of a “Ptolemaic revolution” because of the regressive character of the Jobs Act, which went against the historical function of labor legislation in Italy, namely to balance power between the parties involved in a labor contract. Yet, the bill also showed remarkable continuity with the previous legislation on labor flexibility, of which it was the final phase (Mariucci 2015). According to various jurists (Rusciano and Zoppoli 2015; Mariucci 2015; Romagnoli 2015), the reform modified the essentials of the “Statute of Workers’ Rights” that had been introduced in 1970 by admitting and facilitating layoffs for economic and disciplinary reasons and by substantially modifying Article 18. In terms of flexible work, the Jobs Act did not reduce the number of atypical contracts substantially, on the contrary, it further increased incoming flexibility (Martelloni 2018), making it possible for companies to employ workers on fixed-term contracts without needing to provide any reasons for them. The only limit imposed on employers was a mandatory 36-month duration on such contracts. The Jobs Act also made important changes to “standard” contracts. Newly hired employees on permanent contracts (defined as “growing protection contracts”) no longer benefitted from the full contractual and social rights applied to workers already employed by a company, until they reached a certain level of seniority. The new social safety net finally included new categories of workers (like Co.Co.Co.). The amount and duration of unemployment benefits, though, was still based on workers’ previous form of employment, and so excluded many of the long-term unemployed, highly precarious workers, and women whose careers had been interrupted because of maternity leave.34 Some fringes of the anti-precarity movement described the Jobs Act as an “attempt to accelerate and complete the processes of precarization underway for some time. The Jobs Act did not invent precarity but aims decisively at providing a complete type of neoliberalism” (Lavoro insubordinato 2015). The movement called for a “social strike,” uniting blue-collar workers, precarious workers, and migrants in a single demonstration. On November 14, 2014, marches were held in twenty-five Italian cities, a strike organized collectively by unions, social movements, and precarian groups, with the participation of migrants, students, and the self-employed (Lavoro insubordinato 2015).35 The Jobs Act also sparked significant trade union opposition. The CGIL held a national demonstration on October 25, 2014, in Rome with 150,000 people, including members of the Democratic Party’s left minority. In other cities, further local demonstrations took place, like in Bologna on October 16, 2014. On December 12, the CGIL and UIL jointly proclaimed an eight-hour general strike, involving workers from For a reasoned analysis of the provision see “Luci ed ombre del Jobs Act,” I dossier de lavoce. info, February 27, 2015, http://www.lavoce.info/archives/33382/luci-ombre-jobs-act. 35 “Migliaia in piazza per lo sciopero ‘sociale’ caos, tensioni e scontri,” Corriere della Sera, November 14, 2014. 34

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both public and private sectors, from transportation to schools, and witnessed an average adhesion of 60% of workers. According to the organizers, one and a half million strikers took part in 54 events organized throughout the country.36

6.2.3 THE DEBATE ON THE REFORM OF ARTICLE 18 As we have seen, Article 18 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights remained in its original form for the whole of the aughts and the 2010s but was a fiery topic of debate for trade unions and led to considerable labor reforms. According to several jurists, during the seventies Article 18 had made it possible to achieve “true job stability,” albeit only in companies with over 15 employees (Napoli 1980; Mazzotta 2007). In the wake of the huge political mobilization of 2002, there was an attempt to overcome the issue through a referendum aimed at extending Article 18 to companies with fewer than 15 employees, which was backed by the Communist Refoundation Party, the Greens, the Party of Italian Communists, the left wing of the Democratic Left, and the CGIL. The proposal remained a dead letter because the referendum did not reach the 50% quorum mandated by Italian law: only about 12 million Italians (25.7% of the total number of voters) turned out, though the vast majority (10,245,809) voted in favor.37 After the 2008 crash the debate over Article 18 resumed. The “irresistible rise of the freedom to lay off ” (L’irresistibile ascesa della licenza di licenziare), in Umberto Romagnoli’s words (2015), brought the labor relations of the late nineteenth-century back into the present. The economic crisis also saw the reduction of job stability and the diminishing of protections against firings, universalized in the EU by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in 2000. The issue of the circularity of labor law raised by Luigi Mariucci (2015) is particularly interesting for understanding continuity and discontinuity in the evolution of labor law, in particular those providing protection against dismissal. It was the weakening of the stability of standard labor relations, which some felt favored “a decrease in the bargaining power of workers and a reduction in the effectiveness of the labor protection” (Martelloni, 2018, 96). The Fornero Law amended Article 18 for the first time.38 Prior to that, workers who were laid off without proper cause had the right to get their jobs back and be paid for lost wages. After 2012, reinstatement could only happen for unfair dismissals (e.g., marriage, discrimination, and violation of maternity Monica Rubino, Michela Scacchioli, “La CGIL, un milione in piazza contro il Jobs Act. Camusso: ‘Avanti anche con lo sciopero generale,’” la Repubblica, October 15, 2014. 37 Riccardo De Gennaro, “Art.18, via libera al referendum,” la Repubblica, January 16, 2003; “Referendum, fallito il quorum. Ha votato solo il 25,7%,” la Repubblica, June 16, 2003. 38 Law no. 92, “Disposizioni in materia di riforma del lavoro in una prospettiva di crescita.” 36

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and paternity laws), and in a few cases for illegitimate disciplinary dismissals. As opposed to the broad ability to reinstate fired workers, the new legislation allowed for monetary compensation for workers, the amount of which (between 12 and 24 month’ salaries) was to be established by a judge in cases of dismissal without cause and justified reasons. Despite these modifications by the Fornero Law, Article 18 still discouraged the abuse of dismissals by employers, when compared to the new system envisaged by the Renzi government (Martelloni 2018). Unlike the more limited Fornero Law, the Jobs Act, passed in December 2014 and effective from 2015, had the goal of “surpassing Article 18” entirely by modifying the permanent contracts of all new employees and introducing an “increasing safeguards contract” (Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015). 45 years after its landmark introduction, the right of workers to be reinstated effectively disappeared, with only the right to economic compensation remaining.39 The only instances of reinstatement that remained were in cases of unlawful or discriminatory dismissals, and dismissals that were communicated orally or were related to a worker’s disability. In case of dismissal for disciplinary reasons, reinstatement was possible only if the court established that the charges against the worker were not substantiated. The widespread criticism of labor legislation after the Jobs Act, which can only be briefly summarized here, aroused doubts about its unconstitutionality and raised concerns that it was in violation of EU norms regarding the modification of Article 18 (Giubboni 2015; Ballestrero 2015; Speziale 2017). Other scholars disagreed with how the law shifted the burden of proof of unlawfulness from the employer to the worker (Peruzzi 2015), a decisive aspect of the balance of power between employers and workers, which the sixties’ legislation had tried so hard to equalize. According to some commentators, the absence of effective sanctions against unfair dismissals made the condition of the permanently employed not unlike that of fixed-term workers, making their positions more fragile and exposing them to threats by employers (Martelloni 2018). In response the CGIL conducted a petition in 2016 to hold a referendum to abolish these reforms and fully restore Article 18, plus extend Article 18 to apply to all companies with more than five employees. It was because of that proposal for an extension of the law that in January 2017 the Italian Constitutional Court declared the referendum illegitimate on the grounds that it went beyond being abrogative by also proposing new articles, something not allowed by the Italian Constitution.40 The efforts discussed above to reform or abolish Article 18, seen as a “totem,” whose elimination was considered a “taboo,” received huge attention from the The compensation was in proportion to the length of service, providing two months’ pay for each year worked, up to a maximum of 24. 40 Constitutional Court Ruling no. 26, January 11, 2017; “La Consulta boccia il referendum sull’articolo 18, ok a quesiti su voucher e appalti,” Il Sole24Ore, January 11, 2017. 39

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press in the aughts and 2010s. Elsa Fornero, dismissing that such changes would be taboo, promoted the first amendment to the article, provoking immediate reactions from trade unions like the CGIL. Matteo Renzi called it just a “symbol” of the past and alongside Giuliano Poletti affirmed the need to surpass it.41 The press variously gave voice to the moods of public opinion, politicians, and representatives of the trade unions and employers during the aughts. Although many verdicts were ruled by employment courts on dismissals after the “New Article 18” came into effect, according to some analysts fewer and fewer workers turn to the courts because of the high legal fees, the unpredictability of the outcome, and the shorter period allowed in which to challenge their dismissal (Peruzzi 2015). The “fairy tale of Article 18,” as Gad Lerner put it (2014), is still the subject of legal debate and trade union criticism. Its restoration was included in a bill, proposed by public legislative initiative, entitled “Carta universale dei diritti of the lavoro” (The Universal Charter of Labor Rights), presented to Parliament on September 29, 2016.

6.3 Against Precarity: Mobilization, campaigns, and forms of resistance Precarians have a duty to rebel! Let’s build up a precarious point of view together! Let’s invent and propose new forms of action against corporate blackmail. Let’s demand a new welfare state, based on social citizenship, equality, and respect for the human being. The States General 2.0 will comprise seminars, open assemblies, research, and workshops for the exchange of ideas and tactics regarding the issue of the labor precarization.42

In 2010s Italy, political mobilization, campaigns, and resistance against precarity multiplied, incorporating a broad range of people, particularly students. This section compares the contemporary fight against precarity with the earlier anti-precarity movement in the sixties and seventies, in order to understand their similarities and differences, particularly in terms of their stances on certain issues and the subjectivity of their activists. In the years of the crisis, however, the political struggle was broader because of the creation of a wide-ranging, diverse movement that pivoted around long-term activism. The 2010s were, according to the anti-precarity movement, a period when “everyone [was] talking about precarity,” as the media finally started to pay attention Roberto D’Alimonte, “Jobs act, Poletti: articolo 18? Basta tabù, niente pasticci all’italiana. Bersani: sintesi agevole, basta volerla,” Il Sole24Ore, September 25, 2014. 42 See the website: http://www.precaria.org/stati-generali-2-0. 41

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to precarity and its critics. In 2010 members of over 30 collectives, community centers, committees, and networks, mostly from urban Italy but also a few foreign cities, launched the “"Stati generali della precarietà” (States-General of Precarity) (Milan, October 9–10). In workshops, presentations, and assemblies, the participants discussed the relationship between precarity, rights, and welfare, sharing a number of insights about the San Precario and EuroMayday networks during the economic crisis.  A few months later, the “States-General of Precarity 2.0” (Milan, January 15–16, 2011) was held, which went further in discussing the conditions of precarious workers and migrants (who are precarious workers par excellence) as well as the relationship between austerity and precarity, and the possibility of a precarians’ strike. A booklet entitled Wikistrike: Glossario per lo sciopero precario e un nuovo welfare (Glossary for the precarians’ strike and a new welfare regime, 2011) dealt with the precarians’ strike. The authors presented the booklet as an “encyclopedia produced by our collective intelligence against precarity and at the service of the precarians’ strike.” It portrayed, albeit briefly, the subjectivity of precarians and what they were fighting for. We have not been earmarked by destiny, instead, they have imposed a condition upon us: there are precarians and creators of precarity. This is why the story of bad luck has reached its end. This is why we want to talk about our desires, the freedom we wish to recover, the strength we want to detonate: the only way to overcome precarity. How to do it, that is, by means of a strike of precarians: what we have never been able to do and which we want to and can organize now. A strike not only of the precarians but about precarity and the multiple places and forms by which it expresses itself. A strike to overcome precarity.43

The “States-General of Precarity 3.0” (Rome, April 15–17) focused on the precarians’ strike, theorizing the appropriation by precarians of the right to strike. Precarians had rarely gone on strike because of the threats by employers in the workplace. The main demands advanced in Rome included a new welfare system based on unconditional and universal income, optional rather than imposed flexibility, and residence permits not attached to employment contracts. “Imagine if precarious male and female workers crossed their arms, finally becoming protagonists in their own story and showing that they are strong: the country would come to a standstill,” stated the final document,44 echoing Guy Standing’s idea (2011) of the precariat being a dangerous/explosive class. From the early aughts, the internet played a very important role in facilitating communication within the precarian movement and between it and other related movements, helping people keep track of campaigns, protests, and ral See the website: http://www.precaria.org/stati-generali-della-precarieta-3-0. Ibid.

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lies and follow recent theoretical work. Here the online magazine I quaderni di San Precario had been particularly important.45 It promoted inquiries and self-inquiries into “precarians’ subjectivity” and precarian resistance and tried to refine and put forward a “precarians’ point of view.” The magazine ended after five issues, leaving space for the birth of the virtual collective Effimera: Critica e sovversione del presente (Ephemeral: Criticism and Subversion of the Present),46 an offshoot of the Uninomade 2.0 diaspora and which today has over 200 members. The section “Precarietà e conflitti” (Precarity and Conflict) of the blog is dedicated to the topic of the precariat and precarity, and places particular emphasis on resistance in its writing. Precaria.org, one of the most productive website dedicated to precarity, was conceived of in the wake of the San Precario experience as a “place that sets information in circulation, not to inform, but to create a pool of news from which to extract the bazaar for the creation of conflict.”47 In 2011, the blog connessioniprecarie.org was created, starting from the assumption that “precarity has now become a general condition of contemporary work” globally. The explicit goal of activists behind the blog was to “connect the (dis)connected, produce communication where it fails to be provided,” in an attempt to break down the isolation of workers, forging a global link between various precarious workers. During the years of the fourth Berlusconi government (2008–11), the Monti government (2011–13), and the Renzi government (2014–16), there was significant opposition to the labor reforms promoted by labor ministers Maurizio Sacconi, Elsa Fornero, and Giuliano Poletti. Resistance took various forms, first against the Berlusconi government’s labor plan, then against the Fornero Law, and finally against the Jobs Act.

6.3.1 PRECARITY AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION: AGAINST BLANK RESIGNATIONS We are 188 authoritative women determined to defend women’s dignity and autonomy. We are actually asking the Minister of Labor and Equal Opportunities Elsa Fornero to restore Law no. 188 of 2007, which prevented the practice of fake voluntary resignations. The “blank” resignation applied to workers, who were obliged to sign it at the very moment of recruitment and used when they had a long illness, got married, or began a pregnancy. This practice affects mainly young women and may be considered, in general terms, an abuse of the rule of law.48 47 48 45 46

See the website: http://quaderni.sanprecario.info. See the website: http://effimera.org. See the website: http://www.precaria.org. Public petition, “188 firme per la legge 188 contro le dimissioni in bianco,” http://petizionepubblica.it/pview.aspx?pi=P2012N20910.

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From the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis, the link between the feminization of atypical contracts and the “gendered nature” of precarious work emerged at various levels. ISTAT reported that in Italy female involuntary part-time work was more than twice the European average (58.1% vs 25.5%), meaning more than half of part-time women workers had not chosen to be part-time. Women appeared to be generally more precarious than men: women workers with non-standard contracts totaled 14.3% compared to 9.3% of males. As such, women had less chance of becoming stabilized than men, 11% compared to 17% (ISTAT 2014). Significant percentages of precarious work were found in the main economic sectors, including industry, where fixed-term contracts, temp agency work, and subcontracting were preferred, but also in agriculture, where casual and illegal labor mostly involved male and female migrant workers (Ibid.) Comparative studies have highlighted the impact of “non-standard” contracts on women’s careers and working conditions, even those with high-level qualifications, like university researchers (Bozzon 2015). The relationship between work and motherhood proved to be problematic during the Great Recession: according to ISTAT, between 2008 and 2009 around 800,000 mothers lost their jobs as a result of having children (8.7% of working mothers) either by being fired or being forced to resign (Ingenere 2012). Notably, Italy’s fertility rate was at that time one of the lowest of the OECD countries (1.39 children per woman) and Italy is one of the countries with the highest percentage of first-time mothers over the age of thirty (ISTAT 2015). Between 2008 and 2016, Italy registered a drop in births of 100,000, a significant decline, especially among the non-immigrant population: 21.8% of Italian women born in 1976 will not have children, according to an ISTAT forecast. This is hardly surprising given the high degree of precarity among women and the fact that the paid maternity-leave system depends entirely on the type of contract the women hold. Over the last decade, a basic paid leave has been gradually extended to the main types of “non-standard” female workers, but the amount of the stipend continues to depend on the employment status of the mother at the time of pregnancy and over the previous year (De Simone and Scarponi 2010). Until the approval of the Jobs Act, the INPS explicitly allowed “precarious women workers” to receive maternity benefits directly from the state. However, these workers received only a modest cumulative stipend, while stable workers received 80% of their salary on paid leave for at least five months.49 Self-employed female workers enrolled in the “Gestione separata” system were granted the right to a kind of paid maternity leave as late as 2017, when Law no. 81 of 2017 for the protection of self-employment came into force.50 INPS, “Congedo per maternità alle lavoratrici precarie,” http://www.inps.it/portale/default. aspx?itemdir=5968. 50 Law no. 81, “Misure per la tutela del lavoro autonomo non imprenditoriale e misure volte a favorire l’articolazione flessibile nei tempi e nei luoghi del lavoro subordinato,” approved on May 22, 2017, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 135, June 13, 2017. 49

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In the twenty-first century, too, the classification struggle played a crucial role in the political struggle of precarians and the self-employed. Various studies and surveys revealed how, in order to work, many people had become “collaborators” or “self-employed,” despite being economically dependent and having no control over their working conditions (European Commission 2012). This also affected women, depriving them of maternity benefits available to standard female employees. During the Great Recession, the absence of a basis of social rights urged precarians to organize more and more protests. Several female collaborators and self-employed workers engaged in a battle with the INPS to get some welfare protections, decrying the discrimination they were experiencing.51 The relationship between precarity and gender discrimination became even more visible in the aughts: blank resignations became a symbol of the persistence of discrimination against women based on their dual social role as both producers and reproducers. The issue of blank resignations was not specific to the years of the crisis: the practice had already been the subject of controversies during the economic boom of the late fifties and early sixties, and had been banned by the law of 1963—yet in the aughts it made the headlines again. In 2001, labor ministry inspectors were required to doublecheck resignations of pregnant women made in the first year since the birth of their child.52 However, the inefficacy of the provision led the Prodi government to issue a new law on blank resignations in 2007 (Law no. 188).53 In cases of voluntary resignations, it became mandatory to fill out a form containing an alphanumeric code, which was impossible to change retroactively (Ballestrero 2008). In May 2008, the Berlusconi government abolished Law no. 188, passed by the Prodi government, thus siding with the opponents of the law who had argued that due to its complexity it would create problems for companies with open employment contracts. In 2010, representatives of the Democratic Party presented a new bill, which explicitly mentioned the recently abolished Law no. 188.54 The bill remained a dead letter, but the public debate it generated showed to what extent the unsolved relationship between motherhood, work, and precarity constituted one of the core issues of the discussion. See for example: Diversamente occupate, “Diritto universale alla maternità: La misura di un corpo che si espande,” http://diversamenteoccupate.blogspot.co.uk/; Paola Caruso blog: http://paolacars.tumblr.com. 52 Decree no. 151, “Testo unico delle disposizioni legislative in materia di tutela e sostegno della maternità e della paternità, a norma dell’articolo 15 della legge 8 Marzo 2000 no. 53,” approved on March 26, 2001 and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 96, April 26, 2001. 53 Law no. 188, “Disposizioni in materia di modalità per la risoluzione del contratto di lavoro per dimissioni volontarie della lavoratrice, del lavoratore, nonché del prestatore d’opera e della prestatrice d’opera,” approved on October 17, 2007, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 260, November 8, 2007. 54 Chamber of Deputies, XVI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Maria Grazia Gatti et al., “Disciplina delle modalità di sottoscrizione della lettera di dimissioni volontarie e della lettera di risoluzione consensuale del rapporto di lavoro,” presented on April 20, 2010. 51

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In February 2011, a huge demonstration organized by the feminist group Se non ora quando? (If not now, when?)55 protested the recent laying off of 800,000 mothers through blank resignations and urged the Monti government to restore Law no. 188. Four bills were submitted in February 2012 by various Italian political parties, and the bills were discussed in Parliament the following month.56 In support of reinstating Law no. 188, in 2012 a public petition entitled “188 signatures for the 188 law against blank resignations” was started, addressed to the Minister for Labor and Equal Opportunities Elsa Fornero.57 Signed by 188 leading women personalities, the petition also received about 4,500 endorsements. The political mobilization and media campaign around the petition led to the inclusion in the 2012 Fornero Law of a mechanism to validate resignations, in order to avoid that blank resignation letters continued being used illegally to fire women. The mechanism was fiercely criticized by the journalist Ritanna Armeni58 who pointed out that it would be insufficient and barely applicable. As the procedure introduced by the Fornero Law did not lead to the solution of the problem, new bills were presented by representatives of the Democratic Party and Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom) in 2013.59 During the Renzi Government (2014–2016), a new measure was introduced into the Jobs Act, aimed expressly at countering this phenomenon.

“Il riscatto delle donne, ma non solo. Oltre un milione di persone in 100 piazze,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, February 13, 2011. 56 Chamber of Deputies, XVI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Flavio Di Muro and Flavia Perina, “Disciplina delle modalità di sottoscrizione della lettera di dimissioni volontarie e della lettera di risoluzione consensuale del rapporto di lavoro,” presented on February 14, 2012; bill presented by deputies Antonio Poli et al., “Disposizioni concernenti le dimissioni del lavoratore e la risoluzione consensuale del rapporto di lavoro,” presented on February 16, 2012; bill presented by deputies Anita Di Giuseppe and Giovanni Paladini, “Modifica all’articolo 2118 e introduzione dell’articolo 2118-bis del codice civile e altre disposizioni in materia di dimissioni volontarie del lavoratore e di risoluzione consensuale del rapporto di lavoro,” presented on February 22, 2012; bill presented by deputies Barbara Salmartini et al., “Disposizioni concernenti le dimissioni del lavoratore e la risoluzione consensuale del rapporto di lavoro,” presented on March 28, 2012. 57 See the website: http://petizionepubblica.it/pview.aspx?pi=P2012N20910; http://www.ingenere.it/articoli/dimissioni-bianco. 58 Ritanna Armeni, “Fornero: 188 promesse tradite,” Il Foglio, April 26, 2012. 59 Chamber of Deputies, XVI Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill presented by deputies Nicola Vendola, Marisa Nicchi et al., “Disposizioni in materia di modalità per la risoluzione del contratto di lavoro per dimissioni volontarie del lavoratore e del prestatore d’opera,” presented on March 15, 2013. 55

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6.3.2 PRECARITY AND NEW SLAVERY: AGAINST ILLEGAL LABOR BROKERAGE Caporalato, as a form of illegal labor brokerage as well as a brutal form of control of man over man, is not a hereditary feature of the past. On the contrary, it has returned topical over the last fifteen to twenty years, and to a harsher degree in the last decade. However, it is obviously different from that in the twentieth century. In the vast majority of cases, in particular in heavier-duty and unskilled agricultural harvesting, the “yokels” of Puglia, Sicily, Lucania, Calabria, and Campania have been replaced by new laborers mainly from Africa and Eastern Europe. (Leogrande 2016, 103).

Although illegal labor brokerage is a recurring phenomenon not unique to Italy (Caracausi 2017), it has nevertheless expanded massively and shown new features over the last thirty years in Italy. This has happened in close connection with contemporary global migration trends and the role of “human traffickers,” recently occupied by organized crime. In Italy, the years of the crisis saw a number of reports and investigations into the phenomenon of illegal labor brokerage, already discussed and opposed during the years of the economic boom, when the first law forbidding labor brokering went into effect in 1960. Diminished by the Treu Package in 1997, the 1960s law was fully abolished definitively with the Biagi Law in 2003. In 1986, the new expansion of the “caporalato” phenomenon aroused the interest of Parliament. A survey carried out by Gino Giugni revealed the existence of 150,000 laborers in southern Italy hired through illegal labor brokerage. A decade later, the caporalato hit the headlines once again, when the Senate set up the Commissione parlamentare d’Inchiesta sul fenomeno del cosiddetto “caporalato” (Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the so-called “Caporalato” Phenomenon, 1994–96).60 The investigation revealed how deeply-rooted the phenomenon was, involving 200,000 farm workers from Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, and Calabria. Exposed to illegal labor brokerage in the mid-nineties, these male and female workers were “victims primarily of their economically depressed environment and the serious lack of job opportunities, especially for women.”61 The caporali (the labor brokers) could blackmail the workers because of the instability of the latter’s working conditions which, the Parliamentary investigation revealed, were not regulated by proper contracts. And these workers Comprising twenty senators, the “Commissione parlamentare d’Inchiesta sul fenomeno del cosiddetto ‘caporalato’” was set up by the Senate on September 20, 1994, its action deferred until November 7, 1995, and its work concluded at the end of the legislature (on May 8, 1996). A similar proposal had been proposed to the Chamber by deputy Carlo D’Amato in 1993. 61 Senate of the Republic, XII Legislature, “Disegni di legge e relazioni. Documenti,” Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul fenomeno del cosiddetto ‘caporalato,’ “Relazione sui risultati parziali dell’inchiesta,” (Rapporteur: Senator Donato Manfroi), delivered on February 23, 1996. 60

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had little choice in the matter: “those who did not submit to the imposed conditions,” the investigation noted, “did not work anymore.” It was the instability of their conditions that convinced the laborers to ally with the labor brokers, to obtain illegal social security benefits for themselves and their families. The investigation also highlighted how the recruitment of illegal foreign workers, generally underpaid and paid on a piece-time rate, led to the replacement of regularly employed local workers in northern Italian regions.62 Alessandro Leogrande, in his book Uomini e caporali (2008), described the expansion of the phenomenon of illegal labor brokerage and showed how it was increasingly related to new migrant routes. According to him, there was a difference between the caporalato of the twentieth century and of the twenty-first century, namely the massive number of foreign laborers exposed, much more than Italians, to continuous subjection to forms of neo-slavery (e.g., exploitation through under-payment, exhausting schedules, and unhygienic conditions came alongside more violence, threats, and deprivations of personal liberties) (Ibid.). In the aughts, the investigations carried out in Bari, Rosarno, and Lecce brought to light the exploitation of labor and the illegal labor brokerage, which appeared closely connected to organized crime. “The criminal brokerage of global labor” was the basis of the spread of caporalato throughout the rural areas of twentyfirst century Italy (Leogrande 2016). The phenomenon of caporalato was increasingly connected to the plague of new slavery. Michelle Boutand pointed out that labor flexibility produced a crisis in the employment model, which had emerged from the suppression of slavery, but the resilience of slavery in one form or another had become clear in the aughts. The relationship between illegal labor brokerage and precarity is not only work-related but also existential, especially in the case of migrants, as several scholars have pointed out (Moulier Boutand 2016). Existential precarity was interwoven with precarious working conditions and sharpened by the fear of losing one’s job and home, creating a vicious circle from which it was very difficult for migrants, frequently living in segregated conditions, to escape. In 2011, the FLAI-CGIL and the FILLEA-CGIL launched a “Stop caporalato” campaign,63 which exposed the existence of 60,000 workers in sub-human conditions. They were the victims of forms of illegal labor brokerage run by human traffickers and had to live in particularly precarious housing and living conditions. Ibid. “Stop caporalato: La campagna di FILLEA e FLAI-CGIL,” 2011. The Placido Rizzotto Observatory was set up to investigate “the connections between the agri-food supply chain and organized crime, with particular attention to the phenomenon of caporalato and the infiltration of the mafias in the management of the agricultural labor market.” The FLAI began publishing a periodic report entitled “Agromafie e caporalato” (Agri-mafia and illegal hiring). The four volumes issued to date may be consulted at: https://www.flai.it/osservatoriopr/il-rapporto.

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Political mobilization by the trade unions, judicial action, and frequent media coverage led in 2011 to the introduction into the Italian Penal Code of the crime of caporalato, that is, “illegal labor brokerage.” Its definition, though, allowed punishing caporali only if it were proven that they were carrying out their illegal labor brokerage in an organized way, and used violence and threats to do it. This law, however, was difficult to apply and a new one replaced it in 2016,64 which redefined the crime of caporalato as the “illegal intermediation and exploitation of labor” and provided for arrest in flagrante delicto, and imprisonment for a period of 1 to 6 years, in addition to a fine from 500 to 1,000 euros for each worker the criminal had recruited. The new law centered on the exploitation of workers in need with the goal of combatting undocumented work in agriculture in particular. The approval of this second law against caporalato, which enjoyed a majority across party lines, was considered a “historic milestone” for workers’ rights, an ethical “turning point” in Italian labor law, and a “victory for the whole country.” This law was widely approved by public opinion and was supported by trade unions like the FLAI-CGIL, civil society associations such as Libera, and employers’ organizations like Coldiretti.65 In the spring of 2017, 12 caporali were convicted under this new law (some Italian and some foreign), who were notorious for having enslaved laborers in Nardò (Puglia), where the workers’ repeated protests led to a new law in 2016.66 Further sentences and much media coverage revealed that caporalato was far from being eradicated. Protests and lockouts against the law, organized by agricultural companies in 2017, demonstrated how illegal labor brokerage was an enormous, structural component of the agricultural labor market in southern Italy. In 2018 alone there were an estimated 400,000–430,000 people who were exposed to human trafficking by caporali, according to the FLAI-CGIL Agromafie Report (Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto 2018). Bringing the issue to the public’s attention was the goal of the national “No Caporalato” march held in the Foggia area in April 2017.67 In 2018, the issue of caporalato featured once more in the headlines, following incidents in which several migrants died while being stowed away in trucks to be smuggled to different areas.68 Law no. 199, “Disposizioni in materia di contrasto ai fenomeni del lavoro nero, dello sfruttamento del lavoro in agricoltura e di riallineamento retributivo nel settore agricolo,” approved on October 29, 2016, and published in Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 257, November 3, 2016. 65 Gianluca Testa, “Mai più schiavi, l’anti-caporalato è Legge. Ma per le associazioni non basta,” Il Corriere, October 19, 2016. 66 “Caporalato, 12 persone condannate a Lecce: ‘Migranti ridotti in schiavitù.’ Dalle loro rivolte è nata la nuova legge,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, July 13, 2017. 67 “In marcia per dire No alla mafia del caporalato. Aderisci all’appello,” Left Redazione, March 14, 2017. 68 “Foggia, strage di braccianti migranti. Altri 12 morti in un incidente stradale. 3 feriti. Di Maio: ‘Più ispettori contro il caporalato,’” Il fatto Quotidiano, August 6, 2018. 64

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6.3.3 PRECARITY AND RESEARCH: THE MOBILIZATION OF THE UNIVERSITIES University researchers were another precarious group of workers who had previously protested their conditions in the seventies and were remobilized around the issue of precarity again in the aughts. A new alliance formed between researchers and students in 2010, much like it had in 1977, to oppose the university reforms promoted by the Minister for University and Research, Mariastella Gelmini, which sought to change rules on academic recruitment under the auspices of the new public management paradigm (Bellofiore and Vertova 2018).69 Some recent studies have pointed out that the particular process of precarization was rooted in an earlier university reform by Letizia Moratti in 2005, and which was only exacerbated by the “Gelmini” reform. This reform changed the “governance” of the Italian university as an institution, as well as the relationship between the university and society. According to the analyses carried out by historians like Mauro Moretti, the progressive demonization of professorial selfgovernance corresponded with the decreasing respect for the important social and cultural role of universities in society (2010; 2016). During the years of the crisis, other precarians in education politically mobilized as well. School-teachers became very active, as did other intellectual precarians like editors, journalists, and those employed in the cultural heritage sector (Allegri 2017). University researchers staged protests on the roofs of their institutes during the autumn of 2010, which produced a certain echo within the media.70 The uniqueness of these protests left a certain mark on Italy’s collective memory, inspiring films like Smetto quando voglio (I Can Quit Whenever I Want, dir. Sydney Sibilia, 2014), in which precarious researchers expelled from the university system become drug dealers to escape their grim, hopeless existence as precarians. The success of the film and its two sequels contributed to the debate on precarious researchers, and was considered an expression of the Italian “brain drain.” The criticism of precarity in the universities during the Great Recession was fueled by continuous protests and creative methods, and it was also innovative in that university activists formulated a broad critique of the international rise of the “neoliberal university” (Rustin 2016). The protagonists of this story were mainly students, who challenged increases in tuition fees and student debt, but also precarious researchers and academic staff. The proliferation of international surveys and self-surveys concerning the neoliberal takeover of Western universities has David Perluigi, “Ricercatori sui tetti e studenti in piazza a Roma,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, November 25, 2010. 70 Luigi Franco, “Università, i ricercatori salgono sui tetti. La protesta riparte da Torino, Roma e Salerno,” Il Fatto Quotidiano, November 13, 2010. 69

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often come from researchers who are themselves from the so-called precarious generation, as is the case in Italy (Giorgi et al. 2012; Coin, Giorgi and Murgia 2017; Bellofiore and Vertova 2018). One survey, Ricercarsi: Indagine sui percorsi di vita e lavoro nel precariato universitario (Seeking oneself: A survey of the life and career paths of the university precariat), coordinated by sociologist Emanuele Toscano and supported by the FLC-CGIL, was particularly significant (Toscano et al. 2014).71 The study focused on the spread of precarity and its impact on the lives of researchers in Italian universities. It was conceived of as a “research-action aimed at supporting a political mobilization addressing the condition of precarians in our country’s universities.” By analyzing data provided by the Education Ministry (Miur), the survey revealed that between 2003 and 2012 only 6.7% of the precarious researchers employed by the Italian universities had been stabilized, and there had been an exponential growth in non-permanent positions. The number of research fellows (assegnisti di ricerca) grew particularly fast, increasing from 10,251 in 2003 to 20,078 in 2012, with a particular surge after 2008. This investigation also revealed the negative impact of job precarity on researchers’ lives: they were an average age of 35 and 17% of them still lived at home with their parents, while 73% of them had no children. Of the researchers “expelled” from the university system, half were no longer working for the university due to the non-renewal of their contracts, while over a third were unemployed. In addition to living conditions, precarity also impacted the quality of their research: as many as 84% of the precarious researchers interviewed stated that their work had been harmed by their contractual situation, 43% admitted they were unable to work continuously, while 50% of were simply not able to imagine their career over the next ten years (Gianicola and Toscano 2017). During the crisis years university recruitment collapsed, which, if one adds retirements, meant a drastic reduction (-20%) of the permanent university teaching staff from 2008 to 2016. The high level of precarity affecting Italian universities had been fueled by a drastic reduction in the Fondo di finanziamento ordinario (The Ordinary Financing Fund, FFO) following the block of turnover in the whole public administration implemented at various levels after the Tremonti Decree (2008). The shrinking of the number of permanent staff was only partially compensated for by the recruitment of new fixed-term researchers, referred to as “B type” staff. The latter, according to the 2010 Gelmini law, were to have been given a path to a stable associate professor position. According to some studies, to assure sufficient turnover between 2018 and 2020, the number of B-type researchers required to replace those leaving was 4,000. Only 1,000 of The research team was composed of Emanuele Toscano, Francesca Coin, Orazio Giancola, and Francesco M. Vitucci.

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them had been recruited by 2016, while 3,000 researchers of the A-type were hired although 5,000 were needed (Rossi 2016).72 A survey of the university system provided by the Ministry of Education, University, and Research (MIUR 2018) underlines the impact on higher education of the turnover block and the proportion of non-tenured staff in Italian universities during the mid-2010s. In 2016, the personnel the MIUR defined as “teachers and researchers” amounted to 93,951, of whom a little more than half (48,878) were permanent and about 40% were women. The remaining 48% of staff were non-permanent and formed a true army of adjunct professors (25,770), accounting for 27.4% of the entire teaching and research staff, plus a significant number of research fellows (13,496) and a smaller number (5,557) of fixed-term (A and B) researchers. According to the MIUR in 2016, 50% of the teaching and research in Italian universities was done by precarious workers. During the years of the crisis, the average age of the researcher rose too, ranging from between 37 and 40 years. Moreover, after 2010 the position of researcher was no longer permanent. In 1980, when the position of “researcher” was created and thousands of precarious researchers were stabilized, the average age for a newly recruited researcher was 30 (Rossi 2016). A survey conducted by the Bologna and Emilia-Romagna branches of the FLC-CGIL, in collaboration with the network of precarious researchers and teaching staff employed at the University of Bologna, gathered data on the working and salary conditions of adjunct professors, who made up a quarter of all professors in the Italian university system.73 The rampant growth in the number of adjunct professors was mainly due to the hiring policies of the Universities, which were required to guarantee the survival of degree courses but could not hire permanent staff as turnover was blocked. The working and salary conditions of adjunct professors appeared particularly unsustainable. The “B series” lecturers generally had to work multiple jobs (at times in different universities) in order to earn a salary they could live on. Adjunct professors were formally paid between 25 and 100 euros gross hourly but only for official class hours. Thus, considering the parameters applied to the teaching load foreseen for the courses they held, adjunct professors found themselves being paid from a minimum of 3.75 to a maximum of 15 euro gross per hour.74 The survey revealed that in the University of Bologna, of the 544 active teaching contracts, 166 were taught by PhDs who had no It should be remembered that A-type and B-type researchers were affected by the turnover regulations. 73 Ilaria Venturi, “Il prof per campare fa le consegne,” la Repubblica, January 22, 2018; Venturi, “L’università sulle spalle dei precari: ‘Noi professori da 7 euro all’ora,’” la Repubblica, September 27, 2018; Lillo Montalto Monella, “Essere professore a contratto all’università… per 3,75 euro l’ora,” Euronews, January 26, 2018 . 74 A lecturer’s workload was estimated at 200 teaching hours, including those spent on advising students, grading exams, supervising dissertations, and preparing lectures. 72

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other jobs. About one hundred of the adjunct professors working at the University of Bologna at that time had taught there for over ten straight years. Adjunct professorship was designed originally “to meet particular, motivated educational needs,” but their number, in the course of fifteen years, had grown significantly from 16,274 in 1998 to over 25,000 in 2016, to compensate, during the years of the crisis, for the decreasing number of tenured professors. Adjunct professors are no longer entrusted with special or complementary courses but have proved, more and more frequently, vital to the survival of ordinary degree courses. According to some press reports, during the crisis, entire departments relied on adjunct professors.75 Given these rapidly deteriorating conditions for precarious research during the Great Recession, it is no surprise that universities became the site of mass protest, primarily against the “Gelmini Law” and for the extension of unemployment benefits to precarious researchers, which the Jobs Act had given to Co. Co.Co. workers (DIS-COLL). This created a significant convergence between the Association of Italian Phd Students and Researchers (ADI) and the FLCCGIL, as well as grassroots groups of researchers, especially research fellows. The “#perché noi no” (#why not us) campaign began in 2015 to make known the workplaces, skills, and faces of precarious researchers in Italian universities, starting an online petition for obtaining DIS-COLL unemployment benefits that gathered 10,000 signatures.76 Labor Minister Giuliano Poletti77 stirred up a public controversy when his ministry stated that researchers were to be excluded from the DIS-COLL unemployment benefit because they were not considered workers but “trainees,”78 leading to further mobilization.79 The precarious researchers claimed they were in fact workers just like other Co.Co.Co, workers and refused to be deprived of the rights assured to the latter. They started a slighting web campaign #iodihobbynehoaltri (#I have other hobbies) underlining the need to recognize research as work and not as a hobby, and they sent an open letter to the Education Minister Valeria Fedeli.80 The researchers won their fight on March 1, 2017, when Fabrizio Assandri, “Atenei, la rivolta dei docenti a contratto: ‘Facciamo didattica pagati 3 euro l’ora,’” La Stampa, November 17, 2017. 76 Public petitition, “Estensione indennità di disoccupazione (DIS-COLL) a dottorandi e assegnisti di ricerca,” https://www.change.org/p/ministro-del-lavoro-e-delle-politiche-sociali-estensione-indennit%C3%A0-di-disoccupazione-dis-coll-a-dottorandi-e-assegnisti-di-ricerca. 77 Open letter sent by the International Association of Italian Researchers to the Minister of Labor Giuliano Poletti on February 24, 2017. 78 Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche sociali-Direzione generale per l’attività ispettiva, Interpello no. 31/2015 (oggetto: art. 9, D.Lgs. no. 124/2004-Accesso dis-coll-art. 15, D.Lgs. no. 22/2015). 79 “I ricercatori italiani alzano la voce: “Senza di noi università al collasso,” CorriereUniv, January 16, 2017. 80 Open letter sent by researchers and PhD candidates, members of ADI e FLC-CGIL, to the Minister of Education, University and Research, Valeria Fedeli, dated February 22, 2017. 75

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they successfully got unemployment benefits extended to funded PhD students and research fellows.81 In the 2010s, the general crisis and the lack of funding experienced by the Italian universities generated numerous opportunities for national debate. Various proposals have been formulated since 2010 by diverse actors, who give voice to people working in Italian universities: from the platform drafted by the Coordinamento Nazionale Precari dell’Università della FLC-CGIL (2009) to the mobilization promoted by Rete29aprile, “Researchers for a public, free, open university.”82 The latter was born in the wake of a protest by fixed-term researchers against the Gelmini Law who went on a teaching strike. The last proposal, in chronological order, was the “Perché noi no?” platform, drafted jointly by the ADI and the FLC-CGIL in 2018. It underlines the persistent discrimination against precarious researchers, who had not been included in the stabilization mechanisms for employees in public administration.83 The platform contained proposals not unlike those made in the late seventies: a stabilization plan for people who had long been precarians, a return to an orderly and stable recruitment system, and a reform of the university pre-tenure system.

6.3.4 BEYOND PRECARITY: A CHARTER OF UNIVERSAL LABOR RIGHTS? All told, general precarization of labor means a change in the balance of power in places of production, in the labor market, and society itself; and this is true—and it is well to underline it strongly, because it is usually eradicated from neutral political-economic discourses based on the efficient use of the labor force—not only on the side, [we have] just examined, of labor relations, but also on that of individual labor relations. In fact, the precarization of these inevitably produces an imbalance of power within the contractual exchange between entrepreneur and worker, forcing the latter, permanently subjected to employment blackmail, to yield fully to the pressure of the employer as regards the daily organization of work.84

Valentina Santarpia, “Assegno di disoccupazione anche ai ricercatori: primo sì del governo,” Corriere della Sera, March 2, 2017. 82 Researchers for a public, free, open university. Qualifying points of the Rete29Aprile (2010). 83 On the basis of which those who worked, even if not continuously, for the public administrations for a period of three years could become stabilized. See Minister for Simplification and Public Administration, “Indirizzi operativi in materia di valorizzazione dell’esperienza professionale del personale con contratto flessibile e superamento del precariato,” circular letter 3/2017. 84 Chamber of Deputies, XVII Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” popular bill “Carta dei diritti universali del lavoro. Nuovo statuto di tutte le lavoratrici e di tutti i lavoratori,” announced on September 29, 2016. 81

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The reunification of labor and the extension of social rights beyond precarity became one of the qualifying points of the action not only of social movements, but also of trade unions during the years following the 2008 crisis. On September 29, 2016, a petition with 1.5 million signatures was delivered to the Italian Parliament in support of the bill “Nuovo statuto di tutte le lavoratrici e di tutti i lavoratori” (New Statute of All Female and Male Workers”), referred to as the “Carta dei diritti universali del lavoro” (Charter of Universal Labor Rights).85 The petition campaign spread across Italy: the CGIL’s “coach of rights” stopped in 200 cities; stalls to collect signatures were put in schools, universities, and markets; there were musical performances for youth; an intense social media campaign; and 40,000 meetings were held in workplaces.86 The Charter criticized precarization and proposed a radical rethinking of labor relations in the country, seeking to reaffirm “long-term, stable work relations,” meaning permanent, full-time employment, as the norm for Italian workers. It demanded that universal social rights, considered citizenship rights, should be assured for all workers regardless of type of work contract they held. It called for the reinstatement of protections against firing, previously given to permanent employees by Article 18 of the Statute of Workers’ Rights of 1970 and removed by reforms during the Great Recession. Finally, the Charter proposed reforming legislation on trade unions, to help trade unions reassert themselves as central to the workers’ movement,87 reforming the employment court processes, and restoring the right of workers to appeal directly to the courts. The 2016 Charter had been inspired by a previous bill presented in 200288 by Tiziano Treu, former secretary-general of the CGIL, Antonio Pizzinato, and other members of the left-wing Ulivo (forerunner of today’s PD). The 2002 bill sought to establish a corpus of fundamental rights, safeguards, and guarantees, including over twenty types of rights, for all men and women. The Charter of Universal Labor Rights of 2016 aimed at reinstating and extending the 1970 Statute of Workers’ Rights, reforming the entire structure of labor relations in Italy, and equalizing protections for standard employees, Co.Co.Co. workers, and the self-employed.89 It proposed the drastic scaling Ibid. Andrea Di Nicola, “Una raccolta di firme senza precedenti,” Rassegna sindacale, September 28, 2016. 87 Defining a system of collective bargaining capable of ensuring universal application of the contractual rules. Ibid. 88 Senate of the Republic, XIV Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti,” bill by senators Giuliano Amato, Tiziano Treu et al., “Carta dei diritti delle lavoratrici e dei lavoratori,” announced on December 4, 2002. 89 Chamber of Deputies, XVII Legislature, “Disegni di Legge e Relazioni, Documenti.” The bill was started by popular initiative “Carta dei diritti universali del lavoro. Nuovo statuto di tutte le lavoratrici e di tutti i lavoratori,” announced on September 29, 2016. Esmeralda Rizzi, “Una battaglia che può unire i sindacati europei,” Rassegna Sindacale, May 4, 2016; Stefano Iucci, “Una Carta per il dialogo sociale,” collettiva.it, November 10, 2016. 85 86

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down of flexible contracts, abolishing on-call jobs, radically limiting accessory work, imposing a stricter regulation on fixed-term and temp agency work, reforming apprenticeship and part-time work, and introducing forms of protection for workers involved in subcontracting and company transfers. The bill received significant international publicity through the efforts of its very active promoters: on November 11, 2016, it was presented in Geneva at the headquarters of the International Labor Organization (ILO) before its Director General Guy Rider. In the spring of the same year, it was presented to the European Parliament (May 4, 2016), sent to the European Trade Union Confederation (CES), and to the International Trade Union Confederation (CSI). The Charter was, according to its promoters, a starting point for a broader European discussion on the crucial role of labor in overcoming the crisis. The Charter was also the contribution of the CGIL to the initiative The Future of Work, promoted by the ILO for its centenary (2019). The Charter of Universal Labor Rights, although not yet a state law, was a substantial break with the previous twenty years of Italian labor law, incorporating some of the bills combating precarity formulated from the mid-aughts on.

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EPILOGUE

T

he outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the global responses to it have exacerbated the social contradictions related to job precarity. Italy was one of the first European countries to be hit by the pandemic and the early lockdown, beginning in March 2020. The diverse restraints imposed on economic sectors deepened the existing inequalities between stable and precarious workers, making obvious the lack of adequate protections and income support for precarians.1 Food service and tourism workers, particularly women, were badly affected by the lockdown and by the long-term effects of reduced mobility. The Conte government’s emergency measures to deal with the loss or suspension of jobs provided precarians with only a very modest compensation. The most precarious people, such as on-call workers, have been covered neither by unemployment insurance nor by other emergency measures, preserving their jobs only on paper. The lockdown put a legal halt on the work of many men and women but revealed an enormous amount of under-the-table work that had been going on in Italy, particularly in large cities, where protests and social crises have been reported. The political mobilization in spring 2020 for the so-called “quarantine salary,” put forward by various fringes of the precarian movement, have shown the relevance and long endurance of the precarity/welfare nexus, as well as the importance of struggles for “classification” discussed in this book. In Italy only the health system has a universal character, thus the distribution of income subsidies in case of not working depends on the typology of the contract and its duration. At the beginning of the “second wave” of the epidemic, full-fledged anti-lockdown protests multiplied as new restrictions were announced by the Conte government in October 2020, with unrest in Naples, Turin, Palermo, Milan, and many other cities.2 The political struggles of March 2020 were mostly waged by grassroots self-organized movements, protesting their exclusion from the welfare state, because they were considered temporary, freelance, or were simply invisible. The culture and entertainment industry, which suffered greatly and was not taken into account by the emergency pandemic measures, saw a rash of protests Janine Berg, “Lavoratori precari spinti al limite dall’emergenza Covid-19,” Osservatorio OIL, Covid-19 e mondo del lavoro, March 25, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/rome/risorse-informative/articles/WCMS_740110/lang--it/index.htm. 2 “Proteste in tutta Italia contro le chiusure anti-Covid. Devastazioni a Torino e Milano. A Napoli in migliaia davanti alla Regione,” Il Fatto quotidiano, October 26, 2020. 1

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in autumn 2020 that took the form of concerts and plays, like the performance “I bauli in piazza” (Trunks in the Square) staged in Piazza del Duomo in Milan on October 11, 2020.3 Several protests came out of the desire of the protesters to assert their existence in a society that had rendered their work invisible, such as the free concerts “Music from the Windows” staged by the musicians of Teatro Argentina of Rome in July 2020.4 The measures introduced to deal with the pandemic, like the total lockdown from March to April 2020 and the restraints imposed upon certain economic sectors, have produced enormous instability for the lives of both working men and women, especially in that the pandemic led to the disappearance of many jobs. There was a decree prohibiting the firing of workers, which was extended up to March 31, 2021, but it did not include many precarious workers,5 like temporary workers with contracts close to expiry or on-call workers who were not actually working. The extended cassa integrazione (furlough scheme) only protects full-time employees with open-ended contracts from firings. In an economic and social situation dominated by the pandemic and lockdowns, new forms of work organization have emerged. So-called “smart working” or “telework” raised new challenges, like increased workloads for some workers, particularly women and those in education.6 Online teaching, which began in the spring of 2020 for all education levels including universities, had a systemic negative impact on workers, students, and their parents.7 Teachers had to learn new ways of interacting with the students and new teaching methods and tools.8 Inequalities in access to electronic devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones, as well as the limited network of high-speed internet in Italy, drove many parents, students, and teachers to strongly oppose online learning at the beginning of the 2020–2021 school year.9 Piero Colaprico, “Bauli in piazza: perché lo spettacolo non può diventare l’isola che non c’è,” la Repubblica, October 12, 2020. 4 Peppe Aquaro, “Musica dalle finestre del teatro Argentina tra il sax di Taddei e l’omaggio a Fellini,” Il Corriere della Sera, July 2, 2020. 5 “Conte: blocco licenziamenti prolungato al 21 marzo, cassa Covid sarà gratuita per datori lavoro,” Il Sole 24 ore, October 30, 2020. 6 Michela Aprea, “Non chiamatelo smart working,” Ingenere, September 11, 2020. 7 See, for instance, the enquiries analysing students’ and teachers’ opinions: Terres des hommes, “La scuola digitale per la generazioneZ. L’impatto dell’emergenza Covid-19 sugli studenti italiani e scenari futuri,” https://terredeshommes.it/pdf/2020_Osservatorio_GenZ_OneDay_Scuola.pdf; “Fare scuola da casa a casa. Indagine nazionale docenti sulla didattica a distanza,” Scuola.net,https://scuola.net/uploads/media/default/0001/03/3920763f179f86a00942d5e41479ff0baa1ca960.pdf. 8 For the comprehensive effects of online teaching: Fondazione Giuseppe di Vittorio, “La scuola ‘restata a casa,’ Organizzazione, didattica e lavoro durante il lockdown per la pandemia di Covid-19,” working paper 2/2020, https://www.fondazionedivittorio.it/sites/default/files/ content-attachment/Ricerca%20DAD_FDV-WP-2-2020.pdf. 9 See, for instance, the new student movement “School for the Future,” “Covid, nasce il movimento ‘Schools for future’ contro la didattica a distanza,” November 14, 2020, https://www. 3

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In universities, the disparity between full-time lecturers and precarious ones has become obvious as working time for both has multiplied through online classes. And while tenured professors and researchers have had their work negatively impacted by heightened teaching loads, precarious ones have been much more severely affected as they are paid for a set amount of hours per year, meaning an increased teaching load for them is simply additional unpaid labor, or put differently a dramatic downsizing in their hourly wage. To this we should add the disparity in the timing of the payments themselves. While tenured and precarious lecturers had equally provided online teaching during the lockdown, the latter were paid only at the end of the year’s contract with no changes during the Covid-19 pandemic. The additional effort and the difficult economic conditions for temporary teaching and research staff has not been a major subject of discussion within universities. The terms of the employment contract have remained the same as they were before the pandemic. If precarious university workers contracted Covid-19 while teaching “in-person,” they received no sick leave and would simply be suspended. For years, there have been studies of labor precarity in connection with workers’ health, highlighting the negative effects of the former on the latter in terms of greater risks, fewer protections, and strong mental and physical stress from being stuck for too many years in precarious conditions.10 The connection between work and health has been an interest of the workers’ movement throughout its history, particularly in the 1970s,11 when the organization of labor and the configuration of the workplace was questioned and a new system to control risk and provide protections was put in place. From the point of view of the labor movement, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the emergence of other aspects that deserve to be mentioned, namely the need to adopt protective measures to avoid infection. The complaints voiced by food delivery workers as well as doctors and nurses, lacking face masks and gloves, has shown the importance of re-thinking the relationship among health, work, and prevention. In the case of delivery drivers, the advent of the “sharing economy” and their new status as “independent” contractors for companies like Uber and Lyft has left these workers in a situation in which their employers do not need to provide them personal protective equipment.12 These workers have staged public protests on a number ansa.it/sito/notizie/cronaca/2020/11/13/covid-la-protesta-contro-la-scuola-a-distanza-siestende-al-resto-d-italia_6aa4f2ca-6b89-4308-8b0f-105ac0ecfdd2.html. 10 See, for instance, the recent comparative studies: Nuria Matilla-Santander at al., “Precarious employment and health-related outcomes in the European Union: a cross-sectional study,” Critical Public Health, March 15, 2019. 11 Pietro Causarano, “Prévention à l’italienne: la révolution des années 1970,” Santé et travail, April 2010. 12 Alessandro Trocino, “Coronavirus, la protesta dei rider: ‘La nostra salute vale più di un sushi o di una pizza,’ Il Corriere della Sera, March 12, 2020.

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of occasions, but have only recently produced any positive results, while the growing regional lockdowns are making their work vital for the survival of the food service industry. As health services are a predominantly female industry, women have been in the front line in dealing with Covid-19 and its consequences in hospitals and in assisted-living facilities. Also because most cleaning staff are women, they are the ones most often responsible for sanitization. This is a massive number of women, many of whom are migrants, with low wages and frequently temporary contracts. Women are also the majority of cashiers in grocery stores. It is hardly surprising, then, that women make up 70% of the 54,000 Covid-19 infections registered by INAIL (National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work).14 Moreover, the inquiries and studies conducted during the lockdowns in spring 2020 have shown the persistence, and even the worsening, of inequalities in caregiving within families.15 Women workers engaged in smart working often have had difficulties in getting their spouses and/or family members to see them as workers in addition to caregivers. During the March–April 2020 lockdown “homeworking” often turned out to be doubly hard for women, forced to juggle between fulfilling their work duties and perform caregiving, made even more burdensome as nurseries, schools, and after-school activities shut down.16 In conclusion, the policies of the Italian government vis-à-vis precarity during the Covid-19 pandemic have been largely in response to the growing protests in various industries and by the worst-hit workers, but they been ambivalent. On the one hand, there was a genuine attempt by the government to deal with the problem of millions of workers not covered by the income support plan that had been given only to stable employees. On the other, such steps have merely been emergency measures that are significantly limited in terms of beneficiaries and time-span. If the creation of “emergency income” was an attempt to help those excluded from other forms of support, the sharp rise in poverty after the lockdown, which affected thousands of families where people had lost their jobs, has revealed the inadequacies of such a government instrument. 13

Marco Patucchi, “I rider scioperano e chiedono solidarietà a tutti noi: ‘Per un giorno rinunciate al food delivery,’” la Repubblica, October 30, 2020. 14 INAIL, “I dati sulle denunce da Covid-19,” https://www.inail.it/cs/internet/docs/alg-scheda-tecnica-contagi-covid-30-settembre-2020.pdf, updated at Septermber 30, 2020. 15 “Quando lavorare da casa è … smart. Prima Indagine CGIL/Fondazione di Vittorio sullo Smart working,” May 18, 2020, http://www.CGIL.it/admin_nv47t8g34/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Indagine_CGIL-Fdv_Smart_working.pdf; UDI, Sondaggio smart working al tempo del Covid, October 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iOu34D-O_0Z27DyuAV9JtWKz1f7Mgbto/view. 16 See, for instance, Sandra Burchi, “Lavorare a casa non è smart,” Ingenere, March 17, 2020. 13

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As has become clear through the repeated protests in the healthcare industry, the Conte government has not prioritized resolving the problem of precarious work. On May 29, 2020, young doctors protested precarity in the National Health Service.17 Job recruitment in 2020 has continued to be based on merely emergency criteria. Even during the pandemic, employers have continued to prefer precarious work to stable work with serious and unexpected consequences. Schools are an exemplary case of this, as new staff have been hired not only as temporary workers but can be laid off in the event of further lockdowns with no unemployment benefits.18 Although this measure was later amended, it did not help attract the teaching staff needed for the new school year,19 as people feared the risks of teaching in-person, particularly in primary schools, where in the 2020–2021 school year classroom teaching is required. The long-lasting problem of precarity in the public sector, like in education and healthcare, has reared its head again in the face of the pandemic and the government response to it has found no resolutions.

Michele Lapini, “Giovani medici in Piazza a Bologna: ‘Dopo la laurea mancano posti nelle specialità,’” la Repubblica, May 29, 2020. 18 Roberto Ciccarelli, “Scuola, cinquantamila precari in più licenziabili e senza indennità di disoccupazione,” Il Manifesto, August 10, 2020. 19 Corrado Zunino, “Scuola, a un mese dall’avvio mancano migliaia di prof,” la Repubblica, October 16, 2020. 17

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INDEX

Accornero, Aris, 166, 176, 178 Agnelli, Giovanni, 117 Agostini, Roberta, 201n Alberti, Manfredi, 9, 14, 16 Albini, Tea, 201n Almirante, Giorgio, 137 Amato, Giuliano, 148, 162–63, 219n Andreucci, Samuele, 66 Andriani, Silvano, 21 Anselmi, Tina, 85, 96, 137 Argentin, Ileana, 201 Armano, Emiliana, 187 Arriola, Joaquin, 165 Atkinson, John, 114, 116 Azimonti, Pierino, 67 Ballarino, Gabriele, 179 Baratto, Patrizia, 138 Barberis, Corrado, 91 Barbier, Jean-Claude, 142 Bascetta, Marco, 187 Basile, Rossella, 2009 Bassolino, Antonio, 119 Bauer, Riccardo, 21, 34 Beau, Sophie, 2 Beccattini, Giacomo, 118 Beck, Ulrick, 115–16, 142 Bei, Adele, 59 Benedict XVII, 177 Berlusconi, Silvio, 151, 152n, 156, 162, 166, 197–98, 207, 209 Bersani, Pierluigi, 201 Berta, Giuseppe, 7 Bertani, Eletta, 31 Bertinelli, Virginio, 71 Bettoli, Mario, 62–63, 66n, 74 Biagi, Marco, 151–52 Biagi law, 11, 155, 157, 161, 162, 166, 175–77, 211

Precarious Workers.indd 251

Bianchi, Fortunato, 74n Bianchi, Patrizio, 134–35 Biggeri, Luigi, 160, 166n Bindi, Rosy, 201 Bo, Giorgio, 29 Boccia, Francesco, 201 Boffardi, Ines, 86, 137 Bologna, Sergio, 102, 147, 165 Boltansky, Luc, 142 Bon, Giovanni, 93 Bourdieu, Pierre, 22 Boyer, Robert, 116 Bray, Massimo, 201n Breganze, Uberto, 66 Brodolini, Giacomo, 66, 67, 73, 82 Bronzini, Giuseppe, 187 Brusco, Sebastiano, 93, 94 Buffo, Gloria, 157 Butera, Franco, 135 Butté, Alessandro, 48, 59, 63 Buttiglione, Rocco, 153n Cacciatore, Francesco, 76 Calamandrei, Piero, 15, 47 Calamida, Franco, 124 Calvi, Ettore, 48, 62, 63, 66 Capecchi, Vittorio, 94 Capodicasa, Angelo, 201n Cappugi, Renato, 61n, 64n, 65n Caprara, Massimo, 56, 66 Capucci, Valeria, 10 Caracausi, Andrea, 10 Carra, Marco, 201 Carrieri, Mimmo, 178 Caruso, Francesco Saverio, 158 Casalena, Maria Pia, 9 Casini, Pierferdinando, 154 Castellina, Luciana, 28 Causarano, Pietro, 10

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252 Cavriglia, Antonio, 85 Cazzola, Giuliano, 166 Cenni, Susanna, 201n Cento, Pier Paolo, 156 Cerusici, Tommaso, 10 Cesareo, Vicenzo, 135 Cessari, Aldo, 62 Champy, James, 114 Chiappello, Eve, 142 Chicchi, Federico, 143, 187 Ciccarelli, Roberto, 187 Cimbro, Eleonora, 201 Cinciari Rodano, Maria Lisa, 71, 72 Cipressi, Pierpaolo, 60 Coin, Francesca, 187, 188, 215n Colamonaco, Maria, 31 Colombo, Vittorino, 74 Colucci, Michele, 195 Comandini, Federico, 66n Coppo, Dionigi, 86n Cristoni, Paolo, 127, 128 Cuperlo, Gianni, 201 Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, 97 D’Amato, Carlo, 211n D’Antona, Massimo, 151 D’Attorre, Alfredo, 201n De Angelis, Gianluca, 193 De Benedetti, Augusto, 9 De Bernardi, Alberto, 17 De Lauro Matera, Anna, 70n, 71 De Lorenzo, Giovanni, 75 De Luca, Michele, 147n De Michelis, Gianni, 120–21, 124, 126 De Vito, Christian, 9, 12 Del Vecchio Guelfi, Ada, 70 della Vedova, Benedetto, 199 Delle Fave, Umberto, 29, 59, 66n, 75 Di Giulio, Fernando, 85 Di Giuseppe, Anita, 210 Di Muro, Flavio, 210 Di Vittorio, Giuseppe, 210 Diamanti, Ilvo, 177 Dolci, Danilo, 17 Dominedò, Francesco Maria, 66n Epifani, Guglielmo, 153–54, 201 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 142 Evangelisti, Valerio, 112, 165

Precarious Workers.indd 252

Indec Fana, Marta, 187, 192 Fanfani, Amintore, 19, 66 Fanti, Guido, 33 Farina, Gianni, 201n Fassina, Stefano, 201n Fedeli, Valeria, 217 Federici, Nora, 29 Felice, Emanuele, 4 Ferioli, Alberto, 66 Ferrante, Pia, 36 Ferrari Aggradi, Mario, 76n Ferrari, Giorgio, 123 Ferrera, Maurizio, 176 Foa, Vittorio, 23, 25–27, 45n, 46–47 Fontanelli, Paolo, 201n Fornero, Elsa, 198, 205, 207, 210 Fortuna, Loris, 76 Fossati, Filippo, 201 Francescato, Grazia, 137 Franchi, Maura, 136, 137–39 Frattini, Franco, 152n Frey, Luigi, 93, 96, 97, 115 Fuà, Giorgio, 16, 19–21, 24 Fumagalli, Andrea, 143, 147, 165, 187, 191 Galli, Carlo, 201n Gallino, Luciano, 141, 142, 176, 177, 178, 184, 196 Gallo, Stefano, 41, 195 Garavini, Sergio, 93 Garibaldo, Francesco, 119 Gatti Caporaso, Elena, 34, 59 Gatti, Maria Grazia, 209n Gava, Silvio, 82n Gelmini, Mariastella, 190, 214–15, 217–28 Gessi, Nives, 84 Ghezzi, Giorgio, 143 Giacomoni, Sestino, 161n Giancola, Orazio, 215n Ginsborg, Paul, 7 Giolitti, Antonio, 20, 104n Giovagnoli, Agostino, 5, 7–8 Giovanardi, Alfredo, 85n Giudici, Doriana, 138 Giugni, Gino, 68, 121, 125, 127, 143, 148, 211 Gonnella, Guido, 66, 70n Goria, Giovanni, 124, 126 Graziani, Augusto, 120 Gregori, Monica, 201n

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Index Guerrieri, Emanuele, 66n Gui, Luigi, 29 Hammer, Michael, 114 Hardt, Michael, 167n Harrison, Bennet, 114 Harvey, David, 116 Hatton, Erin, 2 Iacono, Maria, 201n Ichino, Pietro, 143–44, 177 Iotti, Nilde, 30–32, 84 John XXIII, 63 Knotter, Ad, 3 La Loggia, Enrico, 152n la Malfa, Ugo, 104n Laforgia, Francesco, 201n Lama, Luciano, 23, 25, 73, 75, 81 Lauricella, Salvatore, 105n Leleux, Marc, 3 Leogrande, Alessandro, 211–12 Leonardi, Franco, 16 Leonardi, Salvo, 178 Lerner, Gad, 101–2, 205 Lizzadri, Oreste, 49, 56, 58n, 61–62, 73, 74 Lorusso, Francesco, 101 Maccarrone, Vincenzo, 187 Madia, Marianna, 199 Madonna, Serena, 28 Maglietta, Clemente, 62–63, 66n, 67, 72 Magnani, Noya Maria, 85, 86 Malfatti, Franco, 104, 108 Malisani, Gianna, 201n Manacorda, Paola, 119, 120 Manca, Enrico, 121 Mancini, Federico, 68 Mancini, Giacomo, 29 Mancini, Vincenzo, 82, 85n, 123 Mandelli, Walter, 117 Manfroi, Donato, 211n Marcellino, Nella, 32 Marianetti, Agostino, 121, 125 Mariotti, Luigi, 44 Mariucci, Luigi, 4, 83, 92, 111, 128, 143, 197, 202, 203 Maroni, Roberto, 152n Marrone, Marco, 193

Precarious Workers.indd 253

253

Martelloni, Federico, 150, 197 Martini, Maria Eletta, 34 Marzano, Michela, 201n Massucco, Costa, Angiola, 32 Mastella, Clemente, 128n Mattoni, Alice, 169 Melandri, Lea, 171 Meldolesi, Luca, 89, 91–93 Merlin, Lina, 70–72 Minghini, Cesare, 10 Miotto, Margherita, 201n Mognato, Michele, 201n Montessoro, Antonio, 124 Monti, Mario, 190, 198–99, 207, 210 Montuschi, Luigi, 67 Moratti, Letizia, 214 Moretti, Mauro, 109, 214 Morini, Cristina, 187, 188 Mortati, Costantino, 46 Murgia, Annalisa, 4, 169, 174 Murgia, Michela, 174 Murotti, Marta, 32 Musso, Stefano, 6 Natoli, Ugo, 47 Negri, Toni, 167 Nenni, Pietro, 75 Nespoli, Francesco, 192 Nicchi, Marisa, 210n Noce, Teresa, 46–47, 59, 64n, 65 Nogler, Luca Novella, Agostino, 23, 26–27, 45n, 46–47 Ortona, Silvio, 64n, 65, 66 Ottaviano, Vittorio, 16 Paci, Massimo, 89–91, 93 Paladini, Giovanni, 210n Papi, Ugo, 22 Pasquato, Michelangelo, 77 Passaniti, Paolo, 4 Pastore, Giulio, 58–59, 61, 62, 64n, 65–66 Paugam, Serge, 142 Pazzaglia, Alfredo, 137n Penazzato, Dino, 50 Pennacchi, Laura, 186 Pera, Marcello, 154 Perina, Flavia, 210n Pesenti, Antonio, 50–51

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254 Piazza, Camillo, 159n Pieraccini, Giovanni, 29–30, 32–33 Piermartini, Gabriele, 127n, 128 Piore, Michael, 114 Pizzinato, Antonio, 134, 219 Poletti, Giuliano, 205, 207, 217 Poli, Antonio, 210n Pollastrini, Barbara, 201n Porciani, Ilaria, 109 Prodi, Romano (governo), 9, 11, 155, 156, 161, 177, 209 Pugliese, Enrico, 161, 179–80, 194–96 Rampa, Leandro, 84 Rapelli, Giuseppe, 48, 59 Re, Giuseppina, 71n, 72 Reagan, Ronald, 112 Reale, Oronzo, 76n Regalia, Ida, 178 Regini, Mario, 133, 178 Renzi, Matteo, 190, 198, 202, 204, 205, 207, 210 Repetto, Margherita, 100 Reyneri, Emilio, 166 Ricolfi, Luca, 166 Rider, Guy, 220 Ridolfi, Maurizio, 8 Rizza, Roberto, 143 Rocchi, Augusto, 160n Rodgers, Gerry, 116 Rodgers, Janine, 11, 116 Rodotà, Stefano, 157 Romagnoli, Umberto, 4, 143, 203 Rossanda, Rossana, 101 Rossi di Montelera, Luigi, 125, 126n Rubinacci, Leopoldo, 51, 53 Russo Spena, Raffaello, 76 Sabattini, Claudio, 94 Sabel, Charles, 114 Sacconi, Maurizio, 207 Salmartini, Barbara, 210n Salmieri, Luca, 3 Salvati, Mariuccia, 9 Salvati, Michele, 9, 111–12, 118 Salvemini, Gaetano, 17 Salvi, Giovanni, 25n Santoro Passarelli, Francesco, 61 Santucci, Rosario, 163

Precarious Workers.indd 254

Indec Saraceno, Pasquale, 19, 20, 22 Sarti, Adolfo, 109 Scalfari, Eugenio, 176 Scarpa, Sergio, 59 Scotti, Enzo, 121–22, 124 Scovacricchi, Martino, 137n Sennet, Richard, 142 Severgnini, Beppe, 189 Sgarbi Bompani, Luciana, 84–86 Shaukat Saffia, Elisa, 2 Spagnoli, Ugo, 75n Spano, Spartaco, 63 Standing, Guy, 116, 164, 169, 206 Storti, Bruno, 62, 66, 76 Sullo, Fiorentino, 66 Sulotto, Egidio, 74–75 Supiot, Alain, 144–45 Sylos Labini, Paolo, 10, 15, 25–34, 89, 90–93, 165 Tassinari, Arianna, 187 Tassinari, Giorgio, 186 Tedeschi, Nadir, 137 Tedesco, Giglia, 30 Terrosi, Alessandra, 201n Terzi, Riccardo, 32 Tesini, Alessandro, 93 Thatcher, Margaret, 113 Tiddi, Andrea, 143 Tiraboschi, Michele, 162, 164 Tooze, Adam, 9, 183 Toscano, Emanuele, 215 Tremelloni, Roberto, 71n Trentin, Bruno, 117, 134, 178 Treu, Tiziano, 11, 144, 148–50, 162–63, 165, 176, 178, 180, 211, 219 Treves, Claudio, 180 Tronti, Mario, 167 Turco, Livia, 139 Turone, Danielle, 137 Turtura, Donatella, 22, 25–27, 31 Valandro, Gigliola, 59 Validutti, Salvatore, 109 van der Linden, Marcel, 2 Vasapollo, Luciano, 165 Vecchietti, Tullio, 82n Vendola, Nicola, 210n Ventre, Antonio, 128n

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Index

255

Verrocchio, Ariella, 3 Vigevani, Fausto, 134 Viscomi, Antonio, 163 Vito, Francesco, 22 Vittore, Annalisa, 138 Vitucci, Francesco M., 215n Voltolina, Eleonora, 189 Vosko, Leah, 2 Wolleb, Enrico, 116–18 Zaccagnini, Benigno, 63, 66 Zanibelli, Amos, 66, 67n Zappulla, Giuseppe, 201n Zatterin, Ugo, 25n Zazzara, Gilda, 5 Zoboli, Antonio, 66n Zoggia, Davide, 201n Zoppoli, Lorenzo, 163

Precarious Workers.indd 255

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