SYNDICATES AND CORPORATIONS

The Matteotti affair and the 3rd of January speech encouraged the Fascist syndicates to be more militant in their continuing circular pursuit of the industrial working-class support which would oblige employers to take them seriously as workers’ representatives in contractural negoti-ations and labour disputes. During the general crisis of confidence in Mussolini’s government in late 1924, there were signs and fears of revived working-class agitation, stimulated as well by rising inflation which fed into higher wages demands in early 1925. Anti-employer militancy was also fuelled by the party’s offensive under Farinacci against Fascism’s lukewarm and opportunistic fellow-travellers, including businessmen unsympathetic to dealing with the syndicates.

Both Farinacci and Rossoni initially supported the metallurgical workers’

strike for higher wages and union recognition rather improbably called by the Fascist syndicates in Brescia under the guidance of the provincial ras, Turati, in March 1925. The spread of the strikes throughout the industry brutally revealed the dilemma of the Fascist syndicates’ pos-ition. The strike took hold only because the CGL-affiliated metalworkers union, FIOM, called out the bulk of men who remained loyal to their non-Fascist unions. What Mussolini called ‘the race to be the reddest’⁸ exposed the persisting isolation of Fascist syndicates among workers, and was contributing to the resurgence of labour agitation led by the old unions. The strikes were the final and fatal demonstration that the syndicates could not capture industrial workers or impress employers, using trade-union tactics in a normal competitive situation. They depended on the support of the party and state authorities to achieve the monopoly of labour representation they wanted.

The strike’s settlement by PNF and state mediation, pointedly exclud-ing the FIOM, anticipated in microcosm the general arrangement between the Fascist syndicates confederation and Confindustria in October 1925.

The so-called Palazzo–Vidoni pact made explicit what had been intimated in the 1923 Palazzo–Chigi agreement. The industrial employers recognised the Fascist syndicates as the sole representatives of labour. The workers’

elective factory councils, which had socialist and communist majorities as late as 1925, were abolished. Significantly, the employers would not agree to them being replaced by the syndicates’ own fiduciari di fabbrica, factory ‘trustees’ or agents. This meant that the syndicates had no presence beyond the factory gates, and managerial authority in the factories was preserved.

The agreement was effectively written into the institutional struc-tures of the Fascist state. Rocco’s April 1926 law on the judicial regula-tion of labour relaregula-tions stipulated that only the single organisaregula-tions legally recognised by the state could negotiate collective labour con-tracts binding on the relevant branch of production as a whole. These, of course, in industry were Confindustria and the Fascist industrial syndi-cates. The syndicates’ minority position on the ground had been trans-formed into a legal monopoly of workers’ representation. Other organisations could exist as de facto bodies under Rocco’s law, but deprived of the legal right to negotiate labour contracts they simply atrophied. Both the CGL and the CIL dissolved themselves in 1927.

Catholic Action kept alive a semblance of Catholic labour organisation under the guise of training and welfare, while allowing Catholics to join the syndicates. The Rocco law also made illegal strikes and lockouts, the normal levers of pressure for workers and employers in a liberal economy. Instead the law created labour courts as the final stage of a process of compulsory arbitration of labour disputes.

The Rocco law and the way it was implemented reflected the balance between various social and economic forces being incorporated into the framework of the Fascist state and, in particular, the power of the industrialists’ interest group, Confindustria. Since as a result of the Matteotti crisis a Fascist ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship was being created, Confindustria recognised that they would have to enter some formal, institutional relationship with the Fascist state. Their aim was to safeguard their inter-ests within the new structures. This meant consolidating definitively the gains arising from the Fascist defeat of the Socialist Party and labour movement, and also maintaining their organisational independence against ‘integral syndicalism’. Industrialists were as much afraid of the syndicates’ reliance on party and state support as their reviving labour militancy in 1925. State intervention in and regulation of labour relations and economic matters might threaten the autonomy of private enterprise and the freedom of business to make its own decisions about production.

The syndical law and what followed indicated the extent to which Mussolini’s concern to secure industry’s support and co-operation with

the government compromised the corporatist drift of Fascism. The gradual and piecemeal evolution of the corporative system, rather than its systematic, once-and-for-all establishment, was itself a mark of Confin-dustria’s successful resistance to the realisation of the corporative idea.

Rocco’s law actually dealt with labour relations and the negotiation of collective contracts between separate organisations of workers and employers in each area of production. It was not really a full-fledged corporative reform, with ‘mixed syndicates’ or corporations, unitary bodies bringing together under a single hierarchy all the people involved in production, employers, workers and technical-managerial staff, and actually organising and planning production. The law allowed but did not oblige the setting up of fledgling corporations as ‘organs of co-ordination’

of the syndical associations. This was perhaps enough to suggest that a corporative system was in the making. But the facility to form corpor-ations was never actually exercised nor contemplated by industrial employers, before the legal creation of corporations in 1934.

Corporative hopes were rather vested in the new Ministry of Corpor-ations, set up in July 1926. This was meant to supervise the legally recognised syndical bodies and facilitate the stipulation of collective labour contracts. The nominal Minister was Mussolini, and the Under-Secretary between November 1926 and September 1929, when he was made Minister, was the ex-revisionist, Bottai. He intended to make the Ministry the state’s central economic planning and co-ordinating body, managing a corporatively organised economy staffed by Fascism’s new technocratic and administrative élite. Predictably enough, Bottai’s parvenu and predatory Ministry was obstructed and ostracised by the existing Economics Ministry. He found it difficult to take the Ministry’s activity beyond the bureaucratic regulation of the syndical bodies’ affairs and the conciliation of labour disputes, while the corporations had no legal standing or existence. Between 1926 and 1934 there was a Ministry of Corporations with no actual corporations to direct.

Bottai was given the job of producing the ‘Charter of Labour’, defining Fascism’s social principles. But the final draft approved and publicised by the Grand Council in 1927 was Rocco’s work. It once again mirrored that balance in favour of employers limiting the scope of the syndical law.

The Charter spoke of corporations organising production as if they already existed; recognised private enterprise as the most efficient way of production; and outlined some workers’ rights in terms of employment and social insurance and welfare provision. Far from meeting Rossoni’s demands for a full and definitive statement of legally binding workers’

rights, the Charter was a general indication of intent, having the force of suggestion rather than the force of law.

Bottai, however, with the support of the PNF and Confindustria, was instrumental in bringing about the sbloccamento or dismantling of Rossoni’s national confederation of workers’ syndicates in November 1928. This was fragmented into a number of separate confederations covering workers in the various branches of the economy. From Bottai’s perspective, it was a ‘corporative’ reform, since it broke up a large labour confedera-tion of nearly three million members still organised on class lines and with a class mentality. Forming several workers’ associations, which were exactly symmetrical to employers’ organisations in industry, agri-culture and the services, would apparently facilitate inter-class co-operation and the co-ordination of the different sectors of production under the state control of the Ministry of Corporations. This was a profound miscalculation, later regretted by Bottai. He assumed that corporative planning under the state’s auspices would involve the state’s direction of both employers and labour. But the sbloccamento clearly weakened the political and economic muscle of labour organisations with respect to the employers. Most immediately, it deprived the workers’ syndicates of the full weight of a unitary confederation in settling labour contracts and disputes. It contributed more generally to the imbalance in favour of employers which would mark the composition and operation of the corporations, when they arrived.

The Rocco law quite deliberately attempted to draw the sting of class conflict by transferring labour issues from the factory, where employers and workers actually confronted each other, to another plane, that of the law and legally recognised organisations. These were susceptible to state and political pressure for the harmonisation of capital and labour in the interests of national production. Wage agreements and the settlement of disputes arising from them were increasingly brokered by the party or the Ministry of Corporations, or a combination of both: the outcome of a bureaucratic exchange rather than the competitive interaction of employer and workforce.

There was an underlying ‘productivist’ rationale to the legal subordination of class-based and interest group organisations to the overriding will of the state. This inevitably skewed labour relations in favour of employers and to the detriment of workers. The main criterion was always what was best for or most likely to maximise production, and hence the economic strength of the nation. It was the production rather than the distribution of wealth that really mattered. Employers

could argue that wage cuts or the introduction of different and more exploitative work practices were necessary to maintain efficient and continuous production. Italy’s industrial base was probably not strong enough for a high-production, high-wage economy on the American

‘Fordist’ model. But anyway, Rocco’s law was first enacted during the government’s revaluation of the lira in 1926–27, introducing almost a decade of deflationary economic policy straddling the Great Depres-sion. Almost the first acts of the newly legalised workers’ syndicates were to endorse wage reductions in both agriculture and industry, so that production costs could be accommodated to the new value of the currency while retaining competitiveness.

The government’s refusal early in 1929 to countenance an attempt by the workers’ syndicates to relaunch the fiduciari di fabbrica came after Confindustria’s successful lobbying of Mussolini. Only a direct syndicate presence on the shopfloor could ensure that an employer was keeping to the terms of the collective labour contract governing pay and conditions in his industry. But the industrialists said that any challenge to or restraint on the employers’ absolute authority to manage their firms would risk damaging production. Again almost without exception, the same ‘productivist’ criteria were applied to the party and government mediation of labour disputes, and in the decisions of the labour courts on the relatively rare occasions when a dispute actually reached that advanced stage of the arbitration process. Class collaboration in a ‘productivist’ framework invariably involved one-way collaboration.