Until a few months ago Marchionne, the Italian-Canadian-Swiss highest manager of Fiat, was widely credited as the heir to Adriano Olivetti and his ideas on the happy shop. The change of image came when it became clear that he is nothing more than the manager of a multinational, handsomely paid.
At a time when the international situation turned around, masks are slipping away and the real faces have appeared in all their concrete crudeness. The high-level manager was back then and seem to be what it has always been: an manager actor of the global market, which means making choices to move cynically linked to the exclusive interests of corporations, much of yesterday at the expense of everything else, including humans. This is what the story of Fiat in recent months has revealed.
At first the Termini Imerese plant in Sicily, which the Fiat management has decided to close by 2011 because the quality of its production, given the structural conditions of the site, can not be competitive. Then in Campania in Pomigliano d'Arco, where the old company will be replaced by a new company, not registered with the Industrial Union of Naples and a separate contract from the national one, in which the forms of struggle must be submitted to the consideration of the corporate before being practiced. Only those among the 5,200 workers who will accept the new rules will be accepted in the new company in September 2011, while for others there will be layoffs and mobility. Even unions that have not signed the contract for the new plant will be excluded from Campania.
Then again the Lingotto in Turin, questioned before the possibility of transferring the production line to Serbia, since the Serbian government, to encourage increased employment, provides very attractive business conditions in its territory. Finally, in the factory in Melfi in Basilicata, a tug of war seemingly absurd. Three workers first fired on charges of sabotage, then reinstated by court order, but excluding any actual use of force in production. Pending final decision of Appeal, they still receive wages without being able to work.
All business decisions imposed by bullying and blackmail, which show a systematic authoritarian resurgence by Fiat and which elicited immediate outrage. But it is a lament that flows on and off, absorbed by all the sounds of applause received by Marchionne for the "courage" shown. At the international management the lament of the last subjects is not interesting at all, it’s even annoying. Non-functional financial investments that push more and more power production decisions. So today's managers act to compress the rights and conditions for workers to sacrifice the needs of financial trends.
Financial oligarchies and managerial bourgeoisie
"Marchionne wants to polonize us because we cost too much. That's a banker, not a manager! ', Say with great sagacity some workers of Lingotto. Worldwide, the management has become a fact primarily a function of financial speculation, where the human element systematically does not count. In the automated, computerized and robotic today, worker’s individuality is entirely worthless, and increasingly opposed. The individual worker is no longer computable as a human being who provide their workforce, while more and more an interchangeable piece, deprived of their production knowledge, replaced by the efficiency of computer technology and mechanical engineering and automation.
You act in a real dehumanization of work, a global cross-flavored anti-humanist by ruling oligarchies and financial management, which are setting new forms of updated slavery to obtain not only on the place of production, but especially in existential levels , a general and unquestioned submission, common in social stratification. Along with a steady growth of new forms of slavery in the workplace because we can also see a gradual and constant increase of poverty in every strata of society. Only the classes and management strata at high level, in contrast, found a steady increase freedom of movement and personal wealth.
Need of redemption
Ultimately it is true that we lost all sense of the clash of Lenin memory aimed at the class struggle, because the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat is totally impractical. But it is not acceptable to claim that the workers willingly accept to be impoverished, to undergo a substantial increase in the rate of exploitation, to lose rights won through decades of arduous struggles, no more and no protest or fight, because faced with the blackmail of unemployment and the dismantling of the company.
Perhaps now the workers are a bit 'terrified to face this pillar of globalization effrontery. Dormant when every dream of redemption, they seem to accept any conditions on their backs rather than lose the job. But such a fright can not last forever, especially faced with the constant enrichment of the new masters. The need for redemption is the natural order of things. It will regain foot and will resume its global shape. Even if they can hear the echoes with the first wave of strikes in Chinese factories. We must only work to ensure that the next uprising and for true emancipation, dropped from the failures classist, this time based on self-solidarity and the rejection of any exploitation, slavery and subjugation.
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40 n. 356
Andrea Papi