What Happened to FIAT? An Angry Look Back
The public confrontation that had opened again over the Stellantis employment and production crisis in Italy is an unapologetic snapshot of the degradation and ridicule of our country's political and business class. Everything is fake and instrumental: The political right is attacking because premier Giorgia Meloni had done it for the Elkann-Agnelli family newspapers, the center-left does not know what to say, and someone is lashing out at Landini, who among Cgil Cisl and Uil trade unionists is the least guilty.
As in a sudden awakening after a decades-long sleep, the political, business, media and even trade union palace jerks up and shouts: But how is FIAT no longer there? What a pity.
It suddenly turns out that the Italian auto plants today are a production decentralization of French ones, which in turn follow the ruthless logic of a multinational, Stellantis, half European and half American. A multinational that is certainly weaker than the other big auto groups, from Toyota to Volkswagen to the U.S. companies and especially the Chinese ones. China produces 26 to 27 million cars a year, Italy 500.000. In Italy 30.000 workers have disappeared from auto plants in the last twenty years.
The oxen are far from the barn, and as is the case with all the sudden discoveries of Italian disasters, from falling wages to the dismantling of the public health and pension systems, one has to go back at least thirty years to see when the fences were wide open.
By the early 1990s, the Agnelli family was already planning to abandon the car or at least make it marginal in its interests. Telecom, Banca San Paolo, tourism, services – this was where the family's interests were concentrated, and it was forming a veritable second FIAT, with other production and financial interests than the car. Of course, the supports of the entire political system, right center and left, were fundamental and taken for granted for this project, as was the servile media incense, which presented these financial operations as a wonderful innovative project.
The project failed resoundingly, and the Agnelli family had to abandon all new ground for intervention and return to the car. The Melfi plant was born, which, for the usual propaganda regime, was the sign of the future, while for those who worked there it was a place of exploitation like that of the Charlot in Modern Times.
However, the early 1990s had already defined a structural change in the role of the auto industry in our country: Italy had become a consumer, rather than a producer of cars.
Unlike the major European industrial countries, Germany, France, and Spain, which produced more cars than were bought in the country, Italy was buying more than 2 million cars a year and producing less than 1.5 million. The Italian car market had become a liability for the country, whereas until then it had been a major asset. This bottom line has not changed since, it has only worsened, although it has been hidden by the usual propaganda, which painted the crisis of car production in Italy as the world end of the car product. Bullshit, Italians were buying cars like never before, only most of these cars were foreign, because FIAT had missed all the investment and product innovation buses, because the absentee ownership of the Agnellis did not cough up any money, despite huge public supports, billions of hours of layoffs, all obtained with bipartisan consensus.
The same propaganda blackout mechanism was unleashed in 2010, when Sergio Marchionne, to whom the Agnelli family had entrusted its interests, launched the Pomigliano blackmail against the union. As is well known, Marchionne asked workers and unions to give up the national contract of work in exchange for the construction at the FIAT plant in Pomigliano, of the new Panda, initially intended for the group's Polish ones. The entire political system, even those grumbling against the Lambs today, and most of the unions with the exception of Fiom and the grassroots unions, accepted the FIAT CEO's ultimatum and presented it as a great choice for progress. Instead, it was the beginning of the end.
With that choice, Italian auto plants would definitively become screwdriver factories, that is, production departments competing, on the basis of lower costs, with others in the group.
Marchionne presented this path of de-industrialization as its exact opposite, inventing the “Fabbrica Italia” project. Amid glosses, videos and commotion from journalists and politicians, more than 20 billion in investments were announced to revive car production in Italy.
This, too, was all smoke, nothing was done about it, but no authority held the Agnelli and Marchionne accountable. Who meanwhile acquired Chrysler, which was in crisis in the U.S., at a bargain price and with state financing. American trade unionists were bribed to obtain labor contracts favorable to the boss, and eventually FCA was born, whose Italian factories were now a decentralization of those overseas. In turn, FCA failed in its attempt to acquire Opel in Germany: The government and unions there rejected Marchionne's proposal, considering it not credible and industrially destructive.
Then, faced with the new challenges of electric that requires research and investment, the Elkann Agnelli family decided to abandon the field for good, making lavish profit from the incorporation of FCA into the Stellantis group, where Peugeot and Citroen dominate.
And so we are at today's dramatic crisis, marked by a new master blackmail, the demand for public money by the group's ad, Tavares. If you want it still to be produced in Italy, pay up! There has been de-industrialization in Italy and Fiat for thirty years, with the bosses making money, politicians enabling, and journalists incensing each other.
The FIAT crisis is part of the country's political and moral crisis. And it can only be addressed with a radical break with all the policies of the last 30 years. Otherwise we will still have talk, gift of public money and layoffs.
(Written by Giorgio Cremaschi, Trade Unionist; Il Fatto Quotidiano – 2.2.2024)