Beppe Grillo's Blog

Marchionne’s blackmail

Marchionne is just one of the Agnelli family’s employees. He is paid to make them gain and to act as a lightning conductor. Nothing more. His crudeness of language (and of action) that falls down in the pure provocation for those who have been laid off, or sacked and for those workers that accept every condition so as not to lose their job, is unacceptable. Their bosses are putting a muzzle on them. If Fiat has every right to move production abroad, the Italians have a still a greater right to present them with the bill. For decades it has been the Italian taxpayers to pay the profits of the Agnelli family and the big shareholders, ranging from the fund for the laid off workers when Fiat had its accounts in the red, to the financing of the “cash for clunkers” to the incentives for the factories in the South. The voice of the Agnelli family has not yet been heard during these negotiations, let them pack up and leave, but before that, let them pay the tens of billions that they owe to the Italian State.

“We are a group of Italians under the age of 40 living and working abroad but still having direct contacts with Italy to which we are connected by fondness and nostalgia accompanied by the anger of seeing it in constant decline.
Not one of us has up until now been directly involved in politics, even though we feel a connection with the Left in its widest sense, but what is happening cannot leave us indifferent. This is why we have decided to demonstrate our worries about a few important topics:
- Marchionne’s blackmail and the imposition of a contract rather than through negotiation
- the referendum that is similar to the plebiscites of the “Ventennio” {the twenty years of Fascist rule} in which the only choice is between unemployment and conditions imposed by the owner
- the departure from recognised constitutional rights by means of agreeing private contracts
- the renunciation of the national collective contract amidst silence from the Confindustria and most of the trades unions (that from the beginning should have refused to sign a contract that was different from the national one for the Mirafiori factory workers)
- the exclusion of the biggest metal-mechanics trades union from the union representation.
We consider all this to be very serious.
We find it even less acceptable in a period of economic crisis and we reject the attempt to make the workers pay the costs of the failure of neo-liberalism. We are astounded by the embarrassing silence of most of the Opposition, and especially the Opposition in parliament, and we think that the time has come to decidedly take sides. The FIOM Is not just defending the Mirafiori workers. It is defending the Constitution, democracy, and the freedom of choice. It is basically defending the possibility of a future for our country, that seems to us to be getting ever more distant.

...

Laura Andrazi, Paris, France - Alessio Baldini, University of Leeds, UK - Giorgia Maria Battistello, Six Telekurs, London, UK - Tommaso Cavazza, Barcelona, Spagna - Francesca Congiu, University of Leeds, UK - Ilaria Giglioli, University of California at Berkeley, USA - Matteo Giglioli, Palo Alto, California, USA - Simone Giovetti, United Cities of France (Cooperazione Francese), Francia - Silvia Gurrieri, Paris, France - Giandomenico Iannetti, University College London, UK - Salvatore Marchese, Brno, Czech Republic - Nicola Melloni, London Metropolitan University, UK - Vasco Molini, Maputo, Mozambique - Valentina Rigamonti, USAID, Afghanistan -Pietro Roversi, Oxford University, UK - Davide Sormani, Brno, Czech Republic - Gigliola Sulis, University of Leeds, UK - Elia Valentini, University College London, UK - Alessandro Volpi, London, UK

To make contact and join up:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/home.php?sk=group_169410559768904
italianiallesteroconlafion@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/#!/perlafiom

P.S.The following meetings have been arranged for the creation of 5 Star Civic Lists in the following towns:
Canino, Capoterra, Carmagnola, Cassino, Ciriè, Corigliano Scalo, Crotone, Fuscaldo, Isola Della Scala, Nogara, Roseto degli Abruzzi, Siena, Sennori, Viadana

Suggest a meeting in your town.

Berluscoma 2010 (DVD)
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Buy your copy today.

Comments

I would like to comment the letter from Italianiallesteroconlafiom.

I am Italian .I have been abroad for about 20 years. I come from the area of the left since I was a student and then a surgeon for 12 years in the public sector. I have kept applying my ideological back ground founding an industry in Asia. I help people, a create jobs and better conditions for them. I am proud to see people working with us passing from the bike of their grand dad to a motorbike for every member of the family, to marry and prosper and look to the future with a positive attitude.
Like any other business man I need nonetheless to adapt to the rules of the market if I want to stay in business !

I have noticed that the people signing the document belong only to a group of various western Universities with the exception of few working in humanitarian associations.
None of them has anything to do with managing a profitable business and none of them is based in Asia.

As I was impressed by the mature comments ( not the insults!) on the walls of Torino saying that -it is the workers of China that has to become like the workers in Italy, not the other way around- I coul'nd agree more BUT I cannot ignore the fact that this process of historic development will take a generation if not more and that the main victim in the mean time will be the Italian industry and the loss of hundreds of thousands of working places for the so called 'lavoratori' if do not adapt to the conditions of the market. In the mean time Italy should eat not starve and possibly be able to compete. We cannot ignore the weak position of our country in the global economy nor we cannot ignore the telluric rise of the Asian economies and the real dynamic of the global economy .The game is unfortunately well above the heads of our local workers and people MUST wake up and try to understand how much the world has changed in the past 30 years !

I was also appalled by the rhetoric used in your comment where Marchionne, in reality far from insulting either Italy or the Italian, because he uses a pragmatic and a realistic approach is called tout court a ' servo dei padroni' with a vetero discourse that belongs more to the Red Brigades or to our old maoists historical movements than to Beppe Grillo good populist campaigner. People MUST wake up in Italy, and fast.The open market of today is clarifying that who is CREATING the condition of 'selling' products ( Marchionne for one ! ) has the full right to be called a hell of a ‘ lavoratore ‘ ! I am a proud 'lavoratore' myself, as the head of a successful company . What our vetero communist rhetoric enthrone as THE ‘ lavoratori ‘ are unfortunately that interchangeable entity making the products , totally dependent by who is SELLING those products ( Marchionne for one…) and by the swings of the global economy.
The conditions to prosper ( and do not tell me that here we are talking of principles and NOT mere money ! services and the expectation of a bright future) should be created together by the two parts with the full understanding of the value of the roles, here included the full respect of the risk to enterprise and the value and respect that the ‘lavoratore’ N.1, the creator of the enterprise and of the product fully deserves.
Italy was ( is ) badly governed, the laws and the ruling classes are a joke.The confrontation must be political for political changes , addressing the mistakes of the past, growing up in real political conscience and CULTURE not being anchored by stale rehtoric.
To call to the scandal when Marchionne says that Fiat will invest somewhere else if the workers will not abide to development plans of the management is totally ridiculous and an anticlimax in respect to the reality of today’s world.
If you object that Fiat has enjoyed a favourable cover from the state and the tax payers, so they had the metalmeccanici and their selective ‘cassa integrazione’.
Fiat in post war period did not enjoy a monopoly, if not a cultural one, but was considered right or wrong to be an important national capital not last because it was the largest employer of Italian ‘lavoratori’. The fact that today Fiat is still in Italian hands ( and not dismantled like other important steel industries and brought machines and all in China ! )and that these workers still have a job is a direct consequence of this indirect protectionism.

Posted by: Dr. Carlo Forzinetti | January 13, 2011 12:27 PM