Fiat complies but issues threat

Fiat, the Italian vehicle builder and the largest manufacturing company in Italy, has agreed to comply with a court decision and allow members of the FIOM union back into the company’s representative structures.

However, it has threatened that, unless there is a new law on employee representation, its continued involvement in the country is at risk.

The relations between FIOM and Fiat have been tense since at least June 2010. At that time, the company forced through a radical worsening of working conditions at its plant near Naples by threatening to transfer production unless the changes were accepted.

FIOM refused to sign the deal incorporating the new conditions although other unions did.

When FIOM also did not sign a later company-wide agreement, Fiat excluded FIOM members from all representative structures for its employees.

It did this using legislation which allowed it to limit membership of these bodies to those unions which had signed the deal.

It is this legislation which the court has decided is unconstitutional and the judgment has forced Fiat to write to FIOM re-admitting its members as employee representatives.

As Maurizio Landini, the FIOM general secretary said in response to the letter from Fiat, “we are re-entering the plant through the front gate”.

However, the company has not straightforwardly accepted the judgement.

In a statement, it calls for a new law on employee representation, describing this as “an essential precondition for the continuing industrial involvement of Fiat in Italy”.