Search

The organisation arises as product of the struggle … organisations … are … born from the mass strike … from the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions. … In the midst of the struggle the work of organisation is being more widely extended. Class struggle, which is itself structurally limited and selected by various social structures, simultaneously reshapes those structures. … Class struggle is intrinsically a process of transformation of structures, and thus the very process which sets limits on class struggle is at the same time transformed by the struggles so limited. … Organizational capacities are objects of class struggle. … The organizational capacity of the working class to engage in struggle is itself transformed by class struggle. In history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for. UNEXPECTED FINDINGS, ONE MORE TIME: CLASS CONFLICT AS THE INDEPENDENTVARIABLE Just when we thought that we had it all wrapped up, with a pat solution for the temporal dynamics of Italian strikes in the postwar period, the reversal of the causal reading at the end of Chapter 8 (strikes as the cause, rather than the effect, of economic, organizational, institutional, and political factors) has brought in a new twist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive strike waves … march as exclamation marks in labor history … The characteristic thing about [strike-wave] explosions is that they mark qualitative as well as quantitative changes. CLEARLY AN OUTLIER: 1969 The year 1969 is clearly an outlier. The plots reported in Chapter 1 of strike indicators (Figures 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5) and strike shapes (Figure 1.6) singled out that data point as an anomaly. The analyses of the regression residuals throughout this book have provided additional support. What caused the surge in strike activity in 1969? We have seen that the timing of the two major outbursts of industrial conflict in postwar Italy (1959–63, 1969–72) coincided with the timing of both the signing of industrywide collective agreements (1959, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972) and favorable labor-market conditions (the nearly full levels of employment of the late 1950s and 1960s) (Halevi, 1972, p. 81; see also Bordogna and Provasi, 1979). In terms of my stated goal of fitting together all the pieces of the puzzle, following the clues provided by the available theories, this explanation could suffice. I could call off my investigative work. But the theory of statistical outliers teaches us that there may be important lessons to be learned from them (Franzosi, 1994). In cross-sectional analyses, we typically throw out outliers, physically removing them from the sample. Because that is more difficult to do with time-series data, we are more likely to take a different route: ignore outliers, or deal with them via dummy variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business cycle is the cause of the main fluctuations, indeed of the very nature of strikes themselves; by itself, however, it cannot explain the depth of certain retreats, the amplitude of certain offensives. Political circumstances weigh very heavily and provide the key to the understanding of the major silences and thrusts. Politics constitutes an important kind of precondition for the eruption of large-scale worker movements, though not being in itself a sufficient one. The apolitical nature [of trade unions] is a lie, because it cannot exist. Trade unions must have a political outlook … to protect the interests of all workers of any political party or even without a party. To accomplish their goals, trade unions often need the support of political parties. Trade unions have often turned to popular and democratic parties and to their parliamentary groups, in order to lobby for the approval or rejection of a given law, in the workers' best interests. LEFT TO EXPLAIN: THE 1975–78 STRIKE SHAPES Little by little, chapter by chapter, I have used the available theories about strikes to investigate the meaning of the data presented in Chapter 1 (the pieces of the puzzle). I have fitted almost the entire puzzle. I am left with only one of the original pieces (the 1975–78 strike shapes) and one theory: political exchange. But in fact, do we not already have an explanation for the 1975–78 strike shapes? Did we not see, in Chapter 5, that the 1975 wage escalator agreement between labor and capital could account for the lower frequency, [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenger, to be effective, needs organization … to pry loose time, money and commitment … to focus prism-like these resources upon the arena of central state politics. Trades unions in England, as well as in every other manufacturing country, are a necessity for the working classes in their struggle against capital … If a whole trade of workmen form a powerful organization … then, and then only, have they a chance. Trade unions … are the types of proletarian organization specific to the historical period dominated by capital. In a certain sense it can be argued that they are an integral part of capitalist society, and that they have a function which is inherent in the regime of private property. SHIFTING GEARS The findings in Chapters 2 and 3 have shown that economic models go a long way toward explaining Italian strikes. Yet the findings have also revealed the limits of this type of model for the Italian case. In particular, economic models do not explain why the statistical relationships to economic factors should be stronger for strike frequency than for other strike components, nor can they identify the noneconomic determinants that lie behind strike size, duration, and volume. The economic literature has very little to say on these points (Skeels, 1971). The economic strike literature has even less to say about why, under unfavorable labor-market conditions, the Italian working class has been less militant than would seem warranted by economic factors alone (paradox of the génie d'un peuple). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the fluctuations in economic activity affect the number of strikes? Obviously, through their effect on unemployment. When this goes down, when the working day gets longer in the factories, due to new orders, when workers are employed six or seven days a week, instead of four or five, they realize (without having to consult the statistics) that business is going well and they try to take advantage of the situation. Hence, strikes. When, on the contrary, unemployment soars, when workers see some of their fellow workers being dismissed, and the number of working hours and days curtailed, they hesitate to strike, at least over wage issues, for fear of being replaced by the army of the unemployed. The curve of strikes dwindles. Therefore, there is a relationship of cause and effect between the fluctuations of unemployment and those of strikes. HOW THE LABOR-MARKET ARGUMENT RUNS Labor-market theories of strikes claim that union behavior and the propensity to strike are heavily dependent on the state of the labor market. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, in two seminal articles, Rist (1907, 1912) argued that there exists a strong relationship between the business cycle and strike activity, but that this relationship is mainly indirect, mediated by the state of the labor market. According to Rist (1912, pp. 748–9), “the rise or fall of strikes is related to the fluctuations of unemployment, because it is through the rise or fall of unemployment that industrial hardship or prosperity is felt by the workers.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]