The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
Roberto Franzosi
Language: English
Pages: 530
ISBN: 0521452872
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Focusing on the strategic interaction among workers, employers, and the state, this book examines the temporal movement of postwar Italian strikes. Incorporating several theoretical approaches and based on many forms of empirical evidence (statistical, historical, ethnographic, and survey), The Puzzle of Strikes is unique in its broad concern with a variety of actors, theories, and forms of empirical evidence.
Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary
cycle in the eruption of large-scale strikes, clearly linked to the timing of the renewal of national collective contracts. But the data also show that it was indeed just a handful of strikes (among several hundred or even thousand The structure of collective bargaining 159 Figure 5.3. Plot of the percentage of all strikers accountedfor by solidarity strikes 60 -r 50 -• 4 0 -• 3 0 •• Z 2 0 -• 10 -H 1 1 1 1 1 1 H H h H 1- H 1 1 1 Figure 5.4. Plot of the percentage of all
190 strike hours, spread out among tens of 160 The puzzle of strikes Table 5.8. Number of large-scale strikes and percentages of strikers involved 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 73 18 53 14 51 14 81 26 71 19 34 10 78 16 70 20 54 7 26 3 57 11 36 6 a A B A, percentage of total number of strikers; B, number of strikes involving more than 50,000 workers. 80 T T 30 -.25 70-• 20 j> 60-. t/3 o 50-- • • 4 0 -• -• 1 0 30-- -
Exploratory data analysis can never be the whole story, but nothing else can serve as the foundation stone - as the first step. Tukey (1977, p. 3) 1.1. WHY STRIKES? WHY ITALY? It has been twenty years since Shorter and Tilly's Strikes in France: 1830-1968 and Pizzorno's Lotte operaie e sindacato in Italia: 1968-1972 were published two books unsurpassed in the strike literature, even as the levels of industrial conflict reached during the turbulent 1960s remain unsurpassed, and not only in
Workers' Charter granted legal recognition to the unions' representative bodies inside the plants - at least in plants with more than 15 workers - in the form of rappresentanze sindacali aziendali (plant-level union representative bodies), or Rsa. The charter further guaranteed union rights in the workplace, such as time off and leaves of absence for the plant-level union representatives for their union activities. It legalized mass meetings inside the factories, to allow workers to discuss labor
Erik Wright helped me to clarify my arguments. Alberto Palloni shared with me from the beginning my anguish over the tension between theoretical and empirical work. Throughout the long period of both writing and rewriting, I have always been able to count on another friend: Alberto Devoto. During the last year of terrible isolation, his daily electronic messages to the cry of Forza Paris made life more bearable. Svetlana Kropp read and reread drafts of chapters, ran statistical analyses, and
