50 Ways to Say You're Fired: Working in Italy and the U.S.A.
Barkan, Joanne
NOTHING CHARACTERIZES the privatesector labor market in the United States more clearly than the ability to fire employees at will. "Sorry, you're no longer needed here" sounds like the refrain...
...The permanent workers see the new ones as a threat...
...In short, Reid has become a "permatemp...
...Employers who wanted to hire workers legally offered full-time, permanent jobs automatically covered by national union contracts...
...The referendum was immediately nullified because too few voters (only 32 percent of the electorate) went to the polls...
...If a waiter or receptionist quits, she has to replace that person...
...Yet unlike Forti, 66 percent of those who did vote chose not to change the law...
...That's why I won't hire more employees," she claims...
...She employs fewer than fifteen people, so the Workers' Statute does not even apply to her business...
...Yet employers had to pay Social Security taxes for regular workers and provide them DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 73 YOUR RE FIRED with health insurance if the company had a health plan...
...Not surprisingly, employers of every kind, business leaders, and center-right politicians want to deregulate...
...By law, this rented work actually costs more than a permanent worker, but companies gladly pay the higher price...
...From her point of view, the labor situation in Italy is completely frozen...
...It took Anchisi less than an hour to learn how to use the computerized machine, which raises two points: First, although the new technology has greatly reduced the physical difficulty of the task and potential harm to the worker, it hasn't raised the skill level or interest of the job much...
...Others need a profound shake-up (as did the AFL-CIO before John Sweeney took charge...
...No one anywhere should accept this model uncritically or imitate it wholly...
...They all see the labor unions as their main opponents, as the foot-dragging adversaries of "modernization...
...Since February 2000, he has worked full time at a factory (owned by a multinational corporation) that produces parts for refrigerators...
...More sweepingly, she criticizes the once radical labor movement for having lost its vision of an alternative society—one not centered on private companies and money-making...
...She has no health insurance, no accident insurance, no retirement plan aside from Social Security...
...She also opposes the law that requires employers to interview and possibly hire people from the government job placement lists...
...The provision allows a judge to order an employer to rehire a worker who was unjustly fired...
...The NWU has organized 5,500 freelance writers, scattered all over the United States, into a single local of the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW Local 1981/ AFL-CIO...
...You'll just keep losing it bit by bit...
...Nadia Forti herself has been on the lists since she was fourteen years old and has never received a call about a job...
...Sorry, you're no longer needed here" sounds like the refrain of a classic American song...
...He operates a computerized machine that fuses an aluminum coating onto a steel part...
...Anchisi works a different shift every week, but the job itself is not difficult...
...Anchisi's father worked for many years as the Communist Party functionary in one of the Fiat factory towns near Turin...
...First, the "new economy" may have superseded Fordism (an economy based on mass industrial production that takes place in large plants), but Taylorism (production broken up into small, repetitive tasks) certainly persists...
...Banti's description of the constant fear of being fired recalled both the repressive working conditions at Fiat in the 1950s and 1960s and the working lives of most Americans...
...The confederation hasn't put a great deal of money into Nidil, and yet Banti believes the Cgil leadership is committed to defending the rights of atypical workers— one way or another...
...The contract lasts for six months...
...To understand exactly what's going on, one needs a clear image of how people find and keep jobs in Italy and how this contrasts with the American model...
...This law would allow companies to designate up to 100 percent of a workforce as permanent employees of the employment agencies that originally placed them...
...The agencies would have no obligation to offer any benefits to "their" workers...
...They are buying the power to fire employees at will...
...But her workplace—a dean's office in a private East Coast university—is one of the 10 percent that is unionized in the private sector...
...It's impossible just to defend what you have," she said...
...Interim work has grown so quickly in northern and central Italy that twenty-four different agencies 76 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 (including the multinational Manpower) now run fifty-four offices just in Turin, a city of eight hundred thousand inhabitants...
...But they shouldn't be able to fire someone simply because they don't like that person...
...It covers approximately 65 percent of all employees (lavoratori dipendenti...
...In the short term, she believes the unions have failed to propose their own convincing reform programs (for example, a much needed pension reform...
...An earlier version appeared in Italian in Reset magazine...
...then it must either hire him with a regular contract or dismiss him...
...This assault on basic job protections (won in Italy only thirty years ago) erodes the social Thanks to the Bogliasco Foundation/Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities where I was a resident fellow in spring 2000 and worked on this article...
...She found her job through a private employment agency, and the publishing house hired her as a "temp"—a worker hired in theory on a temporary basis...
...In the first fourteen months, Nidil made contact with four thousand workers in Turin...
...Anchisi votes for the Left Democrats, but despite pride in his father's history, he has never joined the union at his workplace...
...Because no legal time limits exist for this kind of work, a temp job can last one day or twenty years...
...The law also gave unions the right to take employers to court for unfair labor practices...
...Forti argues that she should be able to choose whom she wants to work in her hotel and restaurant and, if a relationship sours, fire any employee...
...This minimal but fundamental protection doesn't yet exist in the United States...
...Permatemps have had only one recourse: to sue the companies where they work, using the "common law employee test...
...After programming the machine, he can leave it and do what he likes for about ten minutes...
...One of them started yelling at the union representative for laying him off earlier...
...Making contact with "atypical workers" is a slow and difficult process for Nidil, which depends on the cooperation of the local unions...
...If a company doesn't like the person who arrives, it can ask the agency for someone else because the company is renting work and not a particular worker...
...To stop the suits, employers lobbied Congress for legislation called the Staffing Firm Worker Benefits Act of 1997 (H.R...
...The union negotiates the metalworkers' contract, but that's very remote from us...
...If a job at the next level becomes available and if she is fully qualified for it, the university must offer her the job before offering it to someone from the "outside...
...Faced with this rapid expansion, the two other national labor confederations also set up projects like Nidil...
...He described an orientation meeting for new workers at the factory...
...If Mann's bosses don't believe she's right for the new job, they must negotiate with the union...
...The Dean's Administrative Assistant Alison Mann, too, works as an administrative assistant...
...She remained active for many years and still considers herself a leftist...
...Four of the names used in the text (Sally Reid, Alison Mann, Marcella Forti, and Nadia Forti) are not the real names of the persons described...
...they know that many employers don't want union members...
...Yes, some need new strategies that go beyond trying to defend what already exists...
...After Fiat began hiring again in 1997 (the company's hiring freeze in Turin had lasted eight years), the metalworkers' union (Fiom) did a survey of young workers at Fiat's Mirafiori plant...
...So I was surprised to hear a negative reaction to Nidil from Alessandra Mecozzi, a longtime union official with the Fiom, historically considered Italy's most militant and radical industrial union...
...Parliament passed the law, and the effect on the Italian economy has been striking...
...The employment agency that placed Reid still takes a percentage of her pay check and will do so for as long as she works at the publishing house...
...Photo Captions I want to complete this collection of images from Italy and the United States with a few brief thoughts—photo captions of a sort...
...1891...
...At one level, the discussion of the referendum with Marcella Forti remained completely hypothetical...
...For practically all of them, their first direct association with a labor union has come through Nidil...
...Although Anchisi has no desire to work permanently in a factory, most young people who take these jobs do...
...In the South, the rampant underground economy has limited the spread of legal interim work...
...Companies could fire them just as easily because so few belonged to unions...
...In 1997, the center-left government of Romano Prodi designed legislation creating the new atypical contracts as part of an effort to liberalize the labor market...
...Mecozzi liked hearing that American writers can end up as metalmeccanici...
...Operating since February 1999, Nidil offers services and legal advice to people working under "atypical contracts"—contracts for temporary and part-time jobs...
...On May 21, 2000, she voted "yes" in a national referendum to abolish one provision of the 1970 Workers' Rights Statute (Statuto dei diritti dei lavoratori...
...Yet she doesn't want to spend money on lawyers or submit to the possible whims or prejudices of a judge...
...When I mentioned Nidil, Mecozzi immediately shook her head and said, "I'm not convinced...
...She can take courses at the university...
...In Italy today, the call for labor market flexibility sounds like the repetition of a sacred mantra...
...then he reprograms the machine...
...Yet even some parties in the center-left coalition and some left economists and sociologists now support greater flexibility...
...Until recently, the left quite uniformly considered the Workers' Statute to be the most important and enduring victory of the massive, militant labor struggles of the 1960s...
...Nadia Forti points out that her mother—like almost all small-business owners in Italy—has always hired exactly whom YOUR RE FIRED she wanted and has never hired anyone from an official job placement list...
...Yet, according to Anchisi, most young people never get permanent jobs...
...It seems irrelevant to him...
...More than 1.8 million Italians now work at legally sanctioned, temporary jobs in the industrial and service sectors...
...After working as a teacher in Venice and then in city government, she bought a small hotel and restaurant and has been running them successfully for fifteen years...
...democratic model just as much as, perhaps more than, cutbacks in welfare state benefits...
...His arms and hands," Anchisi said, "are three times as big as mine...
...Almost 90 percent of those polled were twenty-five years old or younger...
...The parent organization is the largest, most left-leaning of Italy's three national union confederations—the Confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (Cgil...
...I wear a sweater to keep warm...
...Forti's daughter, Nadia Forti, recently graduated from law school and is looking for a fulltime job...
...The AFL-CIO opposes the bill, which remains in committee...
...Having a permanent job has become something to be ashamed of," Mecozzi says...
...After eighteen months on training contracts, companies let the workers go and hire new ones on the same temporary, low-wage basis...
...She keeps her job by working hard, making no demands, and not complaining...
...They also argue that the statute and the unions defend the interests of only a "privileged" sector of the workforce—workers with permanent, full-time jobs—to the detriment of everyone else, especially young people looking for work...
...According to the most recent annual report of Istat (Italy's bureau of statistics), 57.7 percent of new jobs created in 1999 fall into the atypical category...
...They existed, of course, but in the underground economy...
...The private employment agencies select people whom they think will work diligently, be compliant, and not turn into union militants...
...As for not hiring more staff, she needs a certain number of employees to run the business...
...She has two weeks of paid vacation and several days of paid sick leave...
...If the union and employer have a good working relationship, they can usually find a solution (adjusting the workload, setting up a probation period, transferring Mann to another department, and so on...
...Mecozzi's skepticism about Nidil wouldn't surprise Ornella Banti...
...The Refrigerator Factory Worker in Turin Dario Anchisi is twenty-six years old and studies business at the University of Turin...
...Mecozzi worked in Turin for many years and now heads up the Fiom's international office in Rome...
...People doing lavoro interinale work so hard that they create resentment on the part of the permanent workers," Ornella Banti said...
...Yet given the evisceration of left political parties, labor unions today offer ordinary citizens their best chance to counterbalance the immense power of market forces...
...If only their businesses could operate in a deregulated labor market .. . if only they could get rid of excess workers, troublesome workers, mediocre workers, then certainly all good things would follow: employees would work harder, companies would hire more readily, productivity would rise, structural unemployment would shrink, and Europe would compete as successfully as the United States in the global market...
...It doesn't give workers what they really want, which is a permanent job...
...Mann's contract—negotiated by the union—requires the university to pay her Social Security taxes and health insurance premiums...
...Temporary workers can't predict how long they will be able to stay at a job...
...Banti relies on union representatives to introduce her to the new workers during their lunch hours and breaks...
...From Nadia Forti's point of view, Italian employers can always fire workers who don't perform their jobs well...
...She has encountered wariness in the Cgil and indifference since the project was founded...
...Second, the company could obviously teach its older workers how to use the new machines but doesn't...
...It might be with or without Nidil," she said...
...She talks to them one by one and finds out what they need: information on their rights, legal advice, access to credit, and so on...
...The union helps current workers with their tax forms and retired workers with their pensions, but it has no other presence in the factory," he said...
...As long as the same job exists and Mann performs it well, the university can't fire her without battling the union...
...she asks...
...Today, some Italian fans of Tony Blair-type center-left politics argue that parts of the Workers' Statute, like the labor unions, are dragging down the economy...
...To avoid paying for any benefits, employers began hiring temps and keeping them on permanently without an iota of security...
...The New York Temp Sally Reid, twenty-four years old, works full time at a publishing house in Manhattan...
...Second, Europeans who work in the United States for a while often remark that we work harder here...
...By demonstrating that the companies control their work, have the power to fire them, and therefore are true employers, permatemps can sometimes win regular benefits...
...She is the administrative assistant to two high-level editors who couldn't get along without her...
...The Venetian Hotelier Marcella Forti joined the Italian Communist Party when she was in high school...
...At night, she takes classes at a local university where she's trying to earn a bachelor's degree in English literature...
...And it doesn't do what a union must do—organize workers at their workplace...
...The middle-aged worker next to him does the same job manually, which requires physical strength and effort...
...She doesn't look for another job because she doesn't expect to find anything better at her level...
...At a more general level, her position demonstrates the pervasiveness of the debate on worker and employer rights in Italy and its significance for the left...
...The statute implemented the rights to organize unions and to bargain collectively that the 1948 Italian Constitution had guaranteed in principle...
...So they have little incentive to join...
...Two Italian Labor Unionists Ornella Banti runs the Turin branch of a union project called New Labor Identities (Nuove identita di lavoro or Nidil...
...And yet the ignorance of other young workers about labor unions seems to appall Anchisi...
...Mann's contract also creates opportunities for her to increase her skills and move up within the workplace...
...Exactly 90 percent hoped to stay at Fiat on a DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 75 YOUR ' RE FIRED permanent basis...
...She gets no paid sick days, no paid legal holidays, and no vacation unless her employer agrees to let her take unpaid time off...
...What's to stop employers from firing someone whose skin color or gender they don't like...
...74 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 From the point of view of a university dean who wants to get rid of an employee as easily and quickly as possible, the union represents a time-consuming bother...
...He works in a sleeveless T-shirt in winter...
...And unions in all post-Fordist economies must find ways to organize an increasingly disaggregated labor force...
...The cornpany can renew it twice...
...She doesn't object to paying severance wages, and she tries to create a pleasant workplace...
...They see easy firing as part of "labor market flexibility" and the best answer to their economic problems...
...Those Europeans who oppose the job protections typical of post–World War II social democracy admire the "American model...
...One new type of contract—designed for interim work (lavoro interinale)—has attracted particular attention...
...Although only about one hundred workers have joined the Cgil through Nidil, Banti doesn't believe membership can be her first goal...
...Mecozzi believes Italian unions are doing the "least bad" job possible of defending Italian workers during the current neoliberal assault, but this is an inadequate strategy for her...
...Here are six snapshots—taken recently in Italy and the United States—of workers, bosses, and trade unionists...
...We probably do...
...You can't be a union for workers who change jobs all the time and always work for different companies...
...Instead, the unions are increasingly isolated as some leftists adopt the center-right's line that unionized workers are overly entitled members of society...
...Companies can now "rent work" from private employment agencies (practically nonexistent in Italy before 1997) that select and send out personnel...
...If Mann and her boss disagree about her performance, the university must negotiate the matter with the local union's representative...
...From Banti's point of view, Nidil's initial goals should be to provide services for these workers, defend them, and draw them into the union's orbit...
...A decade or so ago, most private companies hired administrative assistants as "regular" employees, not as temps...
...According to the 1997 Italian law, however, anyone doing lavoro interinale at the same company for twenty-four months must be offered a permanent job...
...I mentioned counter-examples in the United States to Mecozzi, including my own union— the National Writers Union...
...And 5,500 more Americans have joined the labor movement...
...He didn't even understand the difference between the union and management...
...By law, the company can pay Anchisi less money for performing the same job as a regular worker...
...Reid has been working at the publishing house for four years...
...JOANNE BARKAN, author of Visions of Emancipation: The Italian Labor Movement Since 1945, is senior writer at the Forward...
...Until recently, most such jobs were illegal in Italy...
...From Mann's point of view, the union provides the only possible protection in the American market system...
...Just because a job involves a computer doesn't mean that it is high skill, interesting, or well paid...
...Retired workers now make up 50 percent of total union membership in Italy, and overall, membership figures are stagnating...
...They're still trying to find the best way to do it...
...She voted "no" on the referendum and disagrees with her mother's arguments...
...DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 77...
...The company hired him on a training contract (contratto di formazione)—a type of labor contract designed by Parliament to create jobs for young people trying to enter the labor market...
...Since so-called atypical jobs are the fastest growing part of the job market, it certainly seems that the future of the Italian labor movement deYOUR ' RE FIRED pends in large measure on successfully integrating these new kinds of workers...
...Finally, labor unions today—in Italy or the United States—are not an obstacle to progress and prosperity...
...As for Nidil, she agreed that the organization could be useful if it gave workers their first contact with a union...
...We grow up knowing that it's easy to lose a job and possible to land in the gutter...
...Although the NWU has succeeded in signing contracts with only a few publications, it provides necessary services, information, and benefits (for example, a group health insurance plan) to otherwise completely unprotected writers...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
