We Want Everything Read online

  I didn’t get pissed off because I was going to get fired. That was certain, but I didn’t give a shit about that. They could easily pick me out as I was. I had a moustache, I wore white shoes and a blue shirt, blue pants, it was easy to pick me out. And I stayed how I was when I entered the workshop, without getting changed, without taking my old shoes, my old pants, my old pullover out of my locker, without getting changed the way you always did. I’d gone in wearing what I wore out in the street, with polished white shoes, everything spot-on. I had gone into the workshop like that, committed to not working. But I was pissed off because I hadn’t managed to convince the others.

  I feel like getting a Coke from the machine and I drink it and arrive late to the assembly line. You always have to arrive before the line starts, never after. I found my foreman, and the other foreman, already there, and everyone looking at me. And the leading hand was at my post. I get there and the boss says: Look, you’re breaking everybody’s balls. You have to come on time; I’m giving you a half-hour penalty. I tell him: Do whatever the fuck you want, you’re really breaking my balls, you and Fiat. Go get fucked before I fling something at your head. You can stick these filthy fucking machines, I don’t give a shit.

  All the workers who were standing around were looking at me and I said to them: You’re a bunch of assholes, you’re just slaves. You should be getting into these guards here, these fascists. What the fuck are these insects, let’s spit in their faces, let’s do whatever we want, this is like military service. Outside we have to pay if we go into a bar, we have to pay on the tram, we have to pay for a pensione or a hotel, we have to pay for everything.

  And inside here they want to tell us what to do. For a few useless pennies, good for fuck-all, for work that kills us and that’s it. We’re crazy. This is a life of shit, people in prison are freer than us, chained to these disgusting machines so that we can’t even move, with the screws all around us. The only thing missing is a whipping.

  Anyway I started to work, reluctantly, because I wanted to fight. I wanted to do something, staying there wasn’t for me. While I was there I heard shouting in the distance. The body workshops are huge sheds, so big you can’t see to the end, there’s a constant noise and you can’t hear human speech. The workers have to shout to be heard. I heard trouble, shouting, and I said to myself: It’s the comrades starting a demonstration. I didn’t know where it was, you couldn’t see. I abandon my post, cross all the lines, I cut across them, where all the other machines are, and I go to the comrades. I get there and I join in the shouting, too. We were shouting the strangest things, things that had fuck-all to do with anything, to create a moment of rupture: Mao Tsetung, Ho Chi Minh, Potere operaio.17 Things that had no connection to anything there but that we liked the sound of.

  Things like Long Live Gigi Riva, Long Live Cagliari,18 Long Live Pussy we shouted. We wanted to shout things that had nothing to do with Fiat, with all that we had to do in there. So everyone, people who had no idea who Mao or Ho Chi Minh was, were shouting Mao and Ho Chi Minh. Because it had fuck-all to do with Fiat, it was OK. And we started to organise a march, there were about eighty of us. And one by one as the march passed through the lines people joined on at the back. We found some cartons and tore them up and wrote on them with chalk: Comrades leave the lines your place is with us. On another one we wrote: Potere operaio. On yet another: To arselickers work, to workers the struggle. And we went marching on with these signs.

  The march got bigger and the union officials arrived. It was the first time in my life I had seen union officials inside Fiat. The officials start up: Comrades, there’s no need to fight now. We’ll take up the struggle in autumn with the rest of the working class, with all the other metalworkers. Now means weakening the struggle, if we fight now how will we fight in October? We tell them: We need to fight now because it’s still spring and the summer is ahead of us. In October we’ll need overcoats and shoes, we’ll need to pay for the central heating in our apartments, schoolbooks for our children. So the worker can’t fight in autumn, he has to fight in summer. In summer he can sleep in the open air if he has to, but not in winter. And you know that Fiat needs more product in spring, if we stop now we’ll mess up Fiat, but in October they won’t give a shit.

  The union officials got us into little groups, to divide us up, to break up the march. About twenty of us start another march somewhere else and get some comrades back. In two hours we manage to stop all the lines. Right at that moment the boss of the body plant arrived, the colonel. We were in workshop 54, but all the lines had stopped because we’d gone into the other workshops and we’d made them all stop. The colonel arrives, and as he comes a space opens up among the workers, everyone suddenly goes back to the lines. Fifteen of us were left alone there with signs. So I decide that this is the right moment to confront him, because if not we were pissing everything away.

  He comes towards us and I go towards him with the sign right in his face. I plant it half a metre from his nose and he reads it. I don’t remember which sign it was, something was written on it, I didn’t care what. The only thing I cared about was for him to go get fucked. Make him understand that he couldn’t do anything to us. He sees that I wasn’t going anywhere, that I’d planted myself right there in front of him, and he says: So what are all these signs? Price tags for vegetables? Is this the market? No, I say, they’re signs against the bosses, that’s why we made them. Then he gets a little group of people together, the engineer of the body plant with the other workers. And around the engineer were five hundred workers who kept nodding yes, yes. He spoke and they nodded yes. The union officials gathered other groups on the other body plant lines, and we were left in a little group of fifteen isolated comrades.

  So I say: Comrades, we need to act because if we don’t they’ll isolate us, they’ll screw us. We have to intervene where the engineer is speaking because he’s the biggest fish. If we can fuck up the engineer in front of the workers, we’ll save everything. If we can smash the capitalistic management of this little group we’re there, we’ve won the struggle here today. We went over to them, the engineer was speaking and I say: Can I join this discussion too? He goes: Please, speak. What do you have to say? I have only one thing to say: What productivity bonus do you get? That’s none of your business, goes the engineer.

  No, in fact it is my business. It’s my business because the maximum productivity bonus we get … I don’t even know how much I get. I never look at what’s on my pay slip, my base salary, piece rates, insurance and all of that. I just take the money, without reading it, because I’m not interested in reading it, I’m only interested in the money. But for sure we’d get five or six per cent at the most, maybe seven per cent. But how much do you get? It’s none of your business. In respect of the tiny percentage that we get, I continued, you, according to the annual production of automobiles, which we make, get a bonus of millions of lire. That’s why it’s in your interests to make us more and more productive. While for us, the work and the money never change. Is that true or not?

  I repeat, it’s none of your business. How is it not my business? With my work you make millions and then you say it’s none of my business. You make money because the productivity bonus increases with increases in your category. Whether you’re a leading hand, a foreman, a big boss, Agnelli. The biggest bonus, clearly, is Agnelli’s. I turned towards the workers: Do you know how much money this guy takes in production bonuses? Do you know why he doesn’t want to tell me?

  Then the colonel steps in and says: But don’t you know that I’ve studied? That I’m an engineer? No, I don’t know that, I answer. And I say: But do you know that we don’t give a shit whether you’ve studied? That we don’t recognise any authority over us other than our own any more? He says: Didn’t your parents teach you anything? No, they didn’t, did yours? Yes, mine did. And then he says, Have you done your military service? No, I haven’t done my military service, why, what’s my family and my military service got to do w
ith it? What it has to do with it is that your family should teach you how to behave, to respect people who are more educated. And if you had done military service you would understand that there is always a hierarchy that must be respected. Whoever doesn’t respect this hierarchy is an anarchist, a criminal, crazy.

  You could say that I’m crazy, but there is also the fact that I don’t like work. There, there it is, he shouts, you’ve all heard it, all of you, people who strike don’t like work. And so, I say, why do these guys prefer standing and talking to you over getting onto the lines? You can see that none of these people like work either. Anything, any excuse is enough, even standing and listening to someone talk. Workers don’t like work, workers are forced to work. I’m not here at Fiat because I like Fiat, because there isn’t a single fucking thing about Fiat that I like, I don’t like the cars that we make, I don’t like the foremen, I don’t like you. I’m here at Fiat because I need money.

  As I see it you won’t be here for much longer, the colonel says. I hear that a security guard was beaten up outside. If I find out who did it, I will make him pay dearly. You don’t have to go far to find out who it was, I say. I’ve never liked riddles very much. I know you’ll make me pay, but I really don’t give a shit. I gave that guy a beating and I’ll give someone else a beating tonight. The guy caught the sniff of a beating and got himself out from among us workers quick smart. The fifteen of us had lined up in front of him, and behind him were all the other workers. He runs off, but first he says to me: What is your name? I tell him my name, my surname, the name of my foreman, that I’m in workshop 54, on the 500 line, and that I’m always available. I tell him all this to show that I’m not afraid of him. You’ll see, I’ll make you pay. Ah, get fucked, get out of here you fucking prick, you’ll make me pay some other time.

  He goes off, and as he goes all the workers: ehhhhhhhhh, a shout, everybody cheering: You’re a legend, you fucked him up all right, that guy’s a real prick, he wanted to make fools out of us. OK, OK, I say, we’ve done that, but now it’s time to march. We have to fuck things up for good, smash everything in here now. And we kicked our boots against the cartons of supplies, making a sullen, violent noise, dududu dududu, a couple of hours of this uproar. Now and again we’d have a sort of meeting, one time at the north end of the lines, then at the south. We wound our way through them shouting all together: More money less work. Vogliamo tutto: we want everything. We climbed up and down the lines and held more meetings.

  On like that until the evening. When evening came I went to punch my time card. My time card wasn’t there, they’d taken it away. I go to the supervisor. Boss, where’s my time card? He says: Isn’t it there? Don’t mess around, where have you put it? I reply. I don’t know where it is, he goes, if it’s not there it means you’ll have to wait and then we’ll see. OK, I’ll wait then. Anyway, all the workers head off, they all leave. It was just me, it seemed, at Mirafiori. While I wait another foreman turns up, then another, and another. I say to myself: Hey, this smells like security guards. Boss, where’s my time card? You have to come to the office, he goes.

  Like fuck I’m coming to the office. I’m coming into the factory again tomorrow, with or without my time card. But I’m not coming to the office. If the colonel has something to say to me he can come and say it here in the workshop. I haven’t got anything to say to him, it’s him who wants to say something to me. And I took off quickly so I wouldn’t be the last one there. Some workers were coming out of the locker rooms where they’d showered and dressed. I catch up with my workmates and say: Comrades, they want to grab me and report me. They’ll grab me at the gate and slip some bit of junk into my pocket and call the police and report me for theft. That’s how they do it.

  All arranged. They’d grab me, put any old bit of metal in my pocket, a bolt or a spanner. They’d call the police: we caught him stealing, and this morning he beat up a security guard. They’d give me three years. This was their scheme. They wanted to get me at any cost. I went ahead with the comrades. Let’s stay on our toes at the gate. Because at the gate a guard picks you out, makes you go into a room and pokes around in your bag and your clothes. If they pick me out now, I say to the comrades, I’m not going in for the search, because if I go in I’m fucked. We go on, we get to the gate and I see the foreman, my foreman, surrounded by guards, five of them. The foreman goes: It’s him, that one there.

  A guard comes forward, he’d be the head-kicker in this situation, and says: You, actually, You, please, because they’re always formal at Fiat, You, please, come with me. Who, me? Why do I have to come? Come with me please. I don’t want to come. Please come with me. I don’t want to come, what do you want with me? Why, have you never been searched before? Yes, but this afternoon I don’t feel like it, and I haven’t got a bag, look, I’m wearing a pullover. I lifted it to show my bare chest. I’m wearing pants, that’s all, I haven’t got anything on me, can’t you see? Ciao. Come here, he yells.

  He grabs me around the neck, this fucking goon, and drags me along. So I think about what the fuck to do for a moment. I pretend to go with him. Then I put a foot in front of him and give him a shoulder in the back. Punft, he falls to the ground like a cow turd. I give him a kick in the balls. Two other guards jump me. The first one holds me by the legs and these other two on top. I kick them and elbow them and manage to throw them off. Then I’m beside them with my head down because the monster is holding me tight. At this point another comrade pulls on the arm that this asshole has around my neck like a vice. I pull his arm away, jump up, spit in the animal’s face. And run. Then they grab the other comrade, and they fired him, because he helped me.

  And I left. I went out and there were loads of workers and students outside. Outside the gates all the comrades were talking about the struggle. There were comrades who said I’d done the right thing by fighting the guards. That the day had been a great struggle, really satisfying. And we had a meeting right then. A huge mass of workers went to the bar, so many that you couldn’t get in. And there I met Emilio and Adriano and a load of other comrades. That evening a whole lot of us decided to hold a demo at the university. And that was the beginning of the big struggle at Fiat. That was May 29, a Thursday.

  Second part

  Sixth chapter The wage

  It had already been two or three weeks since it all started at Fiat. The struggles had begun after the strike for Battipaglia, which to be on the safe side the union at Fiat only held for three hours. The first political rally was on April 11, 1500 workers from the South Presses. It was the first chance Fiat workers had taken to fight against the bosses’ plans, which are to create unemployment and take the people of the south by hunger. To create a massive reserve of young people and force them to work in the factories in the north. Work that became almost a prize, a gift the bosses give us. To make us come and sleep in the stations and pile into one room paying rents that were like highway robbery.

  A worker explained all of this to the Maintenance workshop after the strike at Battipaglia. He climbed onto a table in the cafeteria and explained why southerners are forced to come to the north. So the management took the usual steps: transfer the worker to Mirafiori North, isolating him from everyone. But by Tuesday the 15th another group of workers are talking in a second meeting. They burst into the cafeteria, asking for a stop-work and demanding that the internal commission return the worker to his team immediately. I didn’t know this had already happened then. I learnt about it later from some comrades. After I’d chucked in work there for good. After the trouble I set off that day at Mirafiori.

  Over the next 48 hours Maintenance started the fight about categorisation and allowances over the minimum: two hours per shift. They demand the elimination of category three for Maintenance. To get category one workers into the struggle the union demands increases in the over-award allowances. The workers give the go-ahead to stop work straight away. The union holds back. But it’s just a taste. Another month would pass before the struggle s
tarted in all Fiat’s divisions.

  How Mirafiori works. The first of the two big production streams starts in the Foundries, where they make motor parts, the blocks and the aluminium heads. From there to the Mechanics, where the motors are built and finished with other parts. Then the motors go into Assembly, the actual assembly line. The second stream starts in the Presses, where the body parts are stamped out of sheet metal. From here to Assembly, where they are welded together and painted. While the body shells are moving along the line, the engines and the mechanical parts are added. The vehicles are dressed, given tyres and at the end they come out into the yard.

  In the middle of May the forklift drivers went on strike. To run down stocks, with the extra hit of heavy goods being held up in the workshops, because the forklift drivers loaded them onto the internal transports, the strike went for three whole shifts. At noon on the first day Fiat made its first offer: 40 lire an hour extra for all the category three forklift drivers, so as to maintain the hierarchy with the 10 lire an hour difference from category two. Offer flatly refused by the forklift drivers at Mirafiori North.