The history of CGIL anti-fascism (1920-1950)

Italy also recorded a period of heated social conflict: the "red biennium" (1919-20). The protagonists of this phase are the laborers in the countryside, while the factory councils operate in industry.

The "red biennium" was followed in Italy by the "black biennium" (1921-22), marked by the violent attack the fascists wreaked on the labor movement and the fragile institutions of the liberal state.

After the assault on the headquarters of the Municipality of Bologna in November 1920, there were more cases of fire and looting carried out by black squads against the Chambers of Labor, People's Houses, cooperatives, and leagues.

In the Po Valley alone, in the first six months of 1921, there were 726 attacks carried out by fascist squads.

59 People's Houses, 119 Labor Chambers, 107 cooperatives, 83 farmers' leagues, 141 socialist sections, 100 cultural centers, 28 workers' unions, 53 workers' leisure centers fell victim to the violence.

"They were the children of an Italy that sent them forth to frighten people, to bring confusion (...) they were 'Arditi' being plagiarized, exploited (...) That young scum horrified and hurt me," Pietro Nenni would comment years later.

On October 28, 1922, with the March on Rome, Mussolini took power. In early 1925, the Duce determined a turn in a "totalitarian" direction through a series of liberticidal measures (the "fascistissime laws"), which canceled any form of opposition to fascism.

On the trade union level, with the Palazzo Vidoni agreements of October 2, 1925, Confindustria and the Fascist trade union mutually recognized each other as the sole representatives of capital and labor by abolishing the Internal Commissions.

Law 563 of April 3, 1926 legally recognizes the Fascist trade union only, establishes a special Magistracy for the settlement of labor disputes and cancels the right to strike.

With the implementation of the Rocco Code, the strike will be not only banned, but considered a crime - in several instances - among the crimes against the public economy, industry and commerce.

Even before Mussolini's fall on July 25, 1943 following a vote by the Grand Council of Fascism, important sectors of the northern working classes had returned to strike against the regime.

Between March 5 and 17, 1943, factories in Turin are blocked by a protest involving 100,000 workers. Behind the economic demands, the unrest has a clear political intent.  A wave that spreads from Turin to the main factories in northern Italy.

"The strikes of March 1943 (...) expressed the resurrection of the working class as a group (...) and laid the foundations for a new unity of the great historical trade union movements that had already led the workers all the way to the dictatorship and then even into illegality."

"The strikes, wrote Oreste Lizzadri, (...) marked the first, great real defeat of fascism in its elements considered to be the most vital, such as the power of repressive force (...), the myth of its organization, the praised totalitarian adherence to the regime."

The Resistance was started by the workers. And they end it, occupying the factories two years later on the eve of April 25, 1945. Rising up, striking, again in March 1944.

The strikes are joined by hundreds of thousands of workers, clerks, technicians, managers of every productive category and public service.
Students from many high schools and some universities are striking. Employees of Milan's Corriere della Sera also strike.

"In terms of group demonstrations," wrote the New York Times on March 9, 1944, "nothing has happened in occupied Europe that compares with the Italian workers' uprising.

"The victorious insurrection of all the people of Northern Italy," Giuseppe Di Vittorio would say, "realized the essential premise of the rebirth (...) of Italy (...)

(...) It was the workers, peasants, clerks and technicians who constituted the bulk and brains of the glorious partisan formations and all the outbreaks of active resistance to the German invader.

Who can say whether the sensational victory of April 25 would have been possible without the grandiose general strikes that, from March 1943, followed one after another, in short intervals, until 1945?"

While the Chambers of Labor were reborn in the South and the resistance movement intensified in the North, the leading figures of Italian trade unionism continued the dialogue efforts begun as early as the 1930s that would culminate in the signing of the Rome Pact in June 1944.

The unified CGIL was born out of the agreement between the three main Italian political forces, and the Rome Pact would be signed by Giuseppe Di Vittorio for the Communists, Achille Grandi for the Christian Democrats, and Emilio Canevari for the Socialists.

One signature is missing, the one of Bruno Buozzi, who in those same hours was brutally murdered by the Nazis.

"Fascism - Buozzi stated in 1930 - represents in Italy's national life a painful episode (... ) The fascist experience, especially in the workers' arena, constitutes an atrocious injustice, a step backward, the loss of precious years."

On April 25, 1945, the populations of major northern cities rose up; Italy was finally free.

Trade unions will play a major political role in the drafting of the Constitution, which in Article 1 defines Italy as "a democratic republic, founded on labor."

After the general elections of April 18, 1948, which saw the clear affirmation of Democrazia Cristiana and the defeat of Fronte Popolare (PCI and PSI)

and after the July 14 assassination attempt on Togliatti, to which the CGIL will react with a political general strike, Democrazia Cristiana decided to split.

The trade union split period will last for about two years, from the summer of 1948 to the spring of 1950.
It will end with the birth of Uil and Cisl.

The phase following the splits is one of the most difficult for the Italian trade union. Police repression, led by the notorious "Celere" reinforced by Minister of the Interior Mario Scelba, will cause the death of dozens of workers during demonstrations and strikes.

The city symbolic of these massacres is Modena where six workers died on January 9, 1950.

"It should be noted that all these workers," Di Vittorio wrote, "were killed solely because they demanded to work (...). The workers are tired of crying over their dead and are not at all willing to let their needs for work or life suffocate in blood."

The CGIL with its strength and prestige opposes, exposes itself and is hit for it. The first bomb on Corso d'Italia exploded on the night of October 26-27, 1955.

Giuseppe Di Vittorio stated the following day, "United anti-fascism made the new Italy, united anti-fascism must consolidate the democratic order of the state, develop the democratic freedoms of our country."