In 1978, the Labor Office of the People’s Movement was born, which was publicly presented at a conference in Rimini on December 16-17 of the same year, entitled “Trade Union Workers of the People’s Movement”. Trade unionists, who until then characterized their presence in the factory and the unions by signing public positions such as acceptance and liberation, took part.
The head of the Popular Movement of Rome, Saverio Allevato, opens the conference, followed by reports from Unidal trade unionist Mario Spotti and Rocco Buttiglione, which are followed by assemblies with many interventions and Allevato’s conclusions. The first message and interventions in the assembly are very self-critical; the need to move based on real needs and not secondary logic is emphasized, but also to insert factory presence and trade union action into the wider project of the People’s Movement.
Judgment based on need
Spotti’s intervention contains many elements of real testimony. “The purpose of this working meeting,” began Allevato, “is certainly not to establish or direct a Christian trade union movement. We do not intend to establish any stream, much less a Christian one. The aim is instead to grasp our identity and our origins strongly and with a healthy assumption and play it with great simplicity but also with great ruthlessness within the trade union movement”.
Mario Spotti explains:
“We at the union meeting do not recognize each other by different behavior because we are identical to everyone else. We act exactly like them. We read the newspaper like everyone else, we consider these meetings unnecessary, and we know they are formal and already decided. It is disturbing to see how we bring nothing new to this environment. I wondered how, from a certain point in my personal experience, these things appeared; and at the same time, it was obvious to me that in my particular situation – which was Unidal’s situation – things should not be dealt with at all by talking around them, with formalism in an ideological way. It was so clear that a need needed to be addressed instead! That was the serious beginning of union work for me. And that meant facing the need with judgment and starting to be guided by the situation itself.
In a Christian sense, it means sharing the situation and letting your life be judged according to these needs and those people.”Then you can no longer experience a moment like in meetings as I said before: even with all the limits of formality, falsehood, emptiness, and smallness that meetings can have. (…) Because he who has faith cannot live anything in this way, because it depends on him and nothing else to experience things and situations with a judgment of value and faith.
For example, when a colleague from work is speaking in a meeting, you listen to him, even if he repeats what he learned the week before in the party section. Because when a person speaks, he always puts a need into it, or in any case, always puts something of his own, creative, personal. Then, if we are sure that what is taking place in a certain situation is the mysterious presence of the Lord and this presence reaches us through people and things, we also put ourselves in the encounter or situation with this judgment and experience the encounter with faith. and by judging our lives by the things we listen to, and by giving things the value they have and not living the value everyone else ascribes to them, with the alienation that characterizes these situations”.
Christmas leaflets for workers
In his speech, Spotti explains what the presence of Christians in his Unidal factory, which was being renovated at the time, meant:
“How did we start there? We start handing out the first flyer at Christmas, as probably every one of us has already started. At Unidal, which was then Motta and made panettone, I started ten years ago by handing out a leaflet that said: “Look, Christmas is not panettone, it’s something else.” That was surprising ten years ago because it had been twenty or thirty years since the name of Jesus Christ had been heard in the factory, and it was something that divided the mentality.”This work has been going on for years.
These leaflets were constantly distributed, and with our judgment, we as a Christian community interfered in the life of the Union; perhaps the CL magazine was sold at the doors of the factories (…) A work was started that at a certain point seemed without an answer. We asked ourselves: “But does this work have an impact?”. Instead, it began to have an effect. We realized that the things that seemed obvious to us, the leaflets that we were handing out, were placed in the ward by some staff, maybe among a lot of pictures of naked women, but woe betide anyone who touches them.'”Once a worker stopped me and said: ‘You know I read your last leaflet every morning before going to the factory?’ The flyer we gave out months ago.
This means that a very simple presence, sometimes too linear, and almost devoid of novelty, had two effects. One of them was to give back a minimum of dignity and voice to the Catholics in the factory: they felt represented, and they were no longer ashamed to say they were Catholics in the factory. The second thing is that especially when the situation in Unidal worsened, these Catholics began to come to me: for the first time, they reproached me for going to meetings with “comrades” and bringing up their anti-communism. But then they started to feel represented in a political sense as well.”
A labor movement, not trade unionists
“Some workers, delegates and militants, part of the PCI, and some non-parliamentary members started living friendship with us. They left their original group or group and some received communion on the day the cardinal celebrated mass. The human approach to us was an approach to the experience of faith. One woman told us that before she held a party meeting every night; but once the meeting was over, there was nothing left, they were strangers to each other. “With you,” he told us, “I’ve learned to realize that there is something more. To have a broader, more global view of the problems. By being friends with you, I learn differently what the needs of my work colleagues are.”So we can say that he who works hard does not create a movement, but an organization in the world of work. We are not called to create an organization, but we are working here to create a movement of workers – not trade unions – within the world of work. Except that this movement wasn’t born because we were busy, but because there is a Christian identity that works. (…) It is not a goal that we set for ourselves, but a consequence of our actual position where we are”.