The Local Political Economy of Industrial Adjustment

Abstract

This article observes that local trade union responses to industrial restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s varied widely in Italy and that these variations reflect local economic, political, and organizational factors. Unions may oppose, accept, or seek to modify managerial restructuring; they may pursue their goals at the factory level or at the territorial level; and they may be generally successful or unsuccessful in accomplishing their objectives. The article argues that economic differences between Italy's “Industrial Triangle” of traditional “Fordist” mass production and the “Third Italy” of “flexible specialization” explain the generally greater activism of the unions in the former, where restructuring was a far more disruptive, traumatic phenomenon than it was in the latter. But the article also observes striking differences within the Industrial Triangle and within the Third Italy that cannot be explained in economic terms. Rather, these differences are shown to result from variations in the local unions' organizational strength and unity as well as from the existence or absence of local political authorities capable of involving the unions in “local neocorporatist” exchanges.