Company Negotiation in the Referendum Trap. Lessons from the New Company Agreements in Fiat's Italian Factories (2010-2011)

The promotion of company negotiations over industry-wide agreements is a recurrent motif in the debate on increasing flexibility in the European labour market. The Italian case, and more specifically the sequence marked by two reforms in the industrial relations system (2009-2011), offers an insight into the potential excesses of company agreements. During this sequence, Fiat's management undertook to legitimise overriding company agreements by means of referendums on three production sites. This article seeks to examine the attack conducted by the multinational against its main opposing union, by studying the way in which the blackmail exercised through the referendums swept away the embryonic resistance then emerging. The trial of strength launched by one of Italy's biggest companies seems ultimately to have worried the employers' organisations themselves, highlighting as it did the pressure that globalised corporations are capable of applying on national industrial relations systems. (C) 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.