Trade unionism with an awareness of places

To be a territorial union may seem like a syncretism that looks backwards: to the peasant leagues, to the beginnings of that stream of people moving from the fields and workshops demanding rights for the fourth state. Today in the hyper-industrialisation of the 'territorial factory' a multitude of social composition reappears, demanding representation. I do not know if Barbara Distaso, secretary of the Valle Camonica-Sebino CGIL district, was clear where she was heading when she promoted a work of territorial relations going beyond the factory walls and playing music beyond the Fordist organ pipes of representation. Perhaps in 'remembering the future' of trade union 'relationism' by following the traces of jobs and social malaise, the geography of places helped her. A territorial platform of alpine valleys, with the mountains defining its boundaries, with its head in the snow tourism district and its feet in the centre of Lombard manufacturing on the Bergamo-Brescia axis, with the historic rise of the iron and steel and metalworking cycle. He also found memory of a Territorial Pact to which the trade union had been called at the turn of the century when one wondered about the fate of companies in the metamorphosis of that industrial cycle that redesigned the territory. Which today we tend to recount with its poles of excellence: of tourism Ponte di Legno and Tonale, Lake Iseo with the great Christo event and its installation on the water, and then to the Franciacorta of sparkling wines, often making it a place of the through rather than of living and working. Which the union tried to understand by going to municipalities at the bottom of the valley, organising meetings on territorial needs: mobility and digital in Edolo, healthcare and health in Niardo, fragility and the environment in Rogno, good work and jobs in Pisogne. Looking up to the small municipalities clinging to the top, to those at the bottom of the production district, to mountain agriculture, to the ecological crisis and to the water resource, which is not just a lake or tourism event theme, but of energy communities and utilities such as Enel and A2A. Trying to understand and relate to the changing social composition starting from the manufacturing fabric with 25,000 employees and 12,000 in construction, trade, agriculture, but also with the growth of logistics of services to businesses, tourism, people, in that nebula of the fundamental economies of living, health, environment and demography that make the resilience of a territory. This work seemed to me a syncretic attempt to make trade unions by holding together class consciousness and place consciousness. The CGIL drew up a working document on the basis of shared concerns: from the depopulation of the side valleys and how to make neo-population, to that of social and health services, to a vision of tourism not as a mere flow and to how to design new employment for young people and new citizenship. With the request for a co-planning of the development dynamics of the territorial platform and how to dialogue with local institutions such as the Mountain Community, but also with policies, functional autonomies (Chamber of Commerce-University) and the services of medium-sized cities such as Bergamo and Brescia, of which the district is not a periphery, but smart land central. He discussed this with mayors discussing the vast area and protagonists of the territory such as the Brescia transport agency, with the protagonists of a return for change and widespread ecological practice, the forum of the third sector, the topic of battered women, the RSA on the topic of the elderly and the V.A.T. matches at work in the new tertiary and services cycle. In the background of this work of social weaving remains for everyone the question of how to make representation and union of territory or, an even more problematic issue, community unions in a territory where the tumultuous flows of change often lead to a retreat into rancorous localism. Years ago I called Alpine valleys in the grip of anomie with respect to the flows passing through them 'sad areas'. This microcosm gives me hope that these are times in which the territories of the margin are also gaining a voice thanks to a trade union that heeds the warning of a great workerist who wrote: 'the workers' movement began to lose when it began to run... and not behind contradictions, rather in front of ever-increasing modernisation'.

bonomi@aaster.it