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Evolving or Disappearing? Italian Trade Unions in the 2010s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2023

Emilio Caja*
Affiliation:
University of Lisbon, Portugal

Extract

“The worker has his own personality, his own self-respect, his own ideas, his own political opinion, his own religious beliefs, and he wants these rights to be respected by everyone, especially by the employer,” said the first leader of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) Giuseppe Di Vittorio in 1952. Yet between this statement in the 1950s and today many things have changed: not only what the worker is and has become, but also how trade unions have represented workers. This article, focusing on the introduction of the first minimum-income scheme in Italian history, explores how the role of trade unions in representing workers and promoting welfare expansion changed in the country in the 2010s.

Type
Special Feature
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2023

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References

Notes

1. Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Preface to the Workers’ Statute presented at the III Congress of the CGIL, 1952.

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