Introduction

The aim of this paper is to provide a synthetic, quantitative analysis of labor conflicts in Italy as they are recorded in official strike statistics from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the ascent of fascism. The qualification, “as they are recorded by the official statistics on strikes,” imposes two limits. First, forms of industrial unrest other than strikes, such as boycotts, restriction of output, and absenteeism and sabotage, will not be considered here. If it is true that these various types of conflict are to some extent interchangeable (Knowles 1952, 285), and that restricting one specific manifestation might “merely divert the conflict to other forms” (Hyman 1972, 55), this limitation will be particularly significant in the Italian context, where especially during the first decades analyzed here, the legal and political environment was rather hostile both to unionization and to industrial strikes.

Second, the official statistics provided by the government record only “economic” strikes, that is, “those which aim to obtain better working conditions directly from the employer.” Excluded are “political” strikes and those aiming to obtain the passage of some specific legislation or to achieve economic improvements through government measures. It could be, as one Italian scholar put it (Foa, 1975, 1799), that in Italy even more than in other countries the strike movement captured only a portion of labor activity, and that the social strains of the period are better expressed by indices such as migration, crime, and massacres.