Italian Federation of Metalworkers

The Italian Federation of Metalworkers, known as FIOM, was the metalworkers’ union involved in the 1920 factory conflict. Its clearest action in the account came at the Alfa Romeo Portello plant in Milan, where it announced an occupation following a lockout. The episode places the union at the point where a dispute over wages and industrial control became a confrontation over who would command the workplace.

Identity and Industrial Context

At the Alfa Romeo Portello plant, workers’ expectations and management’s plans collided. The factory was preparing to produce the Alfa Romeo RL, a postwar sports model intended to fill a gap in the company’s range. The wider dispute, however, concerned wage increases: negotiations had broken down in mid-August, and the employers’ representatives rejected further concessions.

Workers first responded with obstructionism, slowing production without leaving their jobs. That tactic preceded a sharper escalation. On August 30, despite an appeal from Milan’s prefect, Nicola Romeo declared a lockout at his factory. FIOM then announced the occupation. The sequence matters: the union’s action answered the lockout, rather than initiating the confrontation described at Portello.

The Portello Occupation and National Escalation

Within hours, workers entered factories across Milan; managers, and sometimes owners, were held inside. At Portello, the workers’ red flags bore the hammer and sickle, giving the occupation a visible political emblem as well as a practical claim to control of the plant. The next day, industrialists called a nationwide lockout, and the Italian General Confederation of Labour responded by organizing a much wider occupation: more than 500,000 workers took possession of 600 manufacturing plants across Italy.

The account assigns FIOM a specific role at Portello, not sole responsibility for the national action. The scale and speed of the wider occupation took observers by surprise, including prefects who learned of it from newspapers. Factories from Savigliano to Bagnoli and from Monfalcone to Castellammare del Golfo passed into workers’ hands; workshops and courtyards became places of encampment. The red flag flying over Portello was part of this larger, rapidly spreading movement.

Significance and Limits of the Record

The union’s documented intervention marks a turning point in the plant-level dispute: a disagreement over wages, followed by a slowdown, became an occupation after management shut the factory. The account then broadens from FIOM’s call at Portello to the Italian General Confederation of Labour’s national response, keeping local union action and nationwide coordination distinct.

The occupation also intensified fear among the middle classes. Coming soon after agricultural conflicts in the Po Valley, the factory seizures made the prospect of civil conflict seem more immediate. The account does not detail FIOM’s membership, internal organization, or subsequent activities; its significance here rests on its role in the Portello sequence and on the distinction between that local action and the wider industrial mobilization.