Cinquanta anni di contrattazione di secondo livello: che cosa impariamo dal caso Lamborghini?

In the last fifty years, the nature and quality of industrial relations in Italy has changed considerably. The national bargaining process has been severely weakened and social dialogue between the parties has been questioned on several occasions. Corporate bargaining in the Fiat automotive group marked a season where the test of strength between company management and the Trade Union seemed to be played out on the ground of economic development based on a waiver of workers' rights, and where the global dimension of industrial relations in a multinational company could not be questioned because it was not an issue relevant to corporate bargaining. In this context, the existence of some divergent situations, such as that of Lamborghini, is extremely interesting, due to the particular context of regional development in which it is located and to the turning point in its ups and downs when, in 1998, it was acquired by the Audi VW group. A longitudinal analysis of the bargaining at company level offers cues for tracing a periodisation of the issues at the centre of the comparison between the parties, and the methods in which the comparison takes place. Based on the original body of bargaining from 1968 to 2016, the analysis proposed in this essay uses the results of automatic text analysis for a critical reflection that flanksthe reading of documents. In addition to identifying an effective periodisation of the issues at the heart of corporate bargaining, the conclusions underline the link between the national level and the corporate level of bargaining.