Stefano Agnoletto

This article explores the development of a municipal welfare state in post-war Milan. Looking at developments from a municipal level has interesting implications for the current historiography of the Italian welfare state which is less attentive to regional variations. The article shows how certain cities were able to develop local provision based on municipal rather than national strategies.
Here on Academia you can read the introduction.
You can find the article at this link:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20514530.2015.1101290?journalCode=yjrl20

"During the second half of the twentieth century, Italy, like many other European countries, experienced the birth and growth of a specific kind of welfare state. It was the consequence of various international influences in the context of the Cold War as well as the result of controversial actions of different internal actors. The purpose of this article is to explore the actions of some of these internal actors and their consequences for the definition of the Italian welfare state.

Specifically, the object of this essay is to identify the role played by trade unions in defining the Italian model of state social policy in the period following World War II. This essay proposes an interpretation which identifies trade unions as main actors in the consolidation, albeit difficult and slow, of the welfare system in Italy. Consequently, this enquiry into the “Italian way” also discusses some traditional explanations and classifications proposed in the literature about the welfare state, welfare regimes, and the welfare society. In particular, this essay introduces the concept of a “Union Based Welfare State” in order to describe the Italian experience and as a descriptive category useful for comparative analyses generally.

Following this working hypothesis, this article assesses one particular aspect of the complex framework of the Italian trade union experience after World War II. It offers a reconstruction of the debate and actions regarding the welfare state questions that feature the two most important Italian trade unions, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Council of Labor) (CGIL) and the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions) (CISL).

Moreover, in the essay, a description of the actions of the Istituto Nazionale di Assistenza Sociale (National Institute of Social Assistance) (INAS) and Istituto Nazionale Confederale di Assistenza (Confederated National Institute of Assistance) (INCA) also assists in the investigation of CISL and CGIL’s roles in the welfare state. INAS and INCA are the Patronati (trade union aid societies) of the CISL and CGIL and the tools by which trade unions deal with daily assistance and social security issues.

To summarize, the final goal of this essay is to show how the Italian welfare state experience represents, in the European postwar context, an original “union way” which questions traditional descriptions of the Italian welfare state. In particular, it challenges the description of Italian social policy that uses only the categories of clientelism and familism and instead highlights elements of discontinuity and the central role of trade unions in social policy implementation."

This article concerns a central issue in Italian history and historiog-raphy: the economic transformation of the State of Milan in the 17 th century as a turning point that structurally influenced the development of the Italian economy in subsequent centuries. The hypothesis maintained here is that the State of Milan became one of the leading areas at the origins of Italian industrialization, as an apparently paradoxical consequence of the supposed economic decline that had affected Lombardy's urban economy during the 17 th century. The idea is that capitalism needed a " restorative crisis " in order to continue on its original path. The article does not propose a new theoretical framework or a radical historiographic innovation. It aims to provide a systematic bibli-ographic review and an original analytical category that is useful both for new approaches to established ideas and for new research perspectives.The theoretical point is not only to confirm the generally accepted thesis that the State of Milan underwent a metamorphosis and not a decline in the 17 th century but also to insert the elements of undeniable crisis into a framework of capitalistic development .

l lavoro in esame si caratterizza per il fatto di essere una ricostruzione organica e attenta dell'ampio dibattito sul presunto declino del Paese. Una ricostruzione dal carattere quasi storiografico e documentaristico, perché basata sul richiamo e sul diretto confronto di pareri, opinioni ed analisi espresse da studiosi, esperti, politici e figure istituzionali nell'ambito di interviste pubblicate sulla stampa o in studi e lavori tecnico-scientifici.

Gerli is a small Italian business specializing, since more than a century, in the global trade of metal raw materials, in particular «non-ferrous metals». The enterprise has been managed by five generations of the Gerli family who have ensured its place in the inter-national and local market, showing an innovation capability constant over time.The history of this case study is interesting for several reasons. Gerli represents, first of all, a paradigmatic example of a small size enterprise very common in reality, and in the Italian economic model in particular, but rarely present in business history literature. Secondly, the internationalization pathway featured in the Gerli history is also typical of many small born-global firms. Moreover, Gerli has represented an apparently paradoxical example of a positive combination of path-dependence and an innovative and creative attitude. It has emerged as a dynamic and profitable family firm that has successfully combined traditional characteristics of proprietary capitalism, such as paternalism, dynastic motives, internal succession patterns, with some «modern» features of a capital market, such as technology utilization and, above all, internationalization.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

The launch of the first edition of  "The Italians Who Built Toronto: Italian Workers and Contractors in the City’s Housebuilding Industry, 1950-1980" , was held on Tuesday 14 October 2014 at York University, in Toronto.  My book was discussed by roundtable presenters Prof. Franca Iacovetta, Dr. Angelo Principe, Prof. Ian Radforth, and Prof. Gabriele Scardellato. This was followed by an engaging audience discussion. One thing made me very happy: among the participants there were both scholars and former construction workers, as well as other protagonists of the story my book tells. The Italians Who Built Toronto was recognised both as an academic work and as a way of keeping alive the memory of a community.

During an interview for the Toronto Star about the first edition of my book, Joe Fiorito asked me why an Italian reader should be interested in what happened in Toronto.  I explained that Italy is now receiving waves of immigrants from many other countries, not always easily or happily, but quite often with widespread racism, and I said: ’We have to remember how things were, so when we look at the new arrivals we can understand their problems‘ Joe immediately answered:  ’That lesson is as important in the old country as it is in Toronto today‘.

In another article, for the Daily Commercial News, my interviewer, Andre Widjaja, underlined how my book demonstrated the significance of Italians in shaping the current landscape of Toronto’s construction industry. 

Moreover, after the first edition of this book was published I  received many emails from former construction workers and small employers, as well as from their children and grandchildren, who expressed their gratitude to me for telling their stories. They were all of the opinion that ’Toronto must know and remember these stories’.

For these reasons, I think it is important to publish this new edition for the local market in Toronto and Ontario, the places where the protagonists of my book soon discovered that the streets in the New World were not paved with gold,  but that they were nevertheless able to overcome the challenges that faced them. Toronto was the scene of  their stories of inventiveness and hope, as well as those of oppression and despair.

I am grateful to all the staff of Peter Lang Publishing Group for their editorial efficiency and for the friendly assistance they always gave me. I thank Professor Craigh Phelan, the series editor of the first edition, who immediately supported the opportunity to publish a new edition.

A new book on the stories of inventiveness and hope as well as of oppression and despair experienced by  hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Toronto.

"After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Toronto. This book describes their labour, business, social and cultural history as they settled in their new home. It addresses fundamental issues that impacted both them and the city, including ethnic economic niching, unionization, urban proletarianization and migrants’ entrepreneurship.
In addressing these issues the book focuses on the role played by a specific economic sector in enabling immigrants to find their place in their new host society. More specifically, this study looks at the residential sector of the construction industry that, between the 1950s and the 1970s, represented a typical economic ethnic niche for newly arrived Italians. In fact, tens of thousands of Italian men found work in this sector as labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and cement finishers, while hundreds of others became contractors, subcontractors or small employers in the same industry. This book is about these real people. It gives voice to a community formed both by entrepreneurial subcontractors who created companies out of nothing and a large group of exploited workers who fought successfully for their rights. In this book you will find stories of inventiveness and hope as well as of oppression and despair. The purpose is to offer an original approach to issues arising from the economic and social history of twentieth-century mass migrations."

Negli ultimi anni gli studi di storia economica sul Sei-Settecento lombardo hanno vissuto una fase di particolare vivacità connessa all'emergere di un processo di revisione critica di paradigmi interpretativi consolidati. La ricerca storiografica, e quella storico-economica in particolare, hanno messo a disposizione degli studiosi una qualità non trascurabile di studi e lavori, di cui una ricca produzione bibliografica, anche recente, ne è il risultato ed una valida testimonianza. Nonostante questa indiscutibile realtà si è però constatato il permanere di specifiche lacune sia inerenti ad alcuni archi cronologici sia in relazione all'impiego e all'analisi di tipologie particolari di fonti nella ricostruzione storica.
Il dibattito storiografico sul Seicento, oscillante tra i due diversi paradigmi della crisi e del nuovo modello di crescita, e gli ormai innumerevoli studi sul Settecento lombardo come "secolo delle riforme", sembrano aver in parte trascurato quella che si può definire la fase di passaggio tra i due secoli, con il vortice di sommovimenti che l'hanno caratterizzata, ma che hanno visto forse più attenti gli storici politici o militari che non gli specialisti di storia economica lombarda.
A partire da questa constatazione si è reputato significativo impostare un lavoro di ricerca con l'obiettivo di accrescere le conoscenze sulla realtà dello Stato di Milano negli anni immediatamente precedenti la nomina della Giunta per il nuovo Censimento (1718). Lo scopo perseguito è stato quello di descrivere una realtà complessa al fine di precisare come è nata quella volontà di rinnovamento che si dispiegherà nei decenni seguenti, quali ne furono le premesse, quali antecedenti segnalarono il sussistere di una spinta innovativa, quali le problematiche che si posero all'origine di essa.

La ricostruzione di cinquant’anni di storia dell’Inas, lì Istituto Nazionale di Assistenza Sociale: le vicende principali, le idealità e le motivazioni dei singoli e dell’organizzazione, il contesto storico, culturale, economico e sociale. Un confronto inevitabile con l’esperienza sindacale della Cisl, al cui interno si è sviluppato, a volte tra conflitti e incomprensioni, questo patronato.

L’offerta lavorativa è sempre stata tra le principali attrattive di Milano. Un’offerta che cambia e si trasforma rapidamente a partire dalla seconda metà del Ottocento, quando vengono poste le basi per il decollo industriale che prenderà corpo a partire dall’ultimo decennio del secolo.
La fisionomia di Milano resterà lungamente caratterizzata dalla sua evoluzione industriale, scandita da alcuni momenti cruciali: la prima e la seconda guerra mondiale, la Ricostruzione e gli anni del conflitto sociale, che hanno modificato il mondo del lavoro e insieme il volto della città.
Lungo tutto il Novecento il mercato del lavoro milanese appare segmentato e non omogeneo. Si conferma infatti la tradizionale presenza delle reti di piccole fabbriche e aziende che si affiancano e sopravvivono all’invasività delle grandi industrie taylofordiste, sia come realtà dotate di propria autonomia, sia nella forma dell’indotto.
La crisi delle industrie manifatturiere e la crescita del terziario e del settore dei servizi a partire dagli anni Settanta ha dato origine ad ulteriori cambiamenti nel mondo del lavoro, senza tuttavia determinare la scomparsa di fenomeni di sfruttamento e di debolezza sociale.
Available on line: http://www.milanoattraverso.it/lavoro/

Between the 1950 and the 1970 about 250000 Italians emigrated to Toronto. Dozen of thousands of them (the most part men) found a job in the construction sector as bricklayers, laborers, carpenters, plasterers and cement finishers. In 1960 and 1961 they were protagonist of two long, violent and illegal strikes that represented the beginning of a contradictory path of integration in the Canadian society. The object of my paper is the processes of proletarianization and Italianization/Canadization which affected the Italian workers in the ethnic niche of the Toronto construction sector. My purpose is to discuss the experience of migration of the Italians as a transition from one social identity to another (class and/or ethnic identity). I will propose the following interpretative hypothesis: It was the transition from being peasants, with local identity (napoletana, calabrese etc.) in a rural pre-modern society, to becoming economic actors in an urban and industrial context, that was at the origin of the process of Italianization of this community. In this framework, ethnicity (Italianity) is interpreted as a social practice or a human construction rather than an immutable attribute. The Italianization is presented as an aspect of the process of proletarianization of this group of workers who experienced its way toward a new class consciousness through the discovery of belonging to a larger ethnic community of exploited workers. This research project on the history of Italian immigrants in Toronto represents a new attempt to analyze the process by which the ethnic identity are socially and politically constructed in a specific context, with an approach originally based on the theoretical framework proposed in the 1980s by Robert Miles. I argue that ethnicity is a human construction, but, in this case-study, it didn’t play the expected role of a regulatory process hiding the real economic relations. On the contrary, it was the tool for a new and powerful class solidarity and awareness.

Call for Papers
The Origins of the Welfare State: Global and Comparative Approaches

A special issue of Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict
Co-edited by Stefano Agnoletto and Cristina Palmieri


Zapruder World is an online, open-access and peer-reviewed history journal coordinated by an international network of activists and scholars, both academic and independent. The journal’s parent organization, Storie in movimento (SIM), has been active since 2002 and continues to publish the Italian journal Zapruder.

The project of Zapruder World stems from our desire to broaden, at a global level, the scope of the organization and of its publications. It is guided by the same principles that have inspired SIM so far, namely direct participation, self-funding, and horizontal decision-making.

The aim of Zapruder World is to create a wide arena in which to exchange critical knowledge based on both individual research and collective elaboration. The journal focuses on social conflict paying particular attention to conflicts as movements rather than focusing on their resolutions, so as to better connect the history of social conflicts with current transnational cycles of protest. It therefore uses “social conflict” as an interpretative category rather than simply an object of analysis, exploring it through concepts and methodologies that address the complex interaction between the “local” and the “global.” Zapruder World is animated by an aspiration towards “global history” but intentionally leaves its actual definition, contents, and methods open for discussion.

Volume 3

This special issue will mainly include articles but also other types of original works, both accompanying the articles themselves and as autonomous contributions (such as photographs, videos, interviews, drawings, comics, songs, hyperlinks to online resources, multimedia, etc.). In general, and if possible, we encourage our authors to think about incorporating multimedia both into their pieces proposed for Zapruder World and in the sections (e.g. “yesterday” and “today”) we have implemented  on our  website

Introduction

We invite article proposals for a global and comparative approach to the history of the welfare state  that seeks to overcome the epistemological Eurocentrism that many scholars have employed, whether consciously or unconsciously. Thus, this volume of Zapruder World aims to investigate whether or not the welfare state was/is a global or a regional phenomenon. Moreover, alongside the study of national cases, this volume questions the possibility of  a transnational or supranational understanding of the mechanisms that  characterized the origins of the welfare state during the twentieth century.

Context and Aims

As scholars and activists, we face the hegemony of neoliberal ideologies and their consequences in terms of attacks on public programs in areas such as health, education, income-transfers, housing and so on. We aim to consciously contrast the normalization and dominance of “liberal thought” which consistently downplays the role of welfare legislation and institutions. At the same time, we do not want to “celebrate” the welfare state in itself. In looking at history as, essentially, a space for conflict challenging liberal-conciliatory descriptions of the past, we propose the same critical approach to the history of the welfare state.

In particular, a large part of the debate about the welfare state has discussed whether or not “it has a future.” We think that the awareness of the transformations undertaken by both the notion and the organization of the welfare state at the beginning of the twenty-first century can serve as a starting point for a critical reconsideration of its history and its representation. Recent  cultural and political debates on the role of the State, on social movements and trade unions, etc., can also offer important insights.

Moreover, new theoretical challenges have emerged from public debates such as the idea of overcoming the Market vs. State dualism. These approaches, however, risk blurring the critical difference  between neo-liberal views and activist strategies of self-organization. For this reason, this volume aims to retrace  the origins of the welfare state and illustrate its many possible articulations in order to demonstrate how the Market vs. State dualism has influenced its development. Thus, discussing the origins of the welfare state will allow us to further comprehend the complex and sometimes contradictory factors which led to different articulations of the welfare state in different parts of the world and in different periods.

In conclusion, this special issue of Zapruder World seeks to challenge the dominant emphasis on the “crisis” of the welfare state while, simultaneously, encouraging critical reflection on the possible alternatives offered by the welfare state in responding to people’s basic needs.

Examples of Research Questions:

• Class, gender and ethnicity during the origins of the welfare state: What role did each play? How did they interact?
• The welfare state: a European and/or Western issue? A benign form of Eurocentrism or neocolonialism?
• Is a global approach to the welfare state possible? Are different experiences comparable? Is it possible to have “global answers” to the question: Why did the welfare state emerge? Were there turning points which globally or regionally affected the development of the welfare state (e.g. the 1929 crisis, the World War II etc.)?
• Was/is there a welfare state outside of the West?
• What was the role played by the State in the creation of the welfare state?
• The influence and the role played by ideologies (Marxist, religious, paternalism, Liberalism, etc.).
• Going beyond Esping Andersen’s classification.
• A concession of the State and/or a people’s achievement? The need for new categories.
• Rethinking welfare state paradigms and periodization.

Ideas for Articles:

(Although history is the main focus of this journal, contributions that merge an historical perspective with other disciplines are highly encouraged.)
• Global, transnational, and supranational approaches and perspectives on the history of the origins of the welfare state.
• National cases studies: The role played by different social and/or institutional actors, groups, and ideologies within the origins of the welfare state.
• Comparative approaches: Pursuing different case studies on the origins of the welfare state.
• New hypotheses on the classifications of the patterns of the welfare state during the twentieth century.
• New and innovative theoretical and historiographical approaches and classifications for a global/supranational/transnational understanding the origins of the welfare state.
• Thematic approaches to the origins of the welfare state (such as class, gender, ethnicity, etc.).
• Sectorial approaches to the origins of the welfare state (such as health, education, housing, etc.).
• Before of the welfare state (eighteenth through twentieth centuries): On the experiences of active solidarity and social cooperation (communitarian, trade unionist, etc.) and their influences on the origins of the welfare state. (National, transnational, supranational global and comparative approaches.)

Submissions:

Abstracts in English (300-600 words) shall be sent by April 15, 2015 to submissions@zapruderworld.org.
All contributors will be informed about the status of their abstract submission by June 1, 2015. Full articles (6,000-9,000 words) shall be sent by September 1, 2015. Final drafts, after reviews and comments, shall be expected by December 15, 2015 (in order to publish the completed volume by January 31, 2016).
The Manifesto of Zapruder World, the journal’s previous volumes, as well as guidelines for prospective authors can be found at: http://www.zapruderworld.org.