Italy Strike Survival Guide 2025: How to Deal With Italian Scioperi

How Italy invented the modern labor strike — and why the Fiat occupation of 1920 established the template for European industrial relations

The Italian labor movement's specific historical contribution to European industrial relations: the "Factory Council" movement of 1919-1920 (the Consigli di Fabbrica — the worker self-governance bodies established in the major Turin industrial plants, most importantly the Fiat Lingotto factory) and the September 1920 occupation of the northern Italian factories (approximately 400,000 workers occupied their factories in the most extensive industrial action in European history to that date, establishing a workers' council governance system within the occupied plants) produced the template for European industrial conflict that shaped labor relations throughout the 20th century. The specific Italian contribution: the factory occupation (the internal strike, where workers remain in the factory and continue production under worker governance, rather than the external picket-line strike of the British and American tradition) was specifically Italian in its development and the most influential single labor action in European history. The 1920 occupation failed to produce the workers' state that Gramsci and Togliatti hoped for (the Fascist reaction that followed two years later was partly the industrialists' response to the 1920 occupation) but it established the specific Italian labor relations confrontational tradition that continues in the contemporary Italian strike frequency.