Social media network and especially Facebook, Twitter, and more recently Instagram are becoming staples on the communications menu of the trade union confederations (Cgil, Cisl, and Uil), their relevant sector entities and their local federations. Even if there are but few cases of employees using ‘social media channels’ to gather into collectives and launch their own initiatives, social networks do nonetheless represent a valuable auto-organizational channel for freelancers and those in precarious employment situations.
Pomigliano d’Arco and the Facebook standoff. For Francesco Nespoli, researcher at Adapt (Association for International and Comparative Studies in the field of Labour law and Industrial Relations) one of the rare cases that saw employees driving a cause independently and using social media to do so was at the FCA facility in Pomigliano d’Arco. In 2010, the facility, which at the time was known for its high rate of absenteeism and languishing productivity levels, became a protracted battleground when Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne imposed a radical restructuring program as well as strict working conditions that were signed off by the Cisl-Fim and Uilm, but which Fiom-Cgil had refused to sign.
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