“We won't go back home!” Women's Experiences with Deindustrialization and Unemployment at Fiat and LIP, a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article stems from a project aiming to investigate women's unemployment in the phase of deindustrialization that affected Western European countries from the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis. Countries such as Italy and France, with both a strong working-class movement and a vibrant feminist movement, have had to face economic crises since the mid-seventies and from the eighties have witnessed how neoliberal capitalism started to heavily reshape the global labor market. The old stereotype of female salary as ‘pin money’ within the household budget was again publicly put forth. How did women experience unemployment? What did it mean in terms of their social status, economic independence, sense of self, relationship to the home? To answer these questions and to understand the reconfiguration of class and gender identities, I focus on two milestone cases of labour struggles that are recognized as turning points in the history of the affirmation of neoliberal dynamics: the crisis of FIAT in Italy and of LIP in France. Despite their being at the center of many academic investigations as fundamental sites of resistance, their outcomes in terms of unemployment and particularly the gender dimension of this phenomenon have been largely overlooked so far. I will delineate a comparison between the two cases by drawing on my past research about trade union feminism in the two countries, on archival sources, published accounts and oral histories of two key activists in these struggles. Key factors that will be analysed are: women's participation in the collective mobilisations in the face of unemployment, their relation to the domestic sphere and to care work, their ability to build female networks within their wounded communities.