This is a story that was told to me by my father. It is by no means extraordinary, probably there are thousands of similar stories from across the world. Yet I believe it is significant in reminding us of what is the real impact that trade unions have in shaping the world we live in.
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This story is set in the Po valley of Northern Italy around the year 1950. This is a period of big transformations for the Italian society: The country has just emerged from the nightmares of Fascism and World War II, and it is rebuilding itself. A largely agricultural economy is on the verge of the so called “economic boom”, which will transform Italy in an industrial power.
At that time and place, the society is still mainly structured by a model set centuries before: large, extended families of sharecroppers scrap by farming fields belonging to few landowners. This is the society that has been masterfully depicted by Bernardo Bertolucci in his “1900” masterpiece. In fact, this story takes place a few dozen miles from the locations used to shoot the movie, and temporally these events happen only a handful of years past the movie's ending, which is set on Liberation Day, April 25th 1945.
In one of these sharecropper families, lives a bright kid in his mid teens. Having left school after fifth grade, he is already an active contributor to the livelihood of the family. The boy shows talent and passion for handicraft, and is being mentored by a blacksmith friend of the family that has taken him as his apprentice.
Farm work is still performed mainly by hand, or using animal power. The main crop, wheat, is harvested by hand, using the sickle. The stems are then bound together in sheaves and transported home to be machine-threshed. Mechanized agriculture is only in his infancy, but the trade of the blacksmith is already evolving the new set of skills necessary to keep pace with the mechanization, and of course the kid is fascinated by novelty.
The ingenuity of a young apprentice, coupled to the discipline of a skilled mentor, is a mixture that seldom fails to deliver. The two know of the existence of a machine, called the reaper-binder, that is used to cut the wheat and automatically bind the sheaves. It is not clear how exactly they get the inspiration: Perhaps they have seen pictures of it, or perhaps somebody that saw a reaper-binder in operation described it to them. In any event, the master blacksmith and his apprentice decide that they will build their own, fully mechanized, reaper-binder machine.
They use the chassis and engine of an old car as basis, perhaps a leftover from the war, adapt an horse driven reaper to fit to it, and devise a system of ropes and pulleys for binding the sheaves. The prototype is to be operated by two people: one driving and another tending to the binding by tying the knots, cutting the rope and moving the sheaves out of the way. They work steadily on it, and by harvest time they are ready to deploy their creation.
It is a resounding success. The artisanally made reaper-binder turns out to be quite reliable and efficient: now two people can do the work of ten men in a fraction of the time, and the sharecroppers are able to complete the wheat harvest in record time. The news spread fast, and the neighboring families are already lining up to use this new wonder for their harvest.
The landowner hears about the reaper-binder too. He is so impressed by the initiative of the sharecroppers that he immediately files a lawsuit against the boy's family. The machine, thought quite efficient, does not do as a thorough job as a human would do in its place, and inevitably a little more wheat goes wasted during the machine-assisted harvest in comparison to the manual procedure. The landowner is having none of it. He wants all the wheat he is entitled to, the reaper-binder be damned.
Now the sharecroppers are in serious trouble. They are simple peasants, and lack the resources to fight the landowner in court. They now risk losing their livelihood for the year, and perhaps being evicted and having to move in search of a new sharecropping contract. Their entire future is at risk, and the odds are all staked against them.
But those sharecroppers are resourceful. They might be poor and lack formal education, but they are communists, and know the value of class solidarity: they belong to a trade union. Faced with the lawsuit, they go to the union for help. And the union is there for them.
The union can afford to hire two good lawyers to counsel the sharecroppers. By the time of the trial, the union attorneys have devised a sound defense strategy: on one hand they will try to shift most of the responsibility to the boy, who is not yet liable by law, due to his young age. On the other hand they will seek a conciliation with the landowner, using praise instead of attacking and antagonizing him.
The union lawyers are brilliant: the legend has it that during an argument one of them is so inspired, and reaches such high rhetorical peaks, that he draws a standing ovation from the crowd in attendance, much to the dismay of the judge that is trying to keep some decorum in his court room. And the defense strategy works beautifully: the landowner, realizing he has been outmaneuvered by the defense, and perhaps a bit shamed by all the praise received, decides to drop all the charges against the sharecroppers.
An so the story came to an happy ending. Thanks to union solidarity the sharecroppers were able to fight a pretentious landowner, keep their harvest, and secure the continuation of their contract. As for the landowner, we do not know what happened to him, but it is safe to assume that he was able to recover from the loss of a few pounds of wheat caused by the reaper-binder.
The reaper-binder prototype had its moment of fame too: it was used for quite a few harvests by the local farmers, and it was even the object of a field trip from the engineers of one of the largest factories of the region, who were themselves working on the design of a reaper-binder, and were quite interested in seeing how the blacksmith and his apprentice had solved some of the technical challenges of the project.
The bright apprentice continued to thrive. He kept pursuing his talent, and in a few years, riding the wave of the economic boom, he would open a small business in heavy steel manufacturing. This business would allow him to take care of his aging parents, and ensure a decent livelihood for his new family and the twenty-something families of his employees.
That young boy, my father, is now a retired man. His pension (which is kept current with the inflation because of union fights) allows him a serene life. His health problems are taken care by the Italian single payer health care system (which was fought for tooth and nail by the unions). When he is not busy enjoying his grand children, he spends most of his time volunteering for the community.
Solidarity has always been very important to my father. When I look at his life, the part I have experienced and the part he has told me about, I can see a continuous thread connecting together two union lawyers who fought to save the dreams of a young men from the greed of a landowner, an entrepreneur who has always treated his employees as family, and a retiree who dedicates his time to the community.
Solidarity does not only provides material help, but also makes better persons of those who experience it.