ITALY: Put Out More Flags

Outside the shabby Rome headquarters of Italy’s Catholic labor confederation CISL, a bright new Italian flag flapped in the whipping April breeze. Inside the building the union’s tough, tubby Secretary-General Giulio Pastore was accepting congratulations. “Once,” grinned Pastore, “I vowed that the flag would not fly in front of this building until we controlled an absolute majority of Italian union members. But today I changed my mind.”

Giulio Pastore was celebrating last week’s shop-steward elections at Fiat, Italy’s biggest industrial combine (automobiles, aircraft, refrigerators) and the factory cradle of Italian Communism. A decade ago, when portraits of Stalin still smiled down from plant walk all over Italy, more than three-quarters of Fiat’s employees voted for the Communist-run labor confederation. In 1955, after years of frustrating reverses, Pastore’s CISL and the rival Social Democratic Union between them finally succeeded in electing more Fiat shop stewards than the Communists. Last week, for the first time since World War II, the Communist union not only failed to win a majority but ran a poor third, with only 21% of the vote.