Logistics Made in Italy. a History of Mobilizations from the "Economic Miracle" to the Pandemic.

What have been the main stages in the history of logistics in Italy, and what has been the role of autonomous trade union organisations? By mirroring the country’s socio-economic model and the growing structuring of firms into ‘networks’, logistics has established itself over time as a tool for managing the flow of goods to the point of becoming strategic for the modern economy and its synchronisation needs. Nevertheless, its history has not yet been written. This contribution attempts to trace the boundaries and narrate the socio-historical evolution of the logistics supply chain in Italy, in a time span that starts from the economic boom and arrives at the present day marked by globalisation and the health emergency. By retracing some key stages of the last seventy years, the aim is to provide an instrument of knowledge on the economic and trade union history of the country through the analysis of the development of an ancillary dimension of production that, over time, has acquired an increasingly relevant function with respect to production regimes. The hypothesis guiding this contribution is that phenomena such as the outsourcing of logistics functions, the repression of union rights, and structural illegality, have been the preconditions for the development of the freight transport logistics chain in Italy as a dynamic economic sector. These phenomena were not an effect but a cause of the developmental trajectory of the Italian logistics model. Against this model, the autonomous forms of conflict have effectively opposed. Starting from its origins, passing through epochal transformations such as the advent of intermodality, and arriving at logistics districts, transport infrastructures and digital and material platforms, the focus of this contribution is the history of conflict in a key dimension of the global economy and its impact on the economic organisation of the Italian society.