Research project on "Conflict and participation in industrial relations: longitudinal analysis on Lamborghini Spa"
Coordinated by Margherita Russo, in collaboration with Fulvia D' Aloisio, University of Campania, Lamborghini spa and Fiom
" Multinazionali tedesche in Emilia. Il caso Lamborghini ".
The Lamborghini case represents an original example of hybridization between the Wolkswagen model and the Italian automotive industry.
Margherita Russo, Luciana Canovi, Armanda Cetrulo, Fulvia D’Aloiso, Alessandro G. Grasso, Pasquale Pavone, Massimo Pilati collaborated in the project “Conflict and participation in industrial relations: longitudinal analysis on Lamborghini spa”.
It is complementary to the project “Producing cars between Germany and Emilia. Cultural adaptation of the Volkswagen model in the Emilian context”, coordinated by Fulvia D’aloiso (University of Campania). The latter is part of the larger project “German Multinational in Emilia. The Lamborghini case”.
Research objectives
In the last twenty years, the nature and the quality of industrial relations in Italy has considerably changed. The bargaining process at national level has been severely weakened and social dialogue between the parties has been challenged on several occasions. In this context, the existence of different realities, such as Lamborghini, is extremely interesting for several reasons. First of all, for its history and origin: the company was founded in 1963 thanks to the Emilian entrepreneur Ferruccio Lamborghini, who decided to combine the production of agricultural machinery with the production of luxury machines.
Another crucial factor is the context in which Lamborghini is located, characterised by an high degree of specialization. The factory and all commercial, financial, research and development activities are located in Sant’Agata Bolognese, halfway between Bologna and Modena. Therefore, the company operates in an area where there is a high concentration of clusters, characteristic of Emilia-Romagna.
In this scenario, Lamborghini presents a complex identity that tries to merge its origin with the systems of small-and-medium-sized enterprises in Emilia following the point of view and the directions indicated by the German group Audi VW, which acquired the company in 1998. The awareness of this duality will be the focus of the analysis oriented towards the study of the evolution of industrial relations within the company. In fact, with the acquisition by the Audi VW group, it was introduced a new model of industrial relations in line with the co-determination model adopted by Volkswagen. One of the main aspects that we want to investigate in this research, is the understanding of how and through which means a different model of union relations can be adopted in a context characterized by different social norms and actors.
Before the German acquisition, Lamborghini experienced numerous changes in terms of ownership structure. Born as a small artisan enterprise that in the first few years produced a few hundred cars, Lamborghini went through several phases in which investment projects, crisis and sudden changes of ownership alternated. Today it is a large company of about 1,300 employees, it almost doubled the average car sale compared to 2003, it has a worldwide dealership, a dense network of suppliers in the region, a strong production connection to the Audi VW supply network and an ambitious expansion project with the production of the SUV Urus in 2018.
In this dynamic context, another objective of the research is to investigate whether, and if so how, the quantitative and qualitative development of Lamborghini has been influenced by the creation of the specific industrial relations that characterized the company.
It is useful to underline that Emilia-Romagna is characterized by an elevated level of unionisation and by a fairly significant degree of political and social activism of the working class, especially in the manufacturing industry (which has been the main employment container of the region for a long time) and in the metalworking sector, where most workers are members of the unions. Therefore, it would be useful to try and understand how a high rate of unionisation, which is reflected in the strong and political identity of the region, faces a new model of virtuous industrial relations, which proposes modalities of high bargaining instead of conflicting practices.
The analysis will be based on the study of the company’s supplementary contracts, on the institutions internally regulated and on their evolution. In addition to second-level and national bargaining, we will study the set of trade union agreements aimed at integrating and regulating the implementation of specific institutions provided for in the contracts and the work of bilateral technical commissions, introduced from 2007 onwards. The analysis will also concern the effects of company bargaining on industrial relations. In this sense, the focus will be on the identification of the methods and factors linked to the policies of Total Reward System (TRS) through which the company’s supplementary negotiation influenced industrial relations after 1998.
The longitudinal study of the document base will be enriched by an automatic analysis of the texts, aimed at providing an in-depth analysis of the textual contents in the context in which they are used.
Given the close interdependence between industrial relations and the company's development, alongside the study of contracts, there will be an analysis of the company's financial statements in the period preceding and following the acquisition by Audi. This involves, on the one hand, examining economic and financial performance by observing certain financial statement indicators and, on the other hand, expanding their explanatory ability through an assessment of the contents of the notes to the financial statements. In the same way, if the access to data will be granted, the evolution and internal composition of the workforce will be analysed, the number and proportion of white-collar and blue-collar workers, gender, age and seniority of the company, education level and unionisation rate. Finally, the longitudinal analysis will be accompanied by a cross-section analysis that aims to highlight, respectively, to what extent (and especially if) the distance with the German model has narrowed over time and, to what extent (and if) the distance with the Italian industrial relations model has increased. The first aspect can be investigated through a comparison, not so much with the German co-determination model, but with the degree of transposition and application of the Charter of Employment Relationships within the VW Group, adopted by VW in 2009, which defines the guidelines in terms of treatment, rights and relations for all groups' workers. The second aspect, i.e. the comparison with the Italian framework, can be developed through a comparison between the provisions and the contents defined for in the national collective agreements of the sectors that have been approved over the years . This section will be completed by a series of interviews which, starting from the results observed, will provide further information on the factors that caused them. In this way, it will be possible to verify the existence of cause-effect relations between the economic-financial dynamics and the development of industrial relations.
The research project presented is, therefore, aimed at developing a detailed case-study on one of the most interesting productive realities of the regional and national panorama. Given the need to systematically catalogue and organize the various sources available, a further outcome of this research will be, where possible, the creation of a digitized and organized archive of all documents concerning industrial relations. This will make this documentation easily accessible to both parties (both corporate and trade union).