“On the eve of three anniversaries: of '68; of the warm autumn (1969) and the centenary of the Sardinian party, whose story I had to conclude, I understood that I had to give an order and a complete meaning to a part of my life. In the already very hot summer of 2015 I asked myself: what was I like then and what am I like today, almost fifty years later? I went to check. There were documents available, all that remained was to enter them, at least for the trade union phase of my career, from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s”. Thus were born the three volumes that collect the trade union memoirs of Salvatore Cubeddu, sociologist, scholar of Sardinianism and director of the Sardinia Foundation with a past, not so distant, at the top of the "Federatzione Sarda Metalmeccanicos", which had a close relationship with the Fim-Cisl .
History
Here is “The found diaries. The extraordinary adventure of the Sardinian metalworkers told by a protagonist”, 1700 pages, a broad-based work published by Edes. Three volumes full of thoughts, memories, struggles in the context of a society that is profoundly changing in the dynamics of production and in the relationship between the owners of the factories (in Sardinia there was a public domain with the system of state holdings) and the workers. To tell the truth, there is also a fourth volume, of just over 500 pages, which is the synthesis of the previous ones with a reference to the whole work through files in digital format that can be opened by reading a QR code. Cubeddu retraces exciting moments: «Those in which the generous and constructive identity emerged in the relationship with the Sardinian people, for example, the march po su traballu of 1979 and the founding congress of the Sardinian Metalmeccanicos Federation, and the supportive collaboration of the many who, together and in a short time, they allowed the unitary union of metalworkers to start an alternative industry project to petrochemicals, which valued its most interesting result, i.e. the professionalism of Sardinian workers, the best in Italy in their specializations». The witness of those events gathers, comments and processes the notes collected in fifteen years of militancy. In the plot, with a temporal and thematic scan, the start of the Sardinia dispute in the mid-seventies, the struggle for a new job (1979-1980) and the sunset of the industrial dream (1981-1989).
Joy and pain
An alternation of feelings between joys and setbacks, successes and disappointments. The most painful moments? «Probably they are to be found on the occasions in which incompetence and cowardice emerged from the Sardinian ruling class as a whole. In the case of the union, it was the workers who paid, not unlike what happened to them as Sardinian citizens». Salvatore Cubeddu's long story is also the chronicle of the failure of big industry on the island, a model that has proved to be fragile and strategically inadequate: «The dependence of an important part of the Sardinian ruling class on the 'petrochemical company' (politics, social organizations and trade unions, newspapers, sports) has led to the loss, in industry, of almost everything that had been built in the first twenty years of 'dependent' autonomy, but it has also managed to prevent the affirmation of that alternative for whose realization the movement of the metalworkers fought, perhaps the most constructive and long-lived in the modern Sardinian story». The "Diaries" are dedicated "to fellow metalworkers, none of whom has been definitively fired and all have reached retirement age". A budget? "I answer as a Christian: I 'fought a good fight and have not lost faith' even in Sardinians and in Sardinia, with friends and companions whom I respected and who I am lucky enough to still feel so".