Giuseppe di Vittorio - Opposition to Fascism, Later years

Italian politician and trade unionist, born in Cerignola, Puglia, SE Italy. He became a trade union organizer (1911), a socialist deputy (1921), and a communist (1924). Sentenced to 12 years by a Fascist tribunal, he escaped to France. He then organized the International Brigades in Spain and was extradited to Italy and jailed. He became secretary-general of CGIL (Confedrazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro) from 1945 to 1957 and president of the World's Trade Unions Federation from 1949, as well as a deputy in the Italian parliament.

Giuseppe Di Vittorio, also known under the pseudonym Nicoletti (August 12, 1892, Cerignola—November 3, 1957, Lecco), was an Italian syndicalist trade unionist and communist politician, one of the most influential leaders of the labor movement after World War I. An autodidact, Di Vittorio became active in the socialist movement from adolescence: at fifteen, he was a member of the Socialist Youth Circle in Cerignola, and, in 1911, moved one to lead the Camera del Lavoro in Minervino Murge, and then the one in Bari.

As a native of the Mezzogiorno, Di Vittorio became involved in the syndicalist plans for solving the region's acute problems (in the manner illustrated by the Fasci Siciliani in final decade of the 19th century). A partisan of insurgence, Di Vittorio became a leader of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Unione Sindacale Italiana after its formation in 1912. Unlike the majority of the group (which opposed militarism and Italy's entry into World War I), Di Vittorio, Alceste De Ambris, and Filippo Corridoni advocated irredentism.

Opposition to Fascism

In 1921, after the Italian Socialist Party's split at its Congress in Livorno, he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Di Vittorio was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies on the PCI list in 1924. Di Vittorio lived in the Soviet state from 1928 to 1930, representing Italy to the Red Peasant International. After the World War II Fall of France to Nazi Germany, Di Vittorio was taken in custody by the Italian police, and detained on Ventotene. In 1943, as the Fascist regime fell in most of Italy, he was set free by partisans, and subsequently joined the Resistance in fighting against Mussolini's Italian Social Republic in Northern Italy.

Later years

When war ended in 1945, he was elected secretary of the CGIL - which he had helped bring back into politics through a pact he had signed the previous year with Dino Grandi and Oreste Lizzardi in Rome. On March 5, 1950, the social-democrats (who would become supporters of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party) took a similar attitude, and founded Unione Italiana del Lavoro.

Giuseppe Di Vittorio led the CGIL, as a group favored by the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party, until his death.