09.10.2014
Italy: New attack on workers’ rights
The former ‘official communists’ are being dragged further and further to the right, observes Toby Abse
In the last three weeks the focus of Italian politics has once again shifted back to industrial relations. Despite earlier claims that his “Jobs Act”1 would be largely concerned with simplifying the dense jungle of short-term contracts that currently dominate the Italian labour market, prime minister Matteo Renzi, the secretary of the centre-left Partito Democratico (PD), has gone onto the offensive against article 18 of the Workers’ Statute of 1970, which gives some possibility of reinstatement to workers sacked without “just cause” by bosses employing 15 or more people.
Whilst Renzi is an ideological neoliberal without any link to traditional social democracy, let alone the legacy of ‘official communism’ (unlike the majority of his PD comrades), it is very unlikely that he originally intended to wage this particular battle this autumn; he showed no enthusiasm when his coalition partners in Angelino Alfano’s Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD - New Centre Right) first raised the issue some months ago. Renzi seems to have been pushed into prioritising this question by the balance of forces inside the European Union, when faced with a far worse economic situation than he had predicted.
Reform problems
Renzi had wrongly assumed that his constitutional reforms, which he got through the Senate in July,2 would have had as much impact on the perception of Italy by her European partners as they did at home. While to some extent the image of the young, dynamic, modernising and forceful premier that he had successfully promoted in the Italian media was accepted by those sections of the west European and North American press that paid any attention to Italian politics, his attempt to trade on this and on his electoral popularity at home - his achievement of 40.8% at a moment when other EU governmental parties did very badly in the May 2014 Euro elections - to get major concessions out of the European Commission has failed. His belief, frequently boosted by fellow PD member, president Giorgio Napolitano, on whose expertise in foreign affairs he placed great (perhaps excessive) reliance, that Italy’s six-month presidency of the EU would have a massive impact, had no basis in reality.
Even Renzi’s eventual triumph in getting his foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, the post of the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy involved a prolonged, epic struggle against the Poles and their Baltic allies, whose rabid hostility towards Italy’s perfectly rational refusal to adopt an extremely confrontational stance towards Russia over Ukraine knew no limits. Whilst the desire of the incoming EU commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, to include some women in his overwhelmingly male team eventually rescued Mogherini’s candidacy, even here the price was the elevation of the Russophobe, former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, to the presidency of the European Council, which is in practice a much more powerful position - something which may well undermine any continuing attempts at mediation between Russia and Ukraine by the Italian premier.
However, when it came to the rather more urgent economic questions, Renzi had even less luck, despite enjoying the sympathy of the Italian head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi. Although well aware of the huge problems faced by both Italy and France, and, according to some well informed commentators, eager to emulate US success in restarting the economy via quantitative easing, Draghi is deprived of any real room for manoeuvre by the neoliberal hawks of the Bundesbank. So an Italy still mired in a long recession, with quarter after quarter of negative growth3, mass youth unemployment (44.2% in August 2014) and some serious signs of deflation in the prices of basic consumer goods can expect no mercy from a German-controlled EU and ECB. Indeed José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing president of the European Commission, seemed to take a sadistic delight in denying all Italy’s understandable requests for some easing of EU conditions in the very last days of his mandate.4
Whilst it is likely that, regardless of Renzi’s promises of good behaviour, Italy will be unable to meet the terms of the fiscal compact and other unrealistic targets (accepted by previous Italian administrations since the 2011 crisis in a desperate bid to avoid the threat of direct rule by the troika on the Greek or Portuguese model), it has been made plain to Renzi that no official acceptance of any delays in balancing the Italian budget or reducing the Italian national debt (estimated at 134.6% of GDP in 2014 and likely to rise next year) is possible without ‘structural reforms’. Even if he goes through the motions of allying himself with François Hollande against Angela Merkel - in a bid to shore up his domestic popularity at a time when Silvio Berlusconi, Beppe Grillo and the Lega Nord leader, Matteo Salvini, are all playing the anti-German card - he has become aware that Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt will not regard constitutional changes to the Senate or electoral changes like his proposed Italicum as ‘structural reforms’ of the type they are demanding.
There are, of course, a number of fields in which structural reforms might have been carried out, some of which might have benefited the international bourgeoisie without necessarily hurting the immediate interests of the majority of the Italian population. Italy’s inefficient justice system is genuinely a barrier to foreign investment - potential investors are obviously concerned by issues relating to the enforceability of contracts and the effective decriminalisation of false accounting under Berlusconi’s governments. The latter discourages involvement in the Italian economy by major western European and North American companies, even if it is no barrier to the thinly disguised takeover of Italy’s national airline, Al Italia, by Etihad, all too eager for kickbacks at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. However, Renzi’s close alliance with Silvio Berlusconi - the infamous Patto del Nazareno - makes genuine legal or judicial reform impossible. Indeed such draft proposals as have emerged seem to go in the wrong direction - curbs on the powers of investigating magistrates all too reminiscent of those proposed by notoriously corrupt Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi in the 1980s or Berlusconi in more recent times.
Article 18
Therefore, Renzi has returned to the attack on article 18 - the question of ‘labour-market flexibility’, to use the fashionable neoliberal jargon. The current version of article 18 offers less protection to workers than the original statute of 1970 as a result of the recent amendments pushed through by Mario Monti’s labour minister, Elsa Fornero.5 Moreover, the decline in the number of giant factories, and the increase in casualisation via a variety of short-term or part-time contracts, means that the number of workers covered by it - those on permanent contracts in workplaces employing more than 15 - has steadily decreased.
Nonetheless, article 18 has an enormous symbolic value as the last major conquest remaining from the working class upsurge of the late 1960s. This meant that any further attack was bound to provoke a reaction from the more militant sections of the Italian trade union movement and from any political current inside or outside the PD that still makes some claim to represent a left rooted in the working class.
The battle commenced almost as soon as Renzi came up with an amendment to his “Jobs Act” that would remove the protection of article 18 from new recruits to the labour force. Susanna Camusso, the secretary of the leftwing trade union confederation, the CGIL, promptly responded to Renzi’s provocative September 18 announcement by bluntly stating: “Renzi has Thatcher as his model.” Many on the far left and the majority of the leadership of the CGIL’s most important affiliate, the metalworkers’ union, FIOM, have criticised Camusso for insufficient militancy on certain issues - particularly those related to the anti-FIOM, and thus anti-CGIL, line pursued by Fiat boss Sergio Marchionne. However, it ought to be emphasised that Camusso has been unswerving in publicly expressing her total detestation of Renzi from the moment he came to national prominence, seeing him as a deadly enemy of organised labour.
The traditional social democrat, Camusso - unlike the allegedly far more radical FIOM secretary, Maurizio Landini - saw no merit in Renzi’s exaltation of youth and novelty and never had any inclination to engage in some sort of intellectual dialogue with him. She adopted the same attitude in 2012 to Elsa Fornero and Mario Monti, whose anti-working class austerity policies she had obstructed until she was forced to bow to the political pressure exerted by PD leader Pierluigi Bersani - his members dominated the upper ranks of her own organisation. As in 2012, she has shown a willingness to fight on, regardless of the apparent capitulation of the other trade union confederations, the CISL and the UIL.
The CGIL lost no time in calling a national demonstration in Rome in defence of article 18 for October 25 - quite deliberately picking a day that coincided with Renzi’s annual gathering, the Leopolda, in Florence. This is no longer officially linked to the PD - the party of which Renzi is now leader - but to Renzi himself and his personal following, and its financing has given rise to much controversy. There is no reason whatever to suppose that this mass demonstration in defence of workers’ rights will be cancelled, even if it is harder to judge whether the CGIL will act on its threats to call a one-day general strike, regardless of the lack of enthusiasm for such action from the CISL and the UIL. Maurizio Landini, somewhat belatedly breaking with any misguided notion of making some sort of deal with Renzi, recently gave an interview to La Repubblica in which he proclaimed: “The government must know that we are ready to occupy the factories if the line of a reduction of employment, workers’ rights and salaries passes” - he suggested that this might start with the Thyssen factory in the Umbrian steel town of Terni.6
PD turmoil
The PD itself has been in turmoil over the last fortnight or so. Whilst Renzi obtained a majority for his line in the PD’s direzione (leadership body) of 120 to 11 with 20 abstentions, the debate was far more bitter than usual and Renzi’s predecessor as PD leader, Pierluigi Bersani, made his disapproval very plain.
There has been some talk of a split in the PD, not on the part of what Renzi would label the ‘old guard’ - those close to previous party leaders, such as Bersani and Massimo D’Alema - but on the part of the younger dissident, Pippo Civati, and his followers. Civati was the third-placed candidate in the PD’s 2013 primary contest to decide who would replace Bersani as party leader. He is a somewhat anomalous figure, in that he was originally quite close to Renzi, but has now come to take up a position on the far left of the PD, far closer to Nichi Vendola’s Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL - Left Ecology and Freedom) than to the more traditionalist party apparatchiks, whose candidate in the primary had been the second-placed Gianni Cuperlo. Thus it is hardly surprising that Civati, along with FIOM leader Landini, participated in the October 4 Rome demonstration in defence of article 18 organised by SEL.
The tensions inside the PD have been greatly exacerbated by the recent revelation that the current PD membership figure is only about 100,000 - an extremely rapid drop from the 534,000 paid-up members it claimed at the end of 2013.7 The apparent collapse of the PD as a membership organisation has caused a great deal of anger on the part of the older generation of PD members, who came into politics via the ‘official communism’ of the old Partito Comunista Italiano. This group regards Renzi as having wrecked ‘the Firm’ (La Ditta). Renzi is far less concerned, since he quite consciously rejects the model of the mass membership party associated with the communist tradition and places his emphasis on the PD’s percentage of the vote rather than on how many paid-up members it retains. Traditionalists have argued, probably correctly, that if PD leaders or candidates for regional or local office are chosen by primaries open to all those claiming to be PD supporters, there is far less of an incentive to take out a membership card.
Despite the fairly widespread unease about the attack on article 18 and the disastrous membership figures, it is probable that an overwhelming proportion of PD parliamentarians will stay loyal to Renzi if he turns the question of support for his “Jobs Act” - without any of the pro-worker amendments proposed by the PD left - into a parliamentary vote of confidence. Of course, one must make the proviso that even a relatively small rebellion in the Senate, where the PD has fewer parliamentarians and the coalition as a whole a narrower majority, might have serious consequences.
However, a grand coalition, bringing Berlusconi’s Forza Italia back into government, or an early general election, in which Renzi would seek to win an outright majority in his own right, remain less likely than a return to the fold by most potential PD dissidents. Renzi’s increased patronage as premier has already enabled him to win over many of those who opposed him in the past - most notably the ‘Young Turks’ (Giovani Turchi), whose generational label had far more significance than their supposed leftism.
Notes
1. This English term is regularly used by Renzi to describe his proposals for a new labour law. Renzi is obsessed with using Anglicanisms and Americanisms, despite his a poor grasp of both US and British English.
2.See my earlier article, ‘Berlusconi acquittal boosts reactionary drive’ (Weekly Worker August 14 2014), for more detail about the move to an indirectly elected, regionally based upper house.
3. A tiny increase of 0.1% in the last quarter of 2013 was not a serious interruption in a pattern of negative growth that has gone on for some years.
4. Some may find it ironic that this erstwhile Maoist - in his youth a leading figure in the ultra-leftist, insurrectionary MRPP - has ended up as such an obedient lackey of the capitalist class.
5. See my ‘Monti forces through right to sack’ (Weekly Worker March 22 2012) for more details.
6. See La Repubblica October 6 2014. Landini was attending a Syriza conference in Athens when he made these statements; it remains to be seen if this almost revolutionary fervour survives his return to Italy.
7. These figures were made public by La Repubblica on October 3. Despite rather half-hearted attempts to query their accuracy by some PD members, it seems likely that this was a deliberate leak by some well informed opponent of Renzi.