06.11.2014
Class struggle intensifies
Toby Abse reports on both verbal and physical clashes, as workers resist the latest attacks from ‘Italy’s Tony Blair’
In the wake of the impressive demonstration on Saturday October 25, mobilising one million protestors in Rome,1 the gulf between the leftwing trade union confederation, the CGIL, and prime minister Matteo Renzi has deepened.
Whilst the bourgeois press has focused on the undeniable mutual loathing between Renzi and CGIL secretary general Susanna Camusso, the polarisation is a reflection of an intensifying class struggle - as Renzi put it, speaking to an audience of industrialists on November 3, “There is a calculated design to break Italy in two and divide it between bosses and workers. It is a mad risk. Labour must not be the terrain of political clashes.”2 And it is no accident that October 29 saw unprovoked and extremely violent police charges in central Rome - not against students, unemployed, squatters, anarchists or autonomists (standard targets in recent years3), but against a well organised official protest by FIOM, the engineering workers’ union affiliated to the CGIL, campaigning against redundancies in the steel works at Terni and largely consisting of a delegation from that Umbrian steel town.
The initial clashes were purely verbal. The publication of an interview with Camusso in the centre-left daily La Repubblica on October 29 gave a public signal of the trade union leader’s intransigent opposition not just to Renzi’s proposed changes in labour law - his so-called “Jobs Act” - but also to his whole economic and fiscal strategy. At one stage during the interview she got up and went towards a noticeboard in her office, where she pointed to a clipping from a press agency containing a declaration made by Sergio Marchionne, the managing director of Fiat, on October 2.
Referring to the labour market, Marchionne had spoken of the necessity to get “the scrap metal off the railway tracks” and explained this was the task assigned to Renzi, emphasising: “We have put him there for that very reason.” The CGIL leader pointed out to her interviewer: “See, that declaration has never been denied. It really hit me that a Swiss citizen4 who has moved the legal and fiscal headquarters of Fiat abroad can say of our prime minister, ‘We have put him there’, and that he can do so without arousing any reaction.”
She went on to say: “This explains the government’s attention to great subjects which act as bearers of particular interests … These words of Marchionne illustrate better than any reasoning why the government has no willingness to discuss anything with those who, like the trade unions, represent general rather than corporate interests.”
When asked whether, as the trade unions had claimed in the past, the government follows the lead of Confindustria (the employers’ federation roughly equivalent to the CBI), which represents all enterprises regardless of size, she responded: “The government copies the proposals of the big enterprises of Confindustria.” She argued that Renzi’s reduction in the payroll tax - Irap - largely favoured the large enterprises. “But it will not have any effect on employment.” She attributed the problems of the public administration to outsourcing in “the interests of the strong powers [poteri forti], which paralyse the activities of the public administration”.
Camusso mocked Renzi’s publicly stated unwillingness to negotiate, pointing out that there had been “extra-parliamentary negotiations” over the electoral law, institutional reform and justice reform5, so that in practice this refusal only applied to the trade unions. She said of the ministers she had met on October 27 that “They listen to the corporations, but not to those who represent labour.”
As far as the CGIL’s plans for a general strike were concerned, she concluded: “There will be coordinated strikes, demonstrations, initiatives and then we will carry out a general strike. As always our comitato direttivo (executive committee) called for mid-November will decide.”
Needless to say, Renzi’s loyal acolytes directed a torrent of personal abuse at Camusso after this forthright interview, whose essence was widely reported in other media - even though the close relationship between Renzi and Marchionne, with whom the Italian premier very publicly consorted at the Chrysler headquarters6 during his recent US tour, could not be denied. The most vicious and slanderous attack on Camusso came from the recently elected MEP, Pina Picierno, who belongs to the Partito Democratico, of which Renzi is the leader. (The PD is a merger of various parties, the largest components being the former ‘official communists’ and centre-right politicians like Renzi.)
Picierno said: “I could remind people that Camusso was elected with fraudulent membership cards or the square7 was filled with paid for coaches.”8 This young woman, whose outbursts have embarrassed more politically experienced Renzi loyalists, later made an extremely half-hearted apology, admitting her own remarks were “possibly excessive”, but claiming Camusso’s phraseology, to which she was responding, was “unacceptable”.
Graziano Delrio, the prime minister’s undersecretary, although equally servile, showed slightly more sophistication in his line of attack, saying of Camusso: “Clinging to the declaration of an entrepreneur is in the best of cases infantile.” Asked by his interviewer what it was in the worst of cases, he responded: “It reveals an old logic of suspicion and insinuation.” Aware that this psychological character assassination did not really address Camusso’s substantive point about Renzi being a front man for Fiat, he added: “We have taxed unearned incomes and the banks. Go and see if certain managers and certain bankers are happy with this government.”9
Police assault
These verbal clashes between the government and the trade unions were followed by physical clashes. On October 29 a FIOM demonstration in Rome was attacked by the police. The FIOM protest began peacefully enough with a picket of the German embassy - the steel works in the Umbrian town of Terni, where 537 workers are currently threatened with redundancy, is owned by the German firm of Thyssen-Krupp and the workers felt the dispute was sufficiently important to assume some diplomatic significance in terms of Italian-German relations, as the Terni works accounts for 40% of the special steel produced in Italy and 12% of the European production.10
However, although the picket passed off without incident, things changed when the workers decided to march towards the ministry of economic development, where the minister, Federica Guidi, was having discussions with the Terni plant’s Italian managing director, Lucia Morselli, about their future. Almost as soon as the procession moved towards the ministry, the police charged, with their truncheons drawn, to block the workers’ path. Five demonstrators ended up in hospital with head wounds. National FIOM secretary Rosario Rappa was one of the wounded and even FIOM’s top leader, Maurizio Landini, was on the wrong end of truncheon blows.
The police subsequently claimed they had been conducting a “containment operation” to stop the procession going towards Rome’s main railway station, Roma Termini, allegedly with the intention of paralysing it and bringing Italy’s national rail network to a complete halt for hours. The trade unionists pointed out that this was a lie, that it was a peaceful demonstration, that they had specifically asked to be allowed to go to the ministry in connection with their own industrial dispute and had absolutely no intention of marching on the railway station.
Camusso rightly responded to the incident by saying: “The government must give answers, not beat up the workers”11 - the attack on FIOM activists was an attack on the whole labour movement, she said. Neither Renzi nor interior minister Angelino Alfano, the coalition government’s foremost representative of the Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD, or New Centre Right, the breakaway group of former Berlusconian parliamentarians, who had split from their original patron when he moved into opposition to Enrico Letta’s government in autumn 2013) were willing to take responsibility for the day’s events.
Landini made it clear that he did not believe the police would have acted in so extreme a manner unless they had received an order from somebody further up the chain of command, but quite deliberately did not name anybody as the culprit; implicitly he seemed to be blaming Alfano rather than Renzi, with whom he was until recently on relatively good terms.12 Whether or not Landini holds Renzi personally responsible, FIOM felt it had no choice but to escalate its campaign of industrial action and by the end of October it had announced plans for two demonstrations - one in Milan for workers from the northern regions on November 14, and another in Naples for workers from the southern regions on November 21. These would be accompanied by eight hours of “general strike” (ie, a nationwide strike by all FIOM members) to coincide with the demonstrations.
Whilst FIOM was very careful to keep its own November 3 anti-Renzi demonstration in Brescia separate from the protest organised by the students, the semi-syndicalist breakaway union Cobas and the autonomist centri sociali, there were further violent clashes between those on the unofficial march and the police, adding to the atmosphere of social tension.
The CGIL will be involved in three days of mobilisation called in conjunction with its less militant counterparts, the CISL and UIL: pensioners’ demonstrations in Milan, Rome and Palermo on November 5; a public-sector workers’ demonstration in Rome on November 8; and a demonstration of those involved in the food sector on November 29. The CGIL now seems set on calling a general strike on a day in the first half of December. Currently there seems to be some possibility of UIL joining in, despite an earlier strong statement by Luigi Angeletti, the UIL secretary general, on October 29 that “To proclaim a general strike now would be an attempt to bring down the government, which will not succeed; and therefore would end badly for us.”13
Whether or not the UIL has changed its line, the CISL’s opposition to the CGIL’s general strike strategy remains unchanged, so there seems no hope of a united trade union front against the government. However, Camusso’s low expectations about solidarity from her counterparts in the other trade union confederations, derived from the experience of their behaviour during the 2012 conflicts with the government of Mario Monti, mean that the views of the UIL and CISL will not be the decisive factor in whether the strike goes ahead.
The developments of the last week or so in the media and on the streets make it much more likely.
Notes
1. See ‘Marching in defence of article 18’ Weekly Worker October 30 2014..
2. La Repubblica November 4 2014.
3. On some occasions the irresponsible provocations of the Black Bloc and other ultra-leftists have acted as a trigger, but there can be no dispute about the habitual violence of the Roman police.
4. The Italian-Canadian, Marchionne, has become a Swiss citizen for tax reasons.
5. Although Camusso only mentioned the lawyers’ association, the Ordine degli Avvocati, the implicit reference to Berlusconi and the Patto del Nazareno would have been obvious to most readers.
6. Marchionne is personally responsible for the fusion of the two automobile companies. US taxpayers have footed the bill for Chrysler’s survival, just as Italian taxpayers have frequently bailed out Fiat - contrary to all the propaganda in the neoliberal media about the brilliance of Marchionne’s entrepreneurship.
7. Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, on October 25.
8. It is not altogether clear why a trade union’s use of its own funds to hire coaches for a demonstration in defence of its members’ interests could be regarded as sinister. Even Picierno does not seem to have suggested that the coaches were paid for by some external political or financial interest group, whether domestic or foreign, seeking to manipulate the CGIL - the kind of claim that might have been made during the cold war decades.
9. Interview La Repubblica October 30 2014.
10. Figures given in La Repubblica October 30 2014. Whilst there may be particular resentment against a German firm, it should be stressed that the whole Italian steel industry is now in severe crisis, with similar threats of mass redundancies hanging over the Tuscan steel town of Piombino and, of course, over the notorious steel works at Taranto, where the cavalier attitude of the Riva family towards health and safety over the last two decades since privatisation has created an ecological catastrophe. These towns have all been dominated by this single industry, so that the potential closure of the steel works would in every case give rise to long-term mass unemployment; therefore industrial disputes of this kind are particularly bitter and potentially explosive.
11. La Repubblica October 30 2014.
12. It has to be admitted that Alfano would have more to gain than Renzi from a quarrel between the government and FIOM, since Alfano, unlike Renzi, has no interest in playing off Landini against Camusso or in calming the PD minority, which may still have some sympathy for the unions. Moreover, Alfano is widely regarded as being contemptuous of civil liberties as a result of an episode in which the wife of a prominent Kazakh dissident was illegally deported from Italy during the Letta administration; Alfano claimed total ignorance of that police raid and allowed police officials to take the blame.