05.12.2024

Four times in four years

Another austerity budget, another symbolic general strike. Toby Abse reports on stagnant living standards and how the centre-left is moving towards the trade union bureaucracy

On November 29, two major trade union confederations, Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) and Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL) called a general strike against Giorgia Meloni’s third budget.

This was the fourth time in as many years that these confederations had organised such an action against fiscal measures they regarded as anti-working class and anti-union - they had struck against Mario Draghi’s budget in 2021, as well as against those of Meloni in 2022 and 2023. In this context, it is worth noting that the first of these budgets (Draghi’s) was approved by the main parties of the so-called ‘centre-left’ - the Partito Democratico (PD) and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), both of which participated in Draghi’s government and were therefore responsible for this round of austerity, even if the finance minister was from another party.

Very political

In one sense then, this year’s comments by rightwing politicians that the 2024 strike was ‘political’ - targeting an openly rightwing government in a way the unions would not have targeted a ‘centre-left’ one - is unfair. However, in a wider sense the strike was, of course, very political, since it objected to wage-earners and pensioners being penalised in favour of the bankers, the corporations and the tax-dodging self-employed.¹

It is worth pointing out that, although there have been growing restrictions on the right to strike in Italy, and the 2024 ‘security’ law, which will come into force shortly, makes picketing and other militant tactics either illegal or on the frontiers of legality, at least Italian labour law does not as yet make general, political or solidarity strikes illegal, in the way they have been in Britain for decades.

In case readers are wondering why the CGIL and UIL were not joined by the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL) - the second biggest union confederation, and the one that in the cold war period was associated with the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) - the CISL, which in the 1970s was more militant than the UIL, if less so than the CGIL, has become to all intents and purposes a ‘yellow union’. In practice it cooperates with the government and the employers on most occasions,² despite its general secretary, Luigi Sbarra, making more ferocious speeches at the joint May Day rallies that the three confederations still hold together every year.

This year’s general strike was much more successful than last year’s, since the unions called all the workers out on the same day. Last year, they had imagined that if they called it in different regions on different days, the media coverage of their demands would be spread out over the best part of a week. However, when they called a national transport strike all over Italy on one of these days, they ran into legal trouble, since transport minister Matteo Salvini - probably the most anti-union of Meloni’s ministers - was able to advance a successful legal argument that a national transport strike was not compatible with a partial general strike taking place in only a few of Italy’s regions.

The unions claimed that 70% of the workforce participated in the November 29 general strike, although, needless to say, the government has disputed this figure. Whilst the strike was more successful in some sectors than in others - the minister of education claimed that only 5.66% of school workers had participated and, according to the minister for public administration, the total for public employees was only 5.57% - it was sufficiently serious for Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister, to threaten to intervene against 15 further local or sectional strikes scheduled for December.

Mass support

The enthusiasm aroused by the general strike amongst the more militant sections of the workforce can be seen from the fact that 500,000 people participated in the 43 rallies or demonstrations that the CGIL and UIL called all over Italy.

Such a figure shows that it was not just a question of full-time trade union officials and their friends and families being mobilised, but an event that drew in a much wider layer. The main reason for this was discontent over falling wage levels. In the 30 years between 1990 and 2020, real wages in Italy were stagnant, in sharp contrast to those in countries such as France, Germany and Spain. In 2021-23 there was 17.3% inflation, but only a 4.7% average increase in wages.

Participation in rallies was highest in the traditionally ‘red regions’, such as Emilia Romagna and Tuscany. The Bolognese demonstration addressed by CGIL general secretary Maurizio Landini was one of the largest, with 50,000 participants, but seems to have been exceeded in size by the Florentine one, where local union officials claimed 70,000. The Neapolitan demonstration addressed by UIL leader Pier Paolo Bombardieri had 30,000 marchers, whilst the Roman - where not only PD general secretary Elly Schlein, but former ‘centre-left’ prime minister Massimo D’Alema were the speakers - had 10,000.

The Torinese demonstration had a respectable 20,000 marchers,³ but mainstream media coverage focused on the actions of a few hundred autonomists who broke away from the main march after the rally had ended. Whilst burning pictures of Meloni, Salvini and defence minister Guido Crossetto, and attempting to occupy two railway stations⁴ may not have been the wisest course of action (it undermined the peaceful image that Landini and Bombardieri were seeking to project), the outrage of government ministers was rather synthetic - especially since these young hotheads were met with what has become the standard level of police brutality under the Meloni administration (particularly towards anyone waving a Palestinian flag, as some of these ‘incautious’ youngsters did).

The small rank-and-file or syndicalist trade unions that have challenged the CGIL from the left in recent years chose to participate in the strike, with the exception of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), which has called its own general strike for December 13.⁵ Whilst the fact that the smaller unions were capable of forging some degree of unity amongst themselves (and of forming a sort of united front with the mainstream federations) is to be welcomed, their quarrelsome and fragmented nature means that in most workplaces serious union activists can make more impact within the CGIL.

Rank and file

These rank-and-file unions were nonetheless able to hold 28 demonstrations or rallies in locations varying from Milan to Palermo, even if attendance at these was probably rather low. However, given that some of these fringe unions have played an important role in trying to organise workers in the logistics sector, targeting employers such as FedEx, they may have been the first to come up with the idea of striking on Black Friday, although, given the amount of publicity that this day now receives on Italian TV, as well as in both newspaper and online advertising, it is hard to believe that Landini and Bombardieri were unaware of the symbolic implications of striking on November 29.

In terms of the relationship between trade union activism and electoral politics, it is worth noting that under Elly Schlein’s leadership the PD has moved much closer to the unions, especially the CGIL. During the period when Matteo Renzi led the PD, the relationship between the party and the union confederation once closely associated with the ‘official communists’ was one of mutual hostility, but to some extent relations then improved. However, Enrico Letta, with his dogmatic attachment to the Draghi agenda (ie, anti-working class austerity), widened the gap once again.

Whilst Schlein’s leadership is constantly undermined by sniping from the PD’s right wing, which is strongly represented amongst the party’s parliamentarians, she seems popular with the base, with her repeated calls for a legal minimum wage and constant demands for increased expenditure on Italy’s national health service. The PD’s success in maintaining its hold on Emilia Romanga and regaining Umbria from the right in the two recent regional elections probably cancels out its narrow defeat, when it stood a relatively leftwing presidential candidate, in the Ligurian regional election a few weeks earlier.

Whatever criticisms one might make of Schlein, it is hard to imagine any recent Labour leader, let alone Sir Keir Starmer, giving their backing to a general strike and addressing a rally supporting it, as she did last Friday!

1. The self-employed have in recent years only paid a 15% ‘flat tax’ on the income they deign to declare, unless their self-proclaimed earnings reach a level way above those of most workers. Meloni’s latest Budget included a ‘Concordat’, under which, if the self-employed agreed a set figure for their earnings over the next two years in advance, the tax authorities would make no further enquiries - a blatant invitation to tax evasion by a group which hardly needed any incentive to underestimate their income.↩︎

2. The engineering union linked to the CISL did participate, along with the CGIL’s FIOM and the UIL’s engineering affiliate, in a one-day industry-wide strike earlier this year. However, before the current crisis in the Italian automobile industry in general - and in Stellantis (formerly Fiat) in particular - this CISL engineering union, as well as the UIL’s one, had for decades marginalised the more militant FIOM in the Fiat plants, colluding in a series of sweetheart deals.↩︎

3. The decline of Turin’s traditional major employer, Fiat, now Stellantis, means that, despite the presence of the once famous Mirafiori car factory - now with a much reduced workforce, many of whom are laid off or on part-time work - the city is no longer central to the Italian class struggle.↩︎

4. Salvini had prohibited railway workers from striking, since they had been involved in a relatively successful 24-hour strike within the previous fortnight.↩︎

5. The USB seems to be the strongest of these rank-and-file unions in the Livorno area. For example, on the morning of December 2 it had some sort of picket outside Livorno’s main post office, and the local paper occasionally mentions its activities amongst the Livorno dockers.↩︎