07.09.2011

Market logic challenged by eight-hour general strike

This week the increasingly moribund government of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has faced simultaneous attacks on two fronts: from the speculators and the European Central Bank, on the one hand; and from a general strike by the most militant section of Italy's organised working class, on the other. Toby Abse reports

The September 6 strike primarily involved the CGIL trade union confederation, formerly dominated by the Italian Communist Party, as well as the more combative, but rather fragmented syndicalist sindacati di base - Cobas, Sincobas, USB and others - and dissident engineering workers from unions affiliated to the more moderate trade union confederations - the CISL’s FIM and the UILM.

The pressure from the ECB, backed by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as Italian domestic capital in the form of the main employers’ organisation, Confindustria, and the Banca d’Italia, for greater austerity and further attacks on workers’ rights at present outweighs the pressure from the working class. The eight-hour general strike, which, according to the CGIL, mobilised around 60% of the workforce across the various regions and sectors, is the product of their increasing resentment at being forced to pay for the crisis and of their demands for less austerity and a greater measure of social justice in any sacrifices that might be imposed.

Nonetheless, the general strike, accompanied by numerous well attended marches and rallies, does change the balance of forces, with the popular masses rather than the feeble parliamentary opposition taking centre stage for the first time since the June referenda passed an overwhelmingly negative verdict not just on Berlusconi, but on the entire neoliberal project, of which water privatisation was but the most hated symbol - a project in which the largely ex-‘official communist’ Partito Democratico is in large measure complicit.

As the Lex column in the Financial Times puts it, “Italy, not Spain, will decide the fate of the euro zone”, for “Italy is “the hinge” (September 6). Italy is indeed at the very centre of the euro zone crisis, even if the continuing problems of the far smaller Greek economy - whose astonishing 82.1% yield on one year government bonds is an indication of how near it is to default - are obviously a contributory factor. After some days of rather slow and feeble recovery in late August, the Milan stock exchange is once again in free fall. Friday September 2 saw shares plunge by 3.89% and Monday September 5 witnessed an even more spectacular 4.83% descent, with only a belated rally in the last half-hour of trading pulling the index back up from a catastrophic 5.5% drop.

The all-important spread between Italian and German government 10-year bonds was 370 at the close of trading, having reached 372 at one point, and the yield of the Italian bonds rose to 5.56%, the 11th increase in 11 consecutive days of trading (Spanish bonds have only risen for the last seven days). The major Italian banks were once again amongst the prime victims - with Unicredit’s shares down by 7.30% (Unicredit’s shares have fallen 42% since July 1) and Intesa Sanpaolo down 6.96%. Whilst the banks’ very large portfolio of government bonds makes them particularly vulnerable, the Italian crisis is not just a crisis of the financial sector - Fiat Industrial was also down by 6.74%.

For the last month the ECB has been spending vast sums to prop up Italian government bonds (whilst no figures are available for Italian, as distinct from Spanish or other, bonds being supported, the ECB spent €54.8 billion in the four weeks ending September 2 on bond purchases under the Securities Market Programme) in the belief that Berlusconi had committed himself to pass the kind of austerity package demanded of him in their August 5 letter. The continual - almost daily - changes made to the package originally outlined in the emergency decree of August 12 have made ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi (currently director of the Banca d’Italia, but designated as the new head of the ECB from November) lose all patience with the Italian administration.

It has become increasingly obvious that if this incessant dithering does not come to a very speedy end, the meeting of the ECB’s board on Thursday September 8 may well pull the plug and refuse to continue to support the price of government bonds (such bond buying had already been suspended for five months prior to August 4). This barely veiled ultimatum led Italian president Giorgio Napolitano to send an urgent public message to both the government and the parliamentary opposition late on September 5 demanding that the emergency package be approved immediately, but reinforced in a manner that gave it more “efficacy” and “credibility”. The latest version of this package was voted through the Senate on September 7 in a bid to regain the favour of the ECB before the fateful meeting due the following day. There were yet more changes ahead of the final vote in the Chamber of Deputies, adding an extra €4 billion-worth of cuts and taxes, including bringing forward the increase in the women’s pension age to 65 from 2016 to 2014.

If the pressure from domestic and international capital has been enormous, one should not underestimate the countervailing pressure that the CGIL’s decision to call a general strike has already placed on Berlusconi’s government. The ill-thought-out and probably illegal and unconstitutional attempt to attack public sector pensions aroused intense anger, not just amongst CGIL members, but also among the CISL and indeed the UIL - which, although it has always been the most servile of the mainstream confederations, has a disproportionate number of members in the civil service. It had been proposed to retrospectively cancel the validity of the years spent studying for university degrees or serving in the armed forces from the 40 years service qualification required for a ‘seniority’ pension, but the government withdrew this proposal in order to avoid any risk of the CISL and UIL joining the CGIL in industrial action. Equally, the decision to withdraw the proposed abolition of the three secular public holidays on May Day, Liberation Day and the anniversary of the proclamation of the republic was clearly a capitulation in the face of the imminent working class mobilisation - abolishing May Day, so central to the tradition of the continental European labour movement, is a project whose implementation requires a totally atomised and quiescent proletariat.

It is also worth noting that the collaborationist line of CISL general secretary Raffaele Bonanni and his UIL counterpart, Luigi Angeletti, has been contradicted by the general secretaries of their affiliated engineering unions, Giuseppe Farina of FIM and Rocco Palombella of UILM, who both demand the scrapping of article 8 of the emergency budget, the section that effectively destroys national pay bargaining in favour of factory or company-level deals; otherwise, they state, their members will make it unworkable. This is clearly due to the pressure of the CGIL in general and FIOM in particular - a few months ago these officials were quite happy to make sweetheart deals with Fiat in both Turin and Pomigliano. Under CGIL influence, some rank and file engineering workers from these two unions went further than their temporarily rebellious general secretaries. In Bologna, Treviso and various Piedmontese towns members of FIM or UILM declared in advance that they would join the CGIL strike (even if they sometimes claimed theirs was a parallel strike, whose timing was purely coincidental, or limited their walkout to four hours rather than eight).

The general strike seems to have been as successful as could be hoped for, given the official hostility of the other confederations. It seems to have been particularly successful in bringing Rome to a virtual standstill - the metro was entirely closed on the morning of September 6 and, according to the Roman bus company Atac, 50% of its drivers were on strike. The response on the railways seems to have been a little disappointing, even if management figures, claiming that 94% of long-distance and 60% of regional trains ran, may be somewhat exaggerated.

Attendance at the various demonstrations and rallies organised by the CGIL in all the main towns and cities seems to have been very respectable - 60,000 marched in Milan, 30,000 in Naples, 25,000 in Turin, 15,000 in Genoa, 15,000 in Florence, 20,000 in Palermo, 50,000 in Mestre. Whilst the Turin march included many pensioners and public sector workers, there were also thousands of factory workers, mainly FIOM members clearly not intimidated by Fiat’s attempt to destroy the union at Mirafiori.

This contradicts the slanderous claim made in a press release from FIM-CISL that “Once again participation in the strike has seen a situation of piazza antagonista [hostile city square], with many students and groups from the social centres and few metal workers” In fact the Torinese supporters of the USB, far from dominating the main demonstration, held a separate march, some of whose participants threw red paint at the headquarters of the Banca d’Italia. In Palermo, some autonomists, understandably but unwisely, burnt the banners of the CISL and UIL to demonstrate their disgust at these confederations’ collaboration with the bosses and the government, but these actions were clearly disavowed by the CGIL.

Whilst the Partito Democratico belatedly gave the strike its official backing and PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani participated in the Roman demonstration (even if some women in the crowd shouted at him, ‘Let’s block the emergency budget’), its right wing continued to oppose it. Of course, the hostility of the former Christian Democrats in the PD, who remain close to the CISL, is unsurprising - Matteo Renzi, the extremely self-regarding mayor of Florence, who is notorious for his anti-union policy of forcing shop workers to work on May Day, ostentatiously boycotted the local march, attended by all the other regional PD leaders.

Although in many ways the speech of CGIL leader Susanna Camusso at the Roman demonstration struck the right notes, attacking Maurizio Sacconi as “the worst minister of labour in the history of the republic”, defending May Day and demanding the cancellation of article 8 of the emergency budget, she praised Napolitano’s appeal, which suggests her habitual willingness to compromise with the bosses is not far from the surface, even when she is pushed left by a militant crowd.

A one-day strike, however successful it may have been in terms of turnout, will evidently not be enough. Further strikes, whether sectoral, coordinated or general, will be needed if the partisans of austerity are to be defeated and, given that Italy is on the receiving end of a European austerity drive coordinated by the ECB, successful resistance requires action by the working class movement on a European scale. Whilst it is worth noting that Rifondazione is already publicising schemes for a European day of action against austerity on October 15 and Cobas is sending Piero Bernocchi to London on October 1 to participate in the ‘Europe against Austerity’ conference organised by the Coalition of Resistance, it will require far more than a few speeches at poorly attended rallies if we are to challenge the bankers and industrialists - who do organise in a serious fashion at the continental level.