02.02.2012
Monti prepares for fresh attacks
The nature of the Italian resistance to austerity has so far been contradictory, writes Toby Abse
Whilst prime minister Mario Monti has restored Italy’s status within the European Union and is in a position to debate with Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron on more or less equal terms - in marked contrast to his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, who by the autumn of 2011 had ended up as an object of mockery at European summits[1] - he is facing increasing opposition at home.
That is not so much the case in parliament, where all parties other than the rightwing Lega Nord and anti-corruption Italia dei Valori give him at least nominal support (even if Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà deputies seem increasingly reluctant to turn up and deliver their votes), but it is certainly true of a variety of social groups in the country at large. Although the latest opinion poll cited by political scientist Ilvo Diamanti shows 57.7% of the sample giving a positive judgement on the actions of the Monti government, it is very significant that 56.4% of the very same sample support the demonstrations and protests against that government. This figure far exceeds the percentage that sympathise with the Lega Nord or the radical left.[2] Whilst the whole thrust of Diamanti’s La Repubblica article was an attempt to explain this apparent contradiction in terms of sectionalist attitudes - arguing that many groups supported ‘reforms’ targeting others, but opposed those affecting their own immediate interests - these figures do also indicate a substantial decline in support for the government since its honeymoon period in November 2011. A poll conducted on November 17-18 had given it 78.6% support - probably the nearest any Italian government is likely to get to a national consensus.
It would be absurdly simplistic to reduce all the conflicts of recent weeks to a straightforward direct confrontation between the ruling class and the workers, even if some on the British far left have done so. Socialist Worker - seemingly deprived of any expertise on Italy after the untimely death of Tom Behan (author of numerous books on Italian communism, fascism, the Camorra and Dario Fo) and the recent defection of Chris Bambery to Scotland’s International Socialist Group - takes this extraordinarily crass line.
Sadie Robinson starts by making the incontrovertible, but rather vague statement: “In Italy, workers are fighting privatisation and cuts imposed by the technocratic government of prime minister Mario Monti.” But she then illustrates her contention by referring to taxi drivers, pharmacists and lawyers, alongside the more predictable rail workers, and even asserts: “One truck driver was run over and killed this week whilst protesting against government plans to privatise transport.”[3] This wrongly suggests to her readers that Italian lorry drivers usually work for the state or municipalities rather than being for the most part self-employed or employees of small private firms. It is, of course, true that the Monti government does have longer-term plans to privatise state-run railways and municipally run bus services, but their implementation does not seem to be imminent and the lorry drivers’ dispute was entirely focused on their own working conditions and not a solidarity action.
In reality many of those who have been involved in the recent protests against Monti’s January 20 liberalisation decree usually vote for the PdL and might more accurately be described as petty bourgeois or middle class professionals, rather than members of the working class in any meaningful sense.
Some of the liberalisations were clearly just a means of extending the role of the market at the expense of the common good - for example, moves towards competition and privatisation in local government services. This is in stark contradiction to the outcome of the June 2011 referenda, in which a clear majority rejected water privatisation. But some attacks on bank charges or lawyers’ fees might be to the advantage of the average user of these services. Whilst increasing the number of pharmacists by 5,000 over the next few months will undoubtedly reduce the income of at least some of the existing pharmacists, it is at least possible that it might be in the interests of those who urgently need to obtain medicines. In short not all of the traditional privileges of the petty bourgeois groups, protected first by the Christian Democrats and then by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and PdL for clientelist and electoral reasons, are necessarily in the interests of Italian society as a whole.
Regardless of whether the protests were justified, and in some instances they undoubtedly were, they were often led by people with no connection to the labour movement, however broadly defined, and in the case of some of the more violent protests in Sicily there is little doubt that the Mafia was well to the fore, playing the time-honoured card of Sicilian separatism, which is always brought out when the Italian state starts to interfere with any of its economic interests. It might even be argued that a competitive free market is preferable to a Mafia monopoly over any economic resources - given the record of organised crime in keeping up food prices and in some instances, such as mozzarella cheese, producing poisonous products. And, of course, Mafia control of access to any labour market is damaging to trade union organisation.
Obviously, coordinated actions by the taxi drivers could, and did, create traffic chaos in the centre of a number of major cities, including Rome, and the lorry drivers’ actions had even more impact not just in terms of blocking roads, but also in terms of creating shortages of foodstuffs and other essential commodities. Given the sectional and, at best, apolitical character of this action, it is perhaps surprising that opinion polls should demonstrate such widespread sympathy for protests that had a very negative impact on the daily lives of working class consumers and small farmers without large cash reserves to fall back on.
Labour ‘reform’
If the liberalisation decree represented the second phase of the Monti government’s programme - the first being the austerity package imposed last year - Italy is now entering the third phase: that of labour market ‘reform’. Labour minister Elsa Fornero is currently aiming to achieve an agreement on changes by the end of March. Both Monti and Fornero have realised, as a result of the vigorous interventions of Susanna Camusso, head of the CGIL trade union confederation, and the December strikes, that the immediate abolition of article 18 of the Workers’ Statute would provoke a massive social conflict. But it is clear that the pressure from the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund has in no way lessened since the August 2011 ECB letter to the Italian government.
Corrado Passera, the former head of Banca Intesa and minister for infrastructure in the Monti government, was reminded of the issue at the Davos World Economic Forum. At a round table on January 26 on ‘The future of Italy’, Vittorio Colao, a London-based Italian manager for Vodafone, pointed out that he would not have to put up with such obstacles if he were to open a call centre in Egypt.[4] Such forthright comments, made at a gathering of unashamed advocates of free-market capitalism, indicate the absurdity of giving any credence whatsoever to the rhetoric of ‘intergenerational justice’ endlessly spouted by ruling class ideologues. It is abundantly clear that the attack on article 18 is an attempt to reduce the rights of Italian workers to those of the superexploited proletarians of the third world.
The latest schedule for the discussions on labour market ‘reform’ has fixed a meeting on February 2 between Fornero and the ‘social partners’ (union confederations; the employers’ organisation, Confindustria; the bankers’ association, Abi; and other employers represented by the Rete Imprese and Ania). A report in La Repubblica, clearly based on a briefing from reliable sources, has indicated that the government’s latest proposal is that article 18 would not apply to any workers taken on in the future, regardless of the size of the workplace, although, allegedly, the rights of all those workers currently protected would remain unchanged.[5] It is claimed that in return the problem of casual workers on short-term contracts would be resolved by giving them a greater degree of job security, with financial compensation for redundancy rather than reinstatement, graduated according to their length of service.
Such proposals have for some time been popular on the right wing of the Partito Democratico, the party dominated by former ‘official communists’. The PD’s Pietro Ichino has long been notorious as a rabid neoliberal opponent of article 18 and has recently written a book offering a long and convoluted theoretical justification for this frontal assault on the organised working class. Other experts in or close to the PD with a more old-fashioned social democratic outlook have come up with other proposals, under which workers would only gain full rights under article 18 after some sort of trial period or apprenticeship (a standard three years in the case of the Boeri-Garibaldi proposals and up to a maximum of three years in the case of Damiano-Madia). Even the proposal put forward by former PdL labour minister Maurizio Sacconi (which also involves a three-year apprenticeship and the elimination of some, but not all, short-term “atypical contracts”), whilst being a bit vague and ambiguous, does not openly propose the abolition of article 18 advocated so zealously by the PD ‘reformer’, Ichino.[6]
Italian unemployment stood at 2.2 million (8.9%) in December 2011, the highest since the government statistical agency started collating the monthly figures in 2004.[7] Whilst youth unemployment is also high in Italy at 31% (compared with 22% in the United Kingdom), the figures are considerably worse elsewhere in the southern European periphery of the euro zone (30.7% in Portugal, 46.6% in Greece and 51.4% in Spain).[8] These comparative statistics would cast doubt on the standard neoliberal contention that youth unemployment in Italy is somehow due to the existence of article 18 and it is interesting that the highest figure is not even from Greece, which has suffered the greatest hammer blows of neoliberal austerity in the last year or so, but Spain, where neoliberal labour market policies have been pursued for many years.
So far Susanna Camusso is sticking to a very hard line on article 18 - to the intense annoyance of those who promoted her ‘moderate’ merits as a protégé of Guglielmo Epifani, the previous CGIL general secretary, and an heir to Luciano Lama, the CGIL leader at the time of the ‘historic compromise’. This irritation on the part of the bourgeois intellectuals of the centre-left is best exemplified in the recent exchanges in the pages of La Repubblica between its former (and founding) editor, Eugenio Scalfari, and Camusso herself. This began with an open letter from Scalfari, which started by quoting virtually verbatim from words spoken by Lama in an interview with him back in January 1978. It then tried to show that the logic of Lama’s position of subordinating the immediate interests of his working class members to what he (and Scalfari) saw as the ‘national interest’ would in effect require Camusso to compromise on article 18. Scalfari asserts: “The trade unions can and must favour the flexibility of labour in both entry and exit. If they adopt as their own the trade union policy that Lama carried forward tenaciously for eight years, they will have done their duty.”[9]
Camusso responded the next day. Since she cannot be seen to publicly repudiate the inheritance of Lama, she cleverly emphasised the differences between 1978 and 2012, pointing out that real wages are falling in 2012 in contrast to the inflationary spiral of 1978, so that the lack of purchasing power pulls the economy deeper into recession. Rather than accepting that allegedly old-fashioned restrictions on labour flexibility like article 18 are the cause of mass unemployment, she argued: “On the contrary, productivity in our country decreases with the growth of casualisation, which has not even increased employment, but instead produces that poor-quality labour that we would do well to ask ourselves about.”[10]
Scalfari, having failed to use Camusso’s old ideological position on the right of the CGIL as a method of moral blackmail, showed his own ideological colours, rather than wrapping himself in Lama’s shroud, in his angry response. After accusing Camusso of “closing her eyes to reality” and implicitly supporting a protectionist response to the Asian tiger economies, as well as patronising her as “gentile Susanna” and not just “cara Camusso”, he came to the heart of the matter when he said: “Personally I was never moved when I heard ‘Bandiera rossa’ sung, but, when I heard ‘The Marseillaise’ - yes, I felt something that agitated me in my very soul.”[11]
In short, the veteran journalist counterposes the anthem of the bourgeois revolution to the anthem of the working class fightback against capitalism. At a time when Corriere della Sera has hinted that Raffaele Bonanni, leader of the rival CISL union confederation, is playing with the idea of pursuing a political career in the centre of the political spectrum, it is to be hoped that Camusso will continue to defend the interests of the organised working class once the negotiations start in earnest later this week.
Notes
1. The Financial Times, which held Berlusconi in total contempt by the end of his third premiership, openly calling for his resignation, has adopted a far more respectful tone in relation to Monti - see, for example, the January 17 lead article, ‘Monti warns of backlash’.
3. Socialist Worker January 28.
5. La Repubblica January 30. Given the whole history of two-tier workforces internationally, it is likely the employers would come back for more once the proportion of ‘protected’ workers decreased.
6. See Repubblica January 30 for more detail on these proposals.