#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, IL Cantiere #14: Political and union reflections of the snowy month*. The new advancing: piecework, salary cages and private healthcare by CristianoValente (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Carlo Bonomi, President of Confindustria, in the interview given to the newspaper

"Il Messaggero" last December 31st, without any visible trace of embarrassment,
but with the arrogance that has always characterized the bosses, indicates and
hopes, for the confrontation with trade union organizations, the old and abhorred
solution of piecework, and even more the old logic of wage cages. ---- These,
born from an agreement signed on December 6, 1945 between industrialists and
workers' organizations for the parametrization of wages on the basis of the cost
of living in the various places, and which entered into force in 1946, were
initially foreseen only at north, and only later extended to the whole country.

Originally, the division was into four zones, each with a different wage bill. In
1954 the whole country was divided into 14 zones in which different wages were
applied according to the cost of living.

Between the area where the salary was higher and the one where the salary was
lower, the gap could be as much as 29%.

In 1961 the number of zones was halved, from 14 to 7, and the gap between wages
decreased from 29% to 20%. The system of wage cages met progressively and
increasingly strong opposition from unions and workers.

It is no coincidence that the system was abolished in 1969, driven by strong
worker mobilizations and following the general strike of 12 February 1969, with
as many as five million workers taking to the streets, following which an
inter-confederation agreement was signed on 18 March , which eliminated the
"cages", albeit with a certain graduality which led to its total and complete
abolition from 1 July 1972.

These are Bonomi's words today: "Work is no longer the old Fordist exchange
between time and wages. It is an activity that must be measured on the result,
regardless of the place where it is performed and the time of day.

The national labor contract remains a virtuous safeguard for minimum wages and
worker rights.

But the new technical job profiles today are not found in the old national
classification tables of each sector, they change from company to company.

For this we need a leap forward in the diffusion of company supplementary
contracts: it is there that the optimal remuneration for qualifications, the
rewarded productivity metric, the company welfare are decided.

As well as a salary also commensurate with the real territorial costs: the cost
of living in Milan is not that of other cities.

In the company union this awareness exists, at a national political level and
part of the union still do not understand it". (1)

Such a declaration should lead the trade union leaders, in particular those of
the CGIL, to a battle, spearheading, for the total overcoming of Article 8 of Law
148 of 2011, instead of a simple principled opposition, ritually formulated by
congress after congress, but without ever claiming its total suppression.

This is the rule conceived by the then Labor Minister Maurizio Sacconi, who
intervened drastically in the ongoing debate between CGIL, CISL, UIL and
Confindustria regarding the reform of the collective bargaining model.

The issue on the agenda was the promotion of second-level bargaining (company or
territorial) and the spaces within its competence.

While previously the social partners agreed on the fact that these spaces would
be expressly indicated by the national bargaining agreement (CCNL), Sacconi with
art. 8 expanded this faculty to a disproportionate extent by law, providing that
corporate or territorial collective agreements (proximity is the technical term)
provided they are signed by the majority of the most representative trade union
organizations, or by their representatives in the company, may derogate from
contractual or even legislative provisions , with the only exclusions of the
Constitutional or Community ones.

It is, as is evident, a concrete twist of the real power relations at the
national level, not casually transferred to the single productive realities, to
the single factories, which in this way find themselves isolated in the
territories and in the same categories to which they belong.

Furthermore, second-level bargaining is still present exclusively in large groups
and no more than 20% of production realities and there is increasingly an
objective diversity of economic and regulatory conditions depending on the
reference markets, for example, between companies that work for 'export or for
the internal market, or for companies with a high technological prevalence
compared to the "labor intensive" one, i.e. with a high content of simple labour.

Not putting the total suppression of article eight on the agenda, therefore,
means facilitating and going in the direction that President Bonomi indicates,
i.e. wage jungle, regulatory jungle, diversity of economic treatment for equal
work according to the areas territories in which you live, restoration of the
piecework; a substantial step back over fifty years.

In addition, with the expansion and development of the so-called "corporate
welfare" that President Bonomi sponsors in his address, this supposedly advancing
innovation has in itself a further and dramatic prospect of a retreat, which
instead finds the convinced adhesion of union leadership groups.

Our public healthcare system, universal and not by chance obtained at the end of
the 70s of the last century, precisely on December 23, 1978, with the law n.833
which superseded the various "mutuals" linked to the various categories, already
greatly weakened with the The corporate and private drunkenness of the 90s,
through the enabling law of 23 October 1992 n.412 with the transformation of
public structures from Local Health Units (USL) into Local Health Authorities
(ASL) in competition with each other, is further weakened and circumvented with
the massive introduction of what is called "corporate welfare" which, in addition
to signifying an advancement of private health care and a strong reduction of
public health,reproduces a diversity of health and prevention treatments
according to the different categories to which they belong.

A return therefore to the old mutuals with the right to health no longer a
universal right, but correlated to being a worker, thus excluding the unemployed
and retired, with strong inequalities between the different categories, between
the assisted themselves, with a substantial lack of homogeneity of the services.
In the face of this employers' vision, which Bonomi expresses with extreme
clarity and crudeness, in the trade union debate, more and more often, there is
stammering on the need for an alleged Work Plan, often recalling the figure of Di
Vittorio and his Work Plan over the years 50s of the last century.

The explicitly declared objective of that plan was the increase in employment to
be pursued both through the immediate creation of jobs and the enlargement of the
internal market (which would also have stimulated the formation of new productive
capacity), and through the elimination of bottlenecks and the strengthening of
the productive apparatus.

That plan had no intention of breaking the system, it was not at all a project
for the socialism of the future, but rather a neo-Keynesian project, a proposal
aimed at solving the problems of high unemployment and too low wages which still
characterized post-reconstruction. war.

There was also a wrong analytical postulate which assumed a sort of desertion of
big capital with respect to the need for a reconstruction of the productive
apparatus which clearly did not correspond to reality and that low wages and
unemployment depended on their excessive power.

A mistaken belief that prevented the understanding of the ongoing restructuring
and the monopolistic direction of this process.

And as always happens from erroneous assumptions, such as that of the workers'
willingness to make further sacrifices, not only did we not obtain greater
employment, but concretely prepared for the great defeat suffered by FIAT by FIOM
in 1955, precisely for having underestimated and did not respond adequately to
the first political dismissals, which had already begun in '48 and reiterated
together with the first departments confined to FIAT as early as '52.

The increase in employment came only many years later and following that economic
miracle of the 1960s, a period in which the nationalization of electricity also
took place, vainly requested by the Plan, with the establishment of the national
body for the electricity, ENEL, with law n.1643 of 6 December 1962, by the
Fanfani government.

The discussion on the Labor Plan opened at the second Congress in Genoa in 1949
also and perhaps above all had a political value which culminated, at the III
Congress of the CGIL in Naples, in 1952, with Di Vittorio's proposal for a
Statute of workers which had the objective of realizing and implementing the
Constitution in the workplace.

But even for this it will be necessary to wait another 18 years and above all it
will be necessary for the balance of power to change at a national level and in
the individual productive realities in favor of the working class, relations
which crystallized with Law 300 of 1970, the Workers' Statute.


It is not for a simple historical or theoretical speculation that we start again,
albeit briefly, from the 1950s Work Plan.

In the union elaboration of the last 50 years, up to the contemporary
elaborations, more and more often, we can trace the same errors of analysis or
ingenuity that the Work Plan presupposed.

According to these readings and these analyses, we would in fact find ourselves
faced with a financial and unproductive capitalism dedicated exclusively to
speculation and instead a healthy entrepreneurial fabric, with which to relaunch
a pact, which periodically assumes different lexicons, but which in substance is
the ancient and the road of the producers' pact.

In 1978, faced with inflation around 18% and double-digit unemployment, the
confederal trade union CGIL, CISL and UIL launched the EUR project in Italy,
which had its roots in Di Vittorio's Work Plan, with in mind the objective of
full employment and the revival of investments, indicating, also in this case, in
wage moderation the choice of responsibility of the union to fight inflation and
restore the country.

But even this choice was prodromal for the dramatic defeat of the 80s / 90s and
also this time, as further confirmation of how and where the fundamental events
take place to define the balance of power between the classes which then radiate
into all the interstices and the fields of society in general, at FIAT in October
1980 after 35 days of occupation of the factory.

The need to relaunch a Work Plan, updating it, for the CGIL was then also
presented at the 2010 National Congress, to face the economic and financial
crisis of 2008, which led to a loss of 9 points of GDP until 2011, bringing the
spread at 540 basis points.

This discussion then led to the definition and relaunch of a new CGIL Work Plan
in 2013, but which like Di Vittorio's Work Plan does not live in the daily
elaboration of the trade union and class struggle and is not a reference to any That.

Like the historic Plan, it is a list of requests, some even more or less
sensible, but which have no possibility of concrete realization unless
substantiated by power relations which are instead increasingly favorable to the
bosses and if there is no clear perspective of a real modification and overcoming
of the capitalist economic and social model.

It is enough to think that Italy in 2023 continues to be a country in which
single-income families still prevail, as a consequence above all of the low
female employment rate, hindered not only by an insufficient demand for work, but
also by the difficulties that women with family burdens in reconciling family and
work, especially if they have several children, in the absence of adequate services.

Furthermore, households with two or more employees are still a minority; 44.6%, a
decrease compared to 2004,

when they had reached 45.6%. The poverty line defined by the national statistics
institute for a single-person household is 640 euros per month, but a family with
one dependent child is considered relatively poor with an average monthly net
income of less than 1400 euros.

In reality, 54.4% of employees, i.e. over 10 million male and female workers,
earn well below 1400 euros a month, settling in income classes not exceeding
20,000 euros a year and overall 73.2% of employees, i.e. over 14 million male and
female workers do not exceed 1400 euros per month. (2)

The need to clearly define certain achievable and acquirable objectives in terms
of wages and employment is the only viable way to rebuild that fabric of class
solidarity now torn apart by the constant and increased social inequality.

The reference social block is clearly identifiable in this high percentage of
male and female workers who, together with the new generations and women,
increasingly need real structures of representation, i.e. political and trade
union organizations that take their point of view, without alchemy legislation,
and whose total absence has meant that large sectors of these workers and younger
generations have looked with sympathy at a post-fascist government structure.

*Snowy was the name of the fourth month of the French revolutionary calendar and
corresponded, depending on the year, with the period between December 21/23 and
January 19/21 in the Gregorian calendar. After its abolition by Napoleon, it was
only used during the Commune period and then abandoned.

Note:

(1) Il Messaggero 30 December 2022. Interview by Massimo Martinelli with Carlo
Bonomi: "Work is changing, companies need contracts linked to results"

(2) Cf. "More wages, less hours" the SITE n.11 October 2022 page 7

https://www.veliber.org/archivio/IlCantiere/A3/cant_2023_14/files/cant_2023_14.pdf
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca