WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FdCA, Il Cantiere #16: Union, 19th Congress of the CGIL (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The shame of Meloni's intervention prevents, even more, the necessary discussion,

confrontation and self-criticism that should take place in workers' congresses.
Better one thing done than a hundred to do (*) -- Cristiano Valente ---- Aping
the well-known aphorism of Karl Marx at the end of the Communist Party Manifesto:
"The proletarians have nothing to lose, except their chains: they have a world to
gain" Maurizio Landini at the conclusion of the XIX Congress of the CGIL held in
Rimini from 15 March to 18 March, which saw his reconfirmation as National
Secretary for the following four years, declared: "Ahead we do not have a period
simple, but what are we afraid of? What do we have to lose? Precariousness? Low
wages? What should we be afraid of. We should fear only the fear of opening this
discussion"
The distance from such oratorical rhetoric and the concreteness of events and
decisions is abysmal. Maurizio Landini, the National Secretary who wants to be
more radical and more leftist, will forever be remembered as the Secretary who
invited to speak for the first time in the more than 100-year history of the
CGIL, a Prime Minister raised and raised in the ranks of that organization, the
MSI, which has always made clear and manifest its ideological continuity with the
fascist regime, with the Republic of Salò and with the mass murderers and coup
plotters who, in complicity with state apparatuses, went through all the 60s, 70s
and 80s of our political and civil history.
 From the bomb at the Banca dell'Agricoltura in Milan in 1969, remembered as the
"state massacre", passing through the attacks in Brescia, to the Italicus train,
up to the attack and massacre of the Bologna station in August 1980. But as if
all this wasn't enough, this invitation arrived just after the shipwreck of those
who were supposed to be political refugees in Steccato Cutro in Calabria with
its, for now, 89 bodies found in the sea, which testify to the evident and very
heavy moral and political responsibilities of the current government in not
wanting to avoid such a tragedy.
Finally, with this unnatural invitation, the attention of the congressional
debate has shifted from the materiality of the social conflict in progress to an
operation exclusively of image and representation, based not on real
relationships of force existing in the social fabric, but on a perverse logic of
exchange reciprocal self-legitimation between Maurizio Landini and the Prime
Minister, in which paradoxically the one who gained, in terms of image, was
exclusively the Prime Minister.
Moving on to the conclusions, but more significantly to the opening speech, the
Secretary highlighted the trade union knowledge: from the social security issue,
increasingly embedded in the Fornero reform, by no means overcome despite the
various derogations made and announced, to the wage issue, always more urgent and
to be defined in the drafting of national employment contracts, to the question
of the precariousness of the younger generations, as well as to the question of
gender, and the last trade union frontier the reduction of working hours with
equal pay, assuming to be able to go from five working days to four working days
per week.
For a trade union that should have the defense of the conditions of male and
female workers in its DNA, what is fundamental, in addition to the listing of
some purposes, is the need to define a project and a strategy of struggle to
arrive at the realization and affirmation of these propositions.
But not only has no credible project materialized, but in the proposed analysis,
as well as in the majority official document already presented and discussed
starting from the basic assemblies, the centrality given to our economic
structure characterized by medium-small industrial structures , insufficient and
deficient for competition with other economic systems and not vice versa under
the conditions of a lacerated and fragmented world of work which should therefore
be united in its own normative and wage conditions, beyond the workplace, seems
to us an element of great insufficiency, precisely the reason for that serious
crisis situation in terms of wages and regulations, which the secretary himself
recalled in his conclusions.
The greater the class conflict, the better the balance of power for the working
masses and the greater the need for small and/or medium employers to compete with
greater innovation, an increase in technological processes and therefore the same
industrial size compared to a competitive ability based exclusively on a low
labor cost as in the vast majority of medium and small companies.
Just as largely insufficient and profoundly wrong, it appears to us that we have
not set out to criticize and reverse, again on the social security front, the
tendency to have opened up pension funds as an alternative to the public pension,
a process which has greatly reduced pensions, as they are always plus the
revaluation of the severance pay, left to the public management of INPS, makes
more money than the stock market, volatile by definition, also draining deferred
wages, such are our pensions, due to financial speculation, with the bizarre and
contradictory situation of investing on the traded funds, in the same speculative
funds that control more and more production chains and that, responding only to
the maximum profit of their shareholders, relocate and close industrial
structures such as the case of the former GKN of Campi Bisenzio teaches.
It is necessary to return to a clear and virtuous analysis of class and to affirm
that the interests of the workers conflict with the interests of the public or
private employers and that there is no unionization and no struggles if there are
no partial but real conquests.
No representation is possible and recognized if the social block of reference
does not perceive concrete steps forward with respect to its own economic and
social condition.
Basically it is necessary to identify a single great general battle for the
working masses and to deploy all the organizational capacity that the workers'
movement knows and has for its realization.
This means a single and clear goal, a long-lasting struggle and a constant
ability to unite the workers' movement with the new generations and with women.
If, as is now hypocritically established, even by observers and employers' study
centres, that there is a wage question, the goal of a generalized wage battle is
or should be unavoidable.
No more contractual battles, single category by single category, but union and
the beginning of a process for a unitary structure of struggle and generalized
wage demand.
It is necessary to have as objective and to organize the union of the industry.
It is unthinkable to organize struggles in the energy industry without
simultaneously organizing those who produce the means of production to generate
that energy, or it is unthinkable to hypothesize policies for the mechanical
sector to the detriment of chemists or those who work in services. We must
reunite what is possible, thus preventing the fragmentation of work organization
and thus having greater impact force and greater contractual capacity.
We must claim a wage battle that goes beyond the trend of inflation adjusted for
energy costs, going beyond the agreement that provides for increases linked to
the HICP, the 2018 factory inter-confederation agreement.
We must think about re-internalizing all those sectors and services which in the
factories, but also in the public sector, have been spun off in a jungle of
contracts such as the Multiservices one, signed by CGIL itself, which determine a
real strategy of wage dumping in the production sites and in the same public offices.
Just as it is necessary to overcome and definitively cancel article 8 of the
Sacconi decree which, by placing second-level bargaining before national levels,
makes it possible to derogate even for the worse from the wage and regulatory
conditions of entire production chains.
The same reasoning must be done for the reduction of hours for the same pay. If
we recognize that the increased productivity, that the development of technology
and digitization now pushed into all production processes has by no means been
spread over the workforce either in terms of higher wages or in the reduction of
working hours, thus increasing the exploitation of manpower, it is necessary to
demand a strong and robust generalized reduction in working hours, even being
able to arrive at the prospect of a working week of only four days, thus
guaranteeing greater employment opportunities for the new generations and for women.
Finally, it is necessary to think of a European union that has the capacity to
truly be a continental contractual subject, knowing that without such a horizon,
national and territorial policies will increasingly divide the continental workforce.
In the face of these which appear to us to be imperative needs, the speech of the
newly elected Secretary General Maurizio Landini reconfirms an approach that we
could define, in spite of a radical and left-wing phraseology, substantially
corporative, in the sense of overcoming the class struggle where the reference to
co-determination is proposed again with conviction, recognizing equal dignity
between the interests of the workers and of the company.
It should by now be clear, in our opinion, that in the incessant pendulum of the
class struggle, what counts in the now age-old battle of the movement of male and
female workers are the power relations that can be determined; just as there is
no space and possibility for a sort of "compassionate capitalism", which should
combine the competitive needs of the bosses with social cohesion, there is no
space for what we have always called a "reformist utopia" and which the
"magnificent progressive fate" of Leopardi's memory, in reality already dubious
for the poet himself, in reality they exacerbate inequalities instead of
attenuating them.
Inequalities both of a wage and therefore social nature, and of gender and
therefore discriminating against women and the new generations, and (we could
say) of ethnicity, that is, towards those human groupings based on somatic,
cultural, religious and linguistic characteristics different from ours, present
in our plains and throughout the agricultural sector for the collection of
oranges, tomatoes or apples, or in the time of care for our elderly.
For these reasons our task, as libertarian communists and as militants of the
class struggle, will have to be more and more up to the ongoing conflict,
possibly coordinated and re-launched in the social and trade union struggles of
male and female workers as well as in the social field.

*) Florentine proverb

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