Italy: teachers occupy! Will this be a "hot autumn"?

While the numbers of workers across the world thrown on the scrapheap of global capitalism's current crisis continues to rise, and those responsible sing along with their house trained professional "canaries" about "green shoots" of recovery, spasms of defiance and resistance continue to be seen everywhere. The latest in Italy?

A successful 14 month occupation and work-in by 240 workers in a machine-tool plant outside Milan, against closure and removal of the machinery. It was supported by the workers' families and the local community, but largely left high and dry by leaders of their union , the traditionally militant and "radical" Fiom.

Following that, a series of occupations, sit-ins and symbolic protests are in progress across Italy. In Melfi in the the south east a spare-part supply firm for the local Fiat plant has been occupied by workers on the roof, resisting its closure and the loss of 174 jobs. The occupiers forced the local leadership of one of the unions to call for workers self-management.

In Palermo and Trapani in Sicily, as well as in Venice, local teachers have occupied education offices in protest against the devastating cuts of 65,000 jobs, with teachers, ancillary and admin staff affected. There are more cuts to come in 2010.
These workers are part of the 300,000-strong temporary workforce in education. Their jobs are permanently precarious, every September they are forced to subject to a shameful public selection process, a points-based classification system little better than a hiring-fair. Disgracefully underpaid — they are not paid for the 4-5 month school holidays — the majority of them will never obtain a settled and permanent fixed post. They are forced to move at their own expence across regions, at the capricious whim of a bureaucratic educational establishment.

It is a system as grotesquely inefficient as it is indifferent to the quality of education offered to working class children. Worse, ramshackle education-on-the-cheap-Italy spends less than any other industrialised country Europe; only half the population receive any kind of post-compulsory education. Such a system can only survive with the connivance of the myriad teachers unions whose leaders have derailed again and again any serious , united campaign to resist both the cutbacks by successive governments and the chronic inefficiency of the whole system. The creditable exception to this is COBAS — the "Base" union confederation. COBAS has called for one day strike of all its teachers and public sector workers for 25 October.

These protests are long overdue and come at a crucial moment when the conditioned reflex of the leaders of the main confederation unions will be annually activated against the government of day, with the "threat" of "a hot autumn". This year the verbiage and the rhetoric are thinner and shabbier than usual. No wonder. Last winter, as soon as the crisis hit sectors of the "real" economy the leaders of the three main union outfits set aside their apparently sharp tactical differences about how best to live with the government's announced assaults on public services, education, wage contracts etc, and fell over themselves to assure the government and the business world of their readiness to accept the "collective sacrifices" necessary to put things right. But this is something they and their predecessors have repeatedly done for the system when things get rough because they are an integral part of it.

In practice what this has meant in Italy is that the rich and wealthy enjoy generous tax breaks, investment incentives, and the end of Berlusconi's "crusade" against tax evasion and irregular cheap labour — things that have always seemed to be a natural right to Italy's business class. Is it any surprise that in an economy that has been stagnant for nearly 15 years the possessing classes have exponentially increased their share of the national cake?

For the workers union passivity meant an end to any illusion about resistance to government attacks being organised. This is especially so in education, where last autumn the bureaucrats had organised a mass demonstration, announcing a campaign! We have seen the unions collaborated with the plans to offer an improved social security cushion to workers laid off in struggling plants, with the promise that when good times return they would be rehired. As the crisis goes on, the "redundancy money" offered diminishes — and, in fact, millions of workers are not covered by the scheme. The poisonous effect has been to further isolate and atomise workers, rendering them passive and vulnerable to the lying racist propaganda of the Berlusconi mass media.

A central tactic of the Berlusconi regime has been to deepen the divisions among the working masses in order to restructure the labour market in the interests of greater capitalist productivity, the long-time weakness of Italian capitalism.

Both the pre- and post-election carnival of hate-filled and lying racist propaganda has shifted millions to the Berlusconi camp — or more accurately to the odious vanguard of his campaign, the Northern League. This noxious exercise has culminated in a piece of draconian racist anti-immigrant legislation whose vindictive fascistoid essence is grimly captured in the recent news that the four half-dead Eritrean survivors of 21 days adrift amidst the luxury yacht infested waters of the Sicilian canal, are to be prosecuted for illegal presence in Italy! People whose 74 compatriots perished on the journey!

The criminal silence and inaction of the union tops, among whose members there are tens of thousands of immigrants, after such events is and will remain a blot on the Italian labour and working class movement. Such shame can only be removed by the actions of those workers who today have started to resist in the only way they can. Every struggle and every victory big or small can begin to embolden both themselves and others and help bring the workers' movement closer to the realisation that the increasing political and social nightmare in Italy will only be brought to an end by mass united working class-led action. Ultimately it is a battle for a workers' revolutionary government. The Italian left should set itself such a task and be judged accordingly.