Too sweeping on Italian union leaders

Submitted by Matthew on 25 January, 2012 - 12:20

I agree with a lot of Hugh Edwards’s article (“Italy’s corruption crisis needs workers’ solutions”, Solidarity 230, 18 January 2012), especially his scepticism about the Monti government’s crackdown on tax evasion and corruption (which is a structural problem of Italian capitalism and will not disappear just because Berlusconi has been replaced by somebody who does not engage in tax fraud, false accounting and the bribery of public officials).

However, I think he is being far too sweeping in his criticisms of the trade union leadership. Or, to be more precise, of the CGIL, since the only reason the former Berlusconi collaborators in the CISL and UIL have shown any sign of resistance to Monti is the example set by the CGIL.

I am only too aware of the extent to which Susanna Camusso, the General Secretary of the CGIL, has in the past failed to give all out support to the engineering workers’ union FIOM in its heroic struggle against FIAT’s attempt to exclude fighting trade unionism from its plants (and return to the dreadful climate of repression that prevailed from 1948 until 1968), but we should give credit where credit is due.

We should recognise her current resistance to the attempt to abolish Article 18 of the 1970 Workers’ Statute, the clause giving workers in workplaces employing more than 15 people protection against employers’ attempts to sack them “without just cause” (in other words to sack them for trade union militancy or political views) — protection which currently enforces reinstatement and not just financial compensation.

Given that not only Italian establishment figures like Mario Monti, Labour minister Elsa Fornero and Confindustria [the Italian employers’ federation] President Emma Marcegaglia but also the ECB, the EU Commission, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the IMF all want Article 18 scrapped, Camusso’s resistance should not be dismissed in such a cavalier fashion.

Whilst I would acknowledge that Camusso is only an old-fashioned social democrat and not a communist, her defence of her members’ interests compares extremely favourably with the abject capitulation of Barber and Prentis in the UK.

I would also like to stress that whatever the manifold deficiencies of the Party of Communist Refoundation, that party does stand up for workers’ rights and is not a “stinking corpse” as the AWL, so correctly, described the British Labour Party before your recent retreat into entry work.

Insofar as Edwards has a perspective for the future he seemed to counterpose a rather abstract “rank and fileism” to the trade unions and the “radical left”.

But the grave weaknesses of horizontalist soft autonomism were amply displayed on 15 October 2011 when the sidelining of FIOM and the PRC by the organisers of that day’s anti-capitalist demonstration meant that the Black Bloc literally ran riot in Rome, largely nullifying the effect of a mass demonstration against austerity.

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