Repetition helps! It was not necessary to confirm the IOL on the dry loss of 8.7% of purchasing power, suffered by Italian workers in recent years, but now really no one can question the collapse of wages in Italy. Instead, there is much more shyness in saying what are the real problems of a system of trade union representation and bargaining that has reduced the Italian worker to the joke of Europe and beyond.
Transport is the emblem of this disaster: from sectors that drove the general development of work and the country have transformed after years of wage cuts, wild liberalization, worsening of working conditions and precarity, to places from which you run away with their legs raised.
For some time we have been denouncing the fact that in transport the collapse of wages in Italy is also linked to two other factors too often underestimated or ignored: the progressive expulsion of any form of democracy, which is now affecting all sectors in a transversal way, combined with the continuous reduction of the spaces of strike thanks to an iniquitous law and widely used to protect the employer’s parties.
In recent months, contracts have been renewed in the sectors of seafarers, ports, logistics and bus, tram and rail drivers with increases of less than 6% on average per year compared to a full-year inflation of more than 17%, leaving more than 10% in the pocket of companies.
All this happened without discussing a platform first with the categories and without submitting the contract to a referendum. The negotiation of the Air Transport contract has even reopened without even having been the slightest consultation, not even by mistake.
If, as in the most striking case of the railway workers but also of local public transport, the owners ignore strikes (the most democratic form of participation of workers) participated from 60 to 80%, because the rules impose limited durations, the guarantee of 50% of activity and hallucinating rarefaction, in the end it is advisable to unload on the users the inability to listen to the requests of the categories.
It is incredible how in the largest Italian company – the FSI Group- or the largest public transport company in Europe – the Atac of Rome-, the RSU have expired for more than 7 years but the renewal is prevented while the practice everywhere is now the appointment of the Company Representations from above.
The transport sector is only the most visible tip of the iceberg than what happens to work in Italy.
Convincing the working class it has no right of opinion or speech and that the strike is now a sterile exercise as useless is the great weapon that has been put in hand for too many years to those who take away our wages from the governments of all colors and from those unions now reduced to notaries in defense only of their hegemonies and prebends. And then we’re surprised that people don’t vote anymore.
It is time to take back the word, the democratic practice in the workplace and rebuild the space of conflict without which the contractual demands become almost alms.
For this reason, we will bring the patrimony of discussion of the assembly of all transports held in Bologna inside the square of April 5 in Rome for the salary and against the rearmament.
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