It has been less than half a century since the last time the CGIL he kept his National Congress in Bari, exactly like the one that opens today, but it seems like forever. At the time, the largest Italian trade union, wisely led by an indestructible reformist like Luciano Lama, was very strong and a threat of a strike was enough to bring down a government. Today, on the contrary, the CGIL is very aged, has lost ground in the factories, counts for very little on a political level and appears folded over itself into one maximalist drift and corporate that Susanna Camusso's secretariat - almost certainly the worst in the history of the CGIL - has helped to fuel.
In 1973 the CGIL, after having consolidated in the workplace on the wave of the warm autumn, intelligently thought of using its contractual power not only in the factory but in society and for this reason he made the politics of reform his compass pressing the same political forces on this ground. Today the opposite is happening: faced with the rain of reforms that the Renzi and Gentiloni governments put on the carpet in the last legislature, the CGIL, betraying its history and making not only Lama turn in his grave but also Giuseppe Di Vittorio and Bruno Trentin, And always prejudiced against the opposition. In recent months he has done worse reaching support the Salvini counter-reform on pensions and not knowing which fish to turn to in the face of a clearly welfare measure such as the basic income, regardless of the fact that the symbolic measures of the yellow-green government ended up marginalizing investments.
What is most striking is the inability of the current management team of the CGIL to read and understand the great epochal transformations (from globalization to the advance of artificial intelligence, from the migratory phenomenon to the demographic crisis) that are changing – not necessarily for the better – the world and to adapt trade union policies to a rapidly evolving reality which without erasing the conflict, physiological in any modern society, knows how to critically combine it with the reality of the market and of the company. The fruit of this barbarism has produced an increasingly evident caesura between the factory claims on workers' conditions and the ability to link them to the general interests of society in a strategy of reform and change that had been precisely the distinctive feature of the CGIL in its most brilliant season, between the 60s and 70s.
Will it be possible to stop this painful drift of the largest Italian trade union? The fact that the Bari congress is polarized not on the strategy of change for the coming years but on division between the two candidates who compete for the general secretariat and the succession to Camusso – the maximalist Maurizio Landini and the reformer Vincent Colla - and on the line to follow towards the Government and the Five Stars - subordinates that of Landini and autonomous that of Colla - unfortunately evades the basic issues, cultural even before political, which are facing the union if it wants to try to trace the china.
The time has come choose between continuity in conservation and renewal or, it would be better to say, refoundation, and we'll see if the Congress of Bari will be able to do it. The poverty of analysis and content, even before strategies, which characterizes the union and which has pushed it into the shadows cries out for revenge. But it must also be said that it is a retreat that is not born today.
The latest attempt by the CGIL to renew the analysis of society and the world of work dates back to conferences and study groups promoted in 2005 by the Di Vittorio Foundation, then led by one of the best Italian economists such as Professor Marcello Messori. Then total darkness. Now some belated and cautious signs of renewal seem to appear in Colla's guidelines who rightly ask the union to intervene and negotiate upstream and not downstream of the production processes, who proposes to the union to embrace the logic of German-style participation and which seems to have no intention of towing the Five Stars and their ruinous populism. But it will be necessary to see if the CGIL Congress will be able to adopt these suggestions and - whoever wins between the two challengers - it will be necessary to see if and how the CGIL will then be able to mend its divisions and if it will be able to do so in the clarity of the strategic line and not in a mediocre compromise downwards.
Since the state of health of the union is not only a problem of its members but a terribly important issue that concerns the whole country and the quality of Italian democracy, one can do best wishes to the Congress of the CGIL, even if the reasons for being optimistic are reduced to a flicker. It would be nice if precisely in Bari the CGIL, shelving the carelessness and demagogic maximalism in which Camusso and Landini distinguished themselves, rediscovered the strength to resume the path of renewal and the reforms of the 1973 Congress and reopened a page worthy of the best traditions of Italian trade unionism. There are many illusions to be had, but hope is always the last to die. Congratulations.
