Where are the unions going? A question that is not only legitimate, but it is necessary to ask yourself because, unlike what they complain (with the counterpoint of the minority of the PD and the coryphaei of the radical and maximalist left), nobody has an interest in isolating the intermediate social bodies which, when not they become corporate bastions and go to occupy spaces that do not belong to them, they are precious vehicles of democracy. The fact is that in recent times the policies and, above all, the behavior of the trade unions (albeit with different connotations) have taken on an ever more political and less trade union drift.
Emblematic in this sense was the strike against the school reform: one of the cornerstones, perhaps the most important, of the government's programme. The law under discussion in parliament is a serious attempt to reshape the organization, contents and objectives of the education system: therefore, it is a question that certainly affects the subjects who operate in it, but above all the community of citizens and the present and future of the nation. If this is the case, Minister Boschi's statement that the school does not belong to the unions and that when this occurs, as unfortunately it almost always happens, it doesn't work, is nothing but a truism. That this obvious truth has been considered by the trade unions as an attack on democracy highlights the substantially corporative conception they have of it.
This is clearly confirmed by the fact that the main subjects of the clash do not concern the reform, but the methods of recruitment, the criteria and procedures for assessing the merit of teachers and non-teachers, the powers of principals and above all the claim to negotiate with the I govern the contents of the law as a condition for its approval. If this isn't a political strike what is? Political strikes, openly declared, were also those promoted by the FIOM against the jobs act and the general strike of the CGIL, with a partial adhesion of CISL and UIL, and the support of the minority of the PD, of SEL and of various small radical groups: prodromes of the unrealistic social coalition?
In the face of these political agitations aimed at fighting and overthrowing a state law or preventing its approval, the weakness, if not the factual and cultural subordination, of the trade unions appears macroscopic in tackling the major issues of national and international importance raised by the corporate crises that have characterized the Italian economic system in recent years. Although the prodromes of what could have happened were known and their imaginable developments, the unions were unable to intervene to prevent them, participate in the management of corporate restructuring processes and promote alternative development policies.
In situations that were already deeply compromised, there was no choice but to resort to mediation interventions by the State, but with financial means rendered ineffective by the scarcity of public resources and strikes and exasperated and hopeless forms of struggle. Faced with the impotence and lack of adequate strategies in relation to the plans for restructuring and reducing employment, under the pressure of Landini and the FIOM, there was then a further deviation from the natural orbit of the union by adopting a of "jurisdization" of union action, which is instead imperatively negotiated, through recourse to the judiciary, transforming it from an instrument of economic and social development into a political struggle for the recognition of rights. Continuing on this path of "de-unionisation", Landini proposed the completion of this metamorphosis of the union into a "social coalition": a union-political Proteo ready to transform itself into any object of its creator's desire. Finally, the "cautious" Camusso could not be missing who, in the name of trade union autonomy, declared that he will not vote for the PD and invited not to vote for the PD candidate in the Veneto regional elections.
Can the union undertake a different and innovative path, maintaining its role as representative of the world of work, extended to all the new professional figures that are intrinsically connected to it? Yes if it makes business, private or public, the core of its strategy and not the opponent to beat and if it contributes, as an intermediate social body, to creating the connective tissue between business, the entrepreneurial system, social structures and values cultural.
Paradoxically, the first step in this direction did not come from the union, but from the manager of a large multinational company like Marchionne who proposed to the unions a model of participatory industrial relations that displaces the old old union concepts, and reveals their impotence. Unfortunately it is a unilateral act and this is its limit: it is up to the unions to seize this opportunity to resume the right course and become, from declining political stand-ins, protagonists of the country's economic, social and cultural renewal process.
