Giuliano Cazzola, who was a prestigious trade unionist in the CGIL before becoming one of the leading Italian pension experts, has just finished writing a wonderful e-book for Adapt, the advanced training school in industrial and labor relations, which he says everything already in the title: "Stories of trade unionists". It is a very well documented gallery of union leaders who have truly made the history of the workers' movement: from Luciano Lama to Bruno Trentin, from Pierre Carniti to Giorgio Benvenuto and many others.
However, there is an aspect that is missing in the book but which obviously could not be present in Cazzola's "Stories of trade unionists": what would the old leaders of the CGIL have ever said about the drift to which Susanna Camusso has led the Confederation on the wave of a increasingly minority and increasingly incomprehensible maximalism?
The plastic image of the disbandment of the CGIL is the symbolic embrace that took place on Saturday with Di Maio's Five Stars in the protest demonstrations for pensions and for the resurrection of the fateful article 18 organized by the trade union center led by Camusso.
But wasn't Di Maio the Grillino leader who only a few months ago had infuriated all the unions by claiming that either the union reforms itself or will the 5 Star Movement take care of it by authority if it manages to get into government? Yes, it's really him, but the CGIL must have forgotten about it, with many greetings to common sense and consistency that are no longer his strong point, as they never were for the Five Stars. For Camusso and Di Maio, the waltz and the unbearable lightness of ideas that accompany it are now in fashion. That's why it doesn't take much imagination to imagine the expression of bewilderment and disapproval that great trade unionists like Lama and Trentin would show in the face of the pickaxes that the CGIL is giving its glorious history.
