The paradox of the CGIL's trade union policy is that, marching under the banner of hyper-syndicalism, it has increasingly slipped towards de-unionisation. After all, Landini's confused concept of a social coalition, a non-partisan political entity which incorporates the trade union by taking it outside its historical borders, does nothing but draw the conclusions from his proven experience that the conception and traditional instruments of class struggle are not more able to face the profound transformations of the capitalist system and therefore of the structure of companies and the world of work.
If this is the case, common sense and political intelligence should suggest reconsidering the trade union's roles, strategies and negotiating models and not deluding themselves that they can circumvent the obstacle by ferrying it into a heterogeneous and contradictory political-institutional terrain, effectively abandoning what is the its natural field of action: the business system. On the other hand, it is difficult for this to happen when in the culture of the CGIL and of a large part of the left the company is identified with capital, the enemy to be defeated, unfortunately also supported in this by the persistent tendency in the business world to consider workers and their representatives as outside the management of the enterprise.
It is no coincidence that both the trade unions (with the exception of the CISL) and the business associations, especially Confindustria, stubbornly continue to oppose any form of co-management, depriving themselves of the possibility of framing contractual policies in a strategic dimension. While companies implement internationalization and production reorganization processes aimed at pursuing maximum flexibility and ability to adapt to demand and parcelling out the labor market into figures on the border between dependent and self-employed work, the unions are exhausted in long-standing negotiations and inconclusive for national collective agreements that actually affect small circles of workers protected, yes, by overprotective rights, but not by the bankruptcy of companies and by growing unemployment.
The economic crisis has brought out the impotence of trade union policies to reconcile unsustainable rights in the new economic and social context with the need to put the economy back in order by redefining the structure of the labor market and the welfare state: hence the need to re-centre trade union policies on the enterprise understood as the main contractual subject, but above all as the fundamental institution through which work, professionalism, entrepreneurship and capital interact to create wealth. Co-management is the prerequisite for directing corporate governance towards general economic and social objectives. On this basis, one can and must conceive the role of the State as an ordering and strategically directed subject. The jobs act and the consequent active labor policies have opened a very important way to activate the spirit of co-management in companies and in the economic and social system. Without the collaboration of trade unions and business organisations, it will be difficult to achieve one of the main objectives of this reform: the guarantee of the relocation of the unemployed into the labor market. In such a context, crises such as that of ILVA or Alitalia could have been avoided or prevented and operations of strategic value such as that of Pirelli could have been co-managed. Marchionne concretely demonstrated the validity of this assumption even if he had to share his industrial project with the American union and not with the Italian one (although in the end CISL and UIL followed suit).
That being the case, what will happen to Landini's "party-non-party union-non-union" and Camusso's anti-Renzi union? Both "ircocervi" their good results are getting them: the push towards the de-unionization of the CGIL and the sinking of the already fragile vessel of union unity, for example. For the moment we can be satisfied.
