After the proclamation of a 24-hour general strike in protest against violence against women, which failed, as expected, but was still able to produce inconvenience in large urban centers due to the announcement effect, it would have been logical to listen to the political and trade union forces at the highest levels not so much dissenting voices (posthumously) but at least a reflection and some proposals to pick up the thread of reasoning on the effective regulation of exercising the right to strike in essential public services.
Arrigo Giana spoke in Milan, the general manager of ATM, the new president of the entrepreneurial association of which all the large public transport companies are members and which is also a member of Confindustria. He did so with arguments of common sense, indicating the need to allow the call of a strike only to trade unions representing at least 5% of the workforce, the minimum threshold provided for by the contract to sit at the table of the national contract and to establish for the workers the 'obligation to identify participation in the strike in order to allow the company to organize the best possible service and to inform citizens.
Unfortunately good intentions are not enough to unravel a tangled skein. The essential premise is to establish whether the right to strike is an individual right exercised collectively (like the right to vote) or whether it is an individual right, albeit subject to minimum rules. The latter orientation prevails today in doctrine and jurisprudence and means that, albeit in compliance with existing rules, not only a single trade union organization, regardless of its representativeness, can declare a strike, but it is the individual worker who can order of this right.
The result, especially in public services, is there for all to see. The knot must be resolved in the political and legislative sphere by involving the social forces. If we look at Germany, as is often done these days in the field of industrial relations, there is no doubt that the nature of the law is collective and that the workers concerned decide democratically through a referendum.
If this path is not chosen, perhaps something can be improved but one must resign oneself to accepting the recurring inconveniences (it is not difficult these days to find a good cause) which fall, particularly in public services, on the shoulders of the weakest and poorest citizens. An alternative, to escape from responsibility, is to actually delegate the matter to the prefectures which combine moral suasion with the much more effective tool of injunction.
The immobilism (or opportunism?) of the political forces brings to mind the meaning that the old Milanese tram drivers attributed to the acronym ATM: Waiting for Better Times.
