In the debate on the 2019 economic maneuver there are two great absentees: Confindustria and the trade union organizations and, more generally, the so-called social partners have historically been represented, in fact, by the two collective subjects mentioned above. We specify. It is not that the CGIL, CISL and UIL have decided not to deal with these problems or that the most important entrepreneurs' association has nothing to say about the new political course of the country (the clearest, most adamant and shareable words were pronounced by Carlo Bonomi at the Assolombarda Assembly).
The decline of trade unions is more recent than that of Confindustria, which was not even invited on the occasion of the latest negotiations which, in the past legislature, had important results (collected in the summary report of 28 September 2016) in social security and welfare matters (the APE package originated in that circumstance). Confindustria and trade unions, from time to time, yes they argue among themselves by stipulating some useless inter-confederation agreement on the reform of the collective bargaining framework with the aim of satisfying all the requests and propensities that exist within it and, therefore, ending up "mending the same old socks".
As for the trade unions, they have lost members, have seen their resources deplete; nevertheless, Gaetano Sateriale is right to claim in an article in Il Diario del lavoro that: “Our life, our daily activity is richer than diatribes: in the categories as in the confederal structures, in Rome as in the territories. A job carried out by hundreds of managers that produces thousands of unitary negotiations and agreements, and services provided daily to thousands of lonely people". To have come less is the political role played by the Italian trade union: the one that made it a sharer and often co-decider of the major economic policy decisions, in the distant times of concertation; only holder of a power of interdiction, in the following years, once the social dialogue has ceased.
Today, the government acts in the delicate fields of economic, labor and social policy, as if trade unions did not exist; their leaders, however, are fully aware that they do not have the strength to be heard. "We have decided to react - Susanna Camusso thundered last October 18 - to a maneuver whose meaning we do not understand on the future of the country and the growth and quality of work, react by building a unitary document of CGIL, CISL and UIL which we will present to the executives next Monday (October 22, ed) for its approval and which will then be submitted to the discussion and judgment of our delegates and workers in the assemblies".
In the subsequent presentation press conference, the three union leaders threatened a "mobilization" in the absence of a summons. A few days later, however, the general secretary of the CGIL, concluding the congress of the Chamber of Labor in Bologna, provided proof of intellectual honesty: "It's not that the government doesn't want to discuss with the social partners - said Camusso -. It is that it denies the democratic existence of representation. He thinks that representation is not one of the fundamental factors of a country's democracy”.
The number one of the CGIL then explained that "even the relationship with Parliament is marked by the idea that there is a single representation embodied in the government contract and nothing else". And you reiterated that if there is no confrontation, the unions will have to be clear-cut in giving an answer. But she immediately added: "We must be equally clear to each other in saying that it is not obvious, we must work seriously if we want the masses to follow us". Then the words of trust and consolation: "Regardless of how the electoral guidelines have shifted, there are workers and pensioners".
But the question remains: the workers will follow them, the same ones who, on March 4, voted for the M5S and the League? And this is the crucial question that hangs over the CGIL congress itself. A theme that Maurizio Landini also took up - the one who will almost certainly take Camusso's place - in his final speech by the CGIL in Milan. The former Fiom leader told delegates that in recent months he had stopped at an autogrill near Pescara, where he had been approached by people registered with the CGIL who had admitted to having voted for the League, but who at the same time they recommended that he also hold firm against the yellow-green government.
As if to say: despite everything, we can continue to be the union that represents those workers and their needs. Moreover, those parties which – as direct protagonists or their heirs – first founded the pact of Rome, then favored the divisions which led, in 1950, to the traditional confederal order, have disappeared or are on the verge of extinction. What should the CGIL do, in the new context: commit suicide? Cultivate memories? Resurrect the dead?
To understand the meaning of things, it would have been enough to ask those autogrill workers why they had decided to vote for Salvini. The answer would have been simple: it is the party that most decisively wants to abolish the reform Fornero, as the CGIL itself intends to do. As for the jobs act Wasn't it you, dear Landini, who declared that he took away fundamental rights from workers and that it is not a law worthy of a left-wing party? Certain Giggino DiMaio he went hard when he cursed that provision, but the substance of the assessment does not change. If it's not soup – Antonio Di Pietro would say – it's wet bread.
True, then. Everything changed. It is good for the dead to bury the dead. Life goes on. In 1943, after 25 July, it was enough for the Badoglio government to send (anti-fascist) commissioners to liquidate the corporations. Then all the offices, structures and members found themselves part of a unitary democratic and free trade union, the CGIL. The workers were able to choose a new membership among those offered to them from above; more or less the same ones they found printed on ballot papers and in the political struggle in society.
On March 4, an inverse process took place: it was the workers who - to a large extent in the CGIL - drew the political consequences of their union battles. Soon they will also be asked to account for it in the composition of the management groups, not so much for the card they will have to have in their wallet, but for the policies they will be required to follow. As Marco Bentivogli - an anomalous trade unionist - argued trade union populism preceded political populism; she fed him, provided him with arguments and audiences to conquer.
