Tax reform, minimum wage, social safety nets, basic income. And yet the presidentialism, the attack by the far right on the CGIL and the anarchist threat, the falling birth rate and violence against women. These are the topics covered by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during his speech at CGIL congress in Rimini, the first Premier to attend the union event for 27 years now. The last was Romano Prodi in '96.
Meloni was welcomed by some disputes organized by the internal minority group of the CGIL. Banners were hoisted outside the conference center with the words: “Meloni: not in our name. Cutro: massacre di Stato”, surrounded by cuddly toys. Inside, when Meloni took the stage, some of those present sang from the audience "Hello beautiful".
The Premier responded by thanking all of the CGIL, including “those who contested me with effective slogans, even if I didn't know that Chiara Ferragni was a metalworker”. The reference is to thethink yourself unwelcome” with which the protesters had paraphrased the stole used by Ferragni in Sanremo.
"I've been feeling booed since I was 16. I could say that I am a Knight of merit on this ", commented Meloni, who then added:" I do not escape a context knowing that it is a difficult context. It doesn't scare me. The reason I decided to be here runs deeper. Today we celebrate the birth of our nation. The contrast is positive it has an educational role, unity is something else, it is a superior interest, it is the common destiny that gives meaning to the opposition”, he explained.
Meloni at the CGIL congress on wages and tax reform
The Prime Minister then moved on to the main themes of her speech: “Wages have been frozen for 30 yearsthe – he said – shocking fact because Italy has lower wages than before 90 when there weren't yet mobile phones. In Germany and France they also rose by 30%. It means that the solutions identified so far have not gone well and that we need to imagine a new path which is to bet everything on economic growth". The answer? “Focus on growth". “We come from a world in which it was thought that poverty could be abolished and jobs created by decree – he explained – Today someone is asking that the State, by law, create a high salary by decree. But this is not the case and we have seen it: the companies and their workers create wealth, the State must make the rules. And the challenge is to put companies and workers in the best conditions to create it and make it reverberate on everyone".
This is the vision that underlies the tax reform approved yesterday by the council of ministers, a reform “which in my opinion was hastily rejected by some”, said Meloni referring precisely to the CGIL.
The tax reform, he underlined, “is concentrated on the most fragile, on the middle class“. Then the Prime Minister listed the objectives of the delegation, without however speaking of the coverage and resources necessary to finance the envisaged measures: "A progressive reduction of personal income tax rates, which does not mean making progressivity disappear by significantly expanding the group of those who fall under the first rate to include many employees within it; the introduction also for employees of a low flat fee on salary increases: recognition of the principle of merit; make benefits such as transportation, education deductible and make them monetizable i fringe benefits for example in the case of the birth of a child; we want workers' contributions to bilateral bodies to be deductible and to detax their initiatives in favor of workers; align employees and retirees on the highest level of no-tax area; gradually lower the'Ires".
Meloni at the CGIL congress: "No to the minimum wage, yes to the extension of collective agreements"
The Prime Minister reiterated her opposition to the introduction of the minimum salary, instead endorsed by the CGIL. “It's not the right way, would favor the usual,” he said. “We can try to work together with a universal social safety net system that protects in the same way those who lose their job, whether they are self-employed, employees, or so-called atypical workers. Give everyone the best possible guarantees but that they are the same. Guarantee the same rights. Not guaranteeing a citadel of guaranteed ones”, said Meloni who added on the minimum wage: “The setting by law of a minimum wage risks not becoming an additional but a substitute protection. You would end up making another one favor economic concentrations".
For Meloni, the right solution is instead that of extend “collective bargaining. There must be no Serie A workers and Serie B workers. Who deserves union delegation and who doesn't”. The Premier then recalled that she had earmarked "300 million euros for a more significant salary for school workers" and confirmed her intention to "raise the lowest pensions and cut the tax wedge that the government previous one had imagined it would end this year,” he said: “
Meloni on basic income: "He failed"
The number one of Palazzo Chigi reiterated the rejection without appeal of the Citizenship Income: "He failed his goals for which it was born because upstream there is an error: putting in the same cauldron who could work and who could not work, putting together social policies and active labor policies”.
Meloni therefore claimed “the abolition of the basic income for those who don't want to work. It is dutiful ”-she said. Then, replying to Landini that she asked herself “what have the poor done to the government?”, the Premier stated: “We don't want to keep them in poverty. The only way to achieve this goal is through work. The income – she added – was expected as transitional tool. Well, there are people who have been receiving it for three years and are poorer than before. This measure failed. I don't believe that those who are able to work should be maintained by the state with the money of those who work hard and receive a salary slightly higher than their income".
Meloni on attacks on the CGIL and the anarchists
“We believed that the time of fierce ideological confrontation was behind us and instead in recent months, unfortunately, it seems to me that there are increasingly frequent signs of a return to political violence, with the unacceptable attack by far-right exponents on the CGIL” and the actions “of the anarchist movements that refer to the Br”. Words that managed to elicit a brief applause from the audience.
"It is necessary that all political forces, trade unions and intermediate bodies fight together against this drift", said the Prime Minister who recalled Marco Biagi, two days before the anniversary of his assassination at the hands of the New Red Brigades.
Presidentialism, the Mattei plan and "demographic glaciation"
"We are facing demographic glaciation, to address this problem, I think the challenge is that of an impressive economic and cultural plan to relaunch the centrality of the family,” Meloni said. The goal is to start "from support for women's work, to incentives for those who hire women and new mothers, with home-work reconciliation tools and a taxation that once again takes into account the composition of the family unit".
“I am confident that in the coming years new sectors may also open up linked to the industrial strategies that we are creating. There was a lack of vision in this sense which held back Italy and tied us too much to some countries", said the premier, explaining that "instead we intend transform Italy into the energy supply hub of Europe, of the Mediterranean, with the Mattei plan which is a model of non-predatory collaboration and to help African countries live well". The Mattei plan, he assures, "is the most humane response to immigration". Meloni then raised presidential reform, one of FdI's warhorses in the electoral campaign: “If in the past there hasn't been a clear choice on industrial policies, it is because politics has had a short horizon. A long-term industrial policy cannot be accompanied by governments that last a few months", said the Premier, adding that "We do not realize how much we have paid our political instability, in terms of international reliability, in terms of concentration of energies and resources on major strategic objectives. This is the reason why I continue to be certain that a reform in the presidential sense, or in any case a direct election of the top executive, is, out of respect for the popular will but also for stability, one of the most powerful development measures we can imagine for this nation."
