The part of the task conferred by the executive on Professor Amato relating to the analysis of the existing forms of public funding, directly or indirectly, to trade unions has gone almost unnoticed.
In reality, the veil over the union caste, "hyper-bureaucratized and self-referential", with enormous staff and turnover, large real estate assets (exempt from Imu) and secret balance sheets against any logic of transparency, had already been lifted a few years ago by Stefano Livadiotti in his book “The other caste”. Livadiotti spoke of a trade union excessive power not unlike that of politics which "sacrifices the collective good, stubbornly standing in the way of any reform that risks undermining a status quo made up of privileges, of Cafs which ensure a mountain of tax-free money, of patronages that have become real and its own hunting reserves with an annual turnover – once again tax-free – of millions of euros”.
The alarm bell for an unavoidable reform of trade unions also on the basis of art. 39 of the Constitution was resounded today by the Government, which is preparing to do its homework not only on the costs of politics, but also on union costs, which weigh not only on public finances but also on businesses in terms of competitiveness and productivity.
In this regard, it is worth dwelling on three issues, which may seem marginal, but which in reality are the pillars of a plethoric trade union bureaucracy which prevents the construction of a modern trade union in step with the times.
Expectations for union positions. I public or private workers called to cover provincial and national trade union offices have by law the right to be placed on unpaid leave for the entire duration of their mandate. The salary of the workers concerned is obviously paid by the union, but the related social security contributions are "figurative", i.e. not paid by the union, but paid directly by INPS, which will subsequently pay the pension on the basis of the figurative contributions paid by INPS itself . Since there are thousands of workers on union leave and they form the backbone of the unions in the local structures with the social security and pension costs borne by INPS, and therefore by the community, isn't this an indirect public loan to the unions?
union contributions. In 1995, the popular will, through a referendum, declared that it no longer wanted the forced levy on the paycheck, according to the slogan of the then referendum committee, of the monthly contribution to be paid to the unions. Following the clear expression of the sovereign people, the legislator abrogated the second and third paragraph of the art. 26 of the Workers' Statute, which gave unions the specific right to withhold union membership fees from workers' pay slips.
Unlike the public funding of parties, this time it was not politics that circumvented the will of the people, but the judiciary, recognizing the right of unions (including those that are not the most representative) to continue to have the employer make union deductions from payroll no longer ope legis (repealed) but ope judicis, by virtue of a surreptitious interpretation of the civil law institution of the "transfer of credit", thus burdening companies with improper costs forced to carry out onerous managerial and administrative activities in the interest of the unions.
Union representatives. The current rule of law (Article 19 of the Workers' Statute) is also the result of an abrogative referendum in which the sovereign will of the people limited the recognition of company union representation and related rights only to the unions that agree to "involve themselves ” in contractual dynamics, helping to write the rules governing workers' rights and duties, as well as factory life and work organization. When citizens were called to express their opinion in the referendum on the type of trade union representation, they gave a clear indication for a trade union whose aim was to sign collective agreements and not to always say no.
It is therefore especially special today that, with an amendment presented to the bill on the reform of the labor market, Senator Nerozzi of the Democratic Party proposes to extend the right to set up company union representatives and related guarantees (paid leave, prohibition of transfer and dismissal, etc.) to the most representative unions, regardless of the signing of collective agreements, trying to institutionalize not the right-duty of the union to bargain but recognizing it, in the name of union democracy, the right to "veto" against everything and everyone.
What's the point of all this? Are these choices that really strengthen the protection of workers? Looking at the internal and international production scenario, it would seem not. Deindustrialization, delocalization and growing unemployment dominate the interior. The reformist trade unions Cisl and Uil, although recently put in difficulty by the Government due to the feared axis with the CGIL, are reacting, also with their category structures, to the difficulties induced by these transformations (to which has been added the recent and devastating crisis world) with pragmatism, trying not only to safeguard what remains of employment, but also to create the conditions for maintaining and relaunching the competitive possibilities of companies through the sharing of new organizational forms of production, respectful, however, of the rights and of the needs of the workers.
The CGIL is instead for the defense to the bitter end of the existing and therefore on intransigent and conflicting positions of principle. He almost seems unaware that the scope of our labor reforms is national, while current problems find causes and solutions at a supranational level and multinationals tend to move in search of conditions that allow them to compete on at least an equal footing with the competitors. If you don't understand it, you will continue to do like Renzo's capons of Manzoni's memory.
