13 February, General Strike!
Jobs for all! Rights and education for all!
We won't pay for your crisis!
By now it is clear to everyone: the dramatic economic and financial crisis is being managed by the industries and the Government together with the CISL, the UIL and the UGL unions, with the costs being dumped on employees, the young and pensioners. This crisis reveals to the fullest extent the hypocrisy of wealth that was founded on the reduction of rights and pay, on indebtedness and on the spread of social casualisation as a functional model for industry and society.
Thus there has been a rise in social inequality while the wealth produced by labour goes to fatten returns and profits. Cuts in public and social spending (education, research, healthcare, pensions) aim to divide the workers, putting private and public employees at odds with each other, and to hit women by raising their retirement age. The state school system is being torn apart through total de-structuring, which will only cause further inequality and casualisation in the future. And safety regulations in the workplace are regularly ignored, with the result that workplace deaths and injuries continue to rise.
The government's budget and anti-crisis legislation only confirm the desire to humiliate the world of labour through the meagre handouts of bonuses and the "social card". While huge sums of public funds are easily found to shore up the financial system, there is nothing to support the material conditions of workers and casual workers.
But all this is not enough: so along came the appalling agreements between the Government, the business associations and the collaborationist unions such as the CISL, the UIL and the UGL. The new agreement on the bargaining system envisages a reduction in the buying power of wages covered by national wage agreements and a 2nd-level bargaining system that depends on the profitability of businesses and therefore on the intensive exploitation of the workers' productivity, and on the ability to opt out of national wage agreements. The Bilateral Structures, a new form of collaboration between unions and employers, will guarantee a more rational form of exploitation, without any conflict or demands being made.
Increasing use is being made of redundancy funds, thousands of short-term workers are losing their jobs, several productive plants are threatened with closure, all pointing to a worsening of the crisis and a consequent - and already evident - degrading of society.
In order to respond to all this it is vital that there be increased and continuous social mobilization, in every category and in every workplace.
The FdCA thus supports the strikes called for 13th February by the FIOM and the FP-CGIL and, in the schools sector, by Unicobas. We would also like to see the strikes being joined by that part of the CGIL that is still undecided , by the other grassroots unions, by the schools and university movement and by all the various self-managed social movements.
We need a confrontational syndicalist platform aimed at uniting the workers on:
- stopping job losses, with redundancy pay for all affected workers;
- increased and longer unemployment benefit payments;
- de-application of the Bossi-Fini law for all foreign workers who lose their jobs;
- pay increases not linked to productivity and adjustments to account for fiscal drag;
- de-application of the Gelmini law for education and the Brunetta law for civil servants;
- full union rights and union freedoms in the workplace, for worker self-organization;
- no to sanctions and repression of autonomous labour struggles and demands.
Labour Commission
FEDERAZIONE DEI COMUNISTI ANARCHICI10 February 2009