October: striking to react to the onslaught

A hope for dissent in the workers' mobilizations

The attack on our living and working conditions in Italy is violent, profound and coming from many fronts. The measures taken by the right-wing government during the summer and early autumn are now being added to by the looming threat to review the rules of collective bargaining and the financial plague that could soon hit production - but which for the moment at least is limited to attacks on savings and workers' small investments (including their pension funds) - following a drop in demand with consequences on production, jobs and pay.

Among the various priorities of the Italian State there is no trace of support for wages, pensions and social services. The top priority is support for businesses and the bank and insurance system, through the ransacking of public and private (the workers') resources, taking wealth, jobs, social security and faith away from millions of workers, forcing them into debt for life just so that they can guarantee themselves (maybe) a place to live, a future for their children or an easier retirement.

The workers are humiliated by jobs that exploit them or kill them. They are left to feel miserable by the paltry wages that are barely enough to survive on. They are surprised by the destruction of all their gains over the years in the fields of education, healthcare, social assistance, pensions and transport as they are privatized. They have been caught off-guard by the government's attacks on their constituted rights and freedoms in the world of labour, which they see in the workplace in the form of repressive acts by companies, worthy of the fascist years. They are bewildered by the conniving and collaboration of certain trade unions with the government.

And yet they are trying to fight back: prompt strikes in schools by the CUB and Unicobas; the general, all-category strike called for 17 October by the SdL-CUB-Confederazione Cobas; the tardy but inevitable strike on 30 October against cuts in education; the CGIL's point blank refusal to give in on Confindustria's anti-worker diktats about collective bargaining; the mobilizations on workplace safety in the transport sector and those in the public sector; all these are attempts to react to the current climate, which is suffocating the workers' minds and rights, and to the climate of fear that has been deliberately created in the hope of creating disunity and demoralization among the workers, of blocking every attempt to re-organize in the workplace, of repressing every grassroots response to the violence of exploitation and precarity, of driving us into a new bout of "sacrifices".

The Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici therefore supports the union mobilizations for

• the defence of wages by means of increases resulting from a national, re-unified, collective agreement by sector (industry, commerce, public, etc.); increases to be detached from productivity and overtime at company level;

• the defence of public education and the right to an education with no discrimination for class, ability or origin;

• the defence of state pensions and free social services;

• safety in the workplace under the direct control of the workers;

• permanent contracts for all casual workers, be they Italians of new citizens;

• a society free of exploitation and poverty, of profit and speculation, of capitalist greed and State authoritarianism; a society founded on solidarity and mutual aid, on freedom and the self-management of our lives and our work.

Labour Commission
Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici

13th October 2008