The pax draghiana that in recent months, thanks to the media, has used the no vax as a great weapon of mass distraction is broken. It is broken by a mass event, true, corporeal, which will be felt throughout the boot and in the islands. The general strike of two large unions, the CGIL and the UIL, both with widespread roots. Two of the few mass intermediate bodies present in Italy.
The confederal unions call all female workers and not only to strike on Thursday 16 December, the slogan is “together for justice”. Fiscal justice, social justice. Every general strike is a strike politico. This is also a political strike. Not that the union does not defend a specific part of society, namely those who live off their work. By defending a part of society, however, they defend and represent general interests. In a world stunned by the pandemic and by the very broad agreements, it is a earthquake.
The materiality of the strike is simple, elementary: why reform the tax rates by favoring middle and high incomes, and leaving out 85% of male and female workers? The union does its job, and goes on strike to defend that 85%. It rains on the strike criticisms demolition, in one sense and another.
On the one hand, the entire parliamentary arc, with a few deserving exceptions, defends Draghi and marks the strike as “incomprehensible”, “inappropriate” and “harmful”. In the front row Salvini. Sorry, but if a union does not strike and does not use all the weapons at its disposal to defend its social contacts and its members, what’s there to do? The problem is exactly the opposite: the problem is that in Parliament There is nobody, or almost, which represents that 85% of male and female workers who earn nothing or a pittance from the tax reform, if compared with the others.
On the other hand, there are those who criticize the strike for the weakness of its platform and the timidity of its requests, as well as because it is the entire structure of the law of stability that should be returned to the sender. Confederal trade unions certainly have many limitations, and the CGIL with its organization conference currently underway is trying to self-reform. And the strike platform is certainly influenced by the political context, which is not by the union determined. But those confederal unions, which have taken a different path from the CISL, remain mass organizations, they are a “country within a country”, with their contradictions but also with the ability to be a people for real. Let’s try not to forget it, perhaps by adding a new trade union commitment, in whatever acronym or form it is. Already being in the square on the 16th could be a good sign.
The general strike looks to today, but it also looks to tomorrow, and looks to Brussels. In a historical phase in which, in the midst of a thousand contradictions and contrary pressures, in Brussels we are discussing a directive on minimum salary and on bargaining (so important in Central and Eastern Europe) and a “social Europe” peeps out, the strike of 16 December is a message and a moment of lotta for all of Europe. Do we want to turn the page in Europe, and relegate austerity and the attack on workers’ rights to the history books, and re-establish the “European social model”, or do we want to resume the old neoliberal scheme of cuts to the welfare state?
Between seeing and not seeing, the 16 strikes and go down to the square. The time to sink the blow and to widen the front is there, and therefore we start from the 16th.