The National Strike of Ex-ILVA and Piombino Steelworkers: For a Class Union Line – For United Action by the Combative Unions

FIM FIOM and UILM have called for Wednesday, November 10, the national strike of steelworkers of the groups Acciaierie Italia (former ILVA) and Acciaierie Piombino. They improperly, and equivocally, defined it as a “general” strike – a formula used when all the categories of the working class go on strike together – despite the fact that it was neither a strike of the category of metalworkers – whose national collective contract includes the steelworkers – nor of the steel sector alone, since the workers of the other industrial groups were excluded: Marcegaglia, Thyssen Krupp, Arvedi, Dalmine…

In Genoa, the previous day, a paid assembly had been held outside the entrance to the Cornigliano steel plant, attended by about 150 workers. The three provincial secretaries of FIM, FIOM and UILM, and a FIOM delegate from the plant were present. The USB representative, who had been in the factory for only a few months, did not attend. The next day, in the presence of the three national secretaries, a small demonstration took place in Rome, under the Ministry for Economic Development (Mise). About ten people from Genoa were present. In the Cornigliano plant, the strike adherence was about 40% on the first shift, 30% on the second, and almost 50% on the night shift. On the whole, it was an undertone, but a highly publicized action by the Italian unions.

The main claim of FIM FIOM and UILM is a “national plan for the steel industry”: they ask the State machine of the bourgeoisie to defend its industry.

These unions of the regime, in fact, believe in the principle – proper to union corporatism – according to which industrialists and workers do not form social classes of capitalism with opposing and irreconcilable interests, but, in concert with the government and the State, could contribute to the alleged superior and common good of the “country”, which is the fable as old as capitalism with which the bourgeoisie try to make the proletariat work to their advantage.

The union – if it is a class union and not a regime union – defends wages, fights to reduce working hours, for health and safety in the factory, in short, for the elementary and immediate interests of the workers, not for the satisfaction of these needs through different phantom “industrial policies”.

The class union therefore also fights against layoffs, but this fight is not in defense of capitalist industry – whether private or State – but against it: it seeks to impose, to the detriment of corporate profits, the maintenance of all workers.

If instead, as CGIL CISL and UIL do, the struggle against layoffs is made to coincide with the defense of the industry of a given sector, or of the company, the workers are brought to an inclined terrain all in favor of the bosses, which makes them slide towards the acceptance of ever greater sacrifices: reduction of wages, increase of rhythms, in short, keeping a low union profile, which is limited to “defend the place” by defending the company.

The blackmail of unemployment is a product of the crisis of overproduction of capitalism: it is from the late ’70s that, in capitalistically mature countries (so-called Western), factories close, are downsized and transferred to countries where the lower cost of labor ensures a higher profit rate. This process has been going on for decades and continues to worsen.

So that the threat of unemployment does not annihilate the struggle to defend the living conditions of workers, authentic class unionism – based on the awareness of the incompatibility of the needs of the working class with the interests of the company and the capitalist economy in general – counteracts it by seeking to raise union action above the narrow confines of the company.

If the fight against layoffs is to be waged, and waged tenaciously, thinking that it is enough to stand in this trench is a losing line of defense. In capitalist competition, losing companies close down and lay off workers. Winning companies often do so by virtue of investments that involve new plants and fewer workers. These normal processes of capitalism become more acute as the economic crisis progresses.

“We are entering a new era characterized by hyper-competitiveness”, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pronounced in her State of the Union address on September 15. The fact that a bourgeois politician affirms what for Marxism is a truism, is a consequence of the fact that the crisis of overproduction is beginning to manifest itself even in the hitherto “young” capitalisms, which have allowed world capitalism not to collapse in recent decades, thanks to their very high growth rates, which however have led to their premature aging: the failure of Evergrande in China is a clear manifestation of this.

Faced with a process of historical significance such as the decline and global crisis of the capitalist economy, if a national bourgeoisie – like the Italian one – succumbs to international capitalist competition in a given sector – as happened in the civil aviation sector with Alitalia – can and should the trade unions prevent it, invoking a stronger bourgeois State to defend national industry?

A class union, in order to deal with the rising threat of unemployment, would have called at least all steelworkers to strike, not only those of the groups affected by State intervention (through Invitalia), and not for a “national plan for the steel industry” but to reduce working hours with equal pay, to increase the redundancy fund to 100% of the wage, and to unite the struggle of steelworkers in Italy with their class brothers in France, Spain, Germany, in short, internationally.

Defending the “Italian” steel industry goes in the opposite direction, of course: they should close the steel mills and lay off the workers in other countries, not in Italy! Regardless of the contortions of opportunism to justify and deny that this union line feeds nationalism, this is exactly what the workers are led to think.

One must also ask why these collaborationist unions organized a mobilization of a fraction of a single productive sector at a time when it is the entire wage class that is under attack.

In the face of the new attack on pensions and other anti-worker contents of the budget law, in the face of the decline in wages since 1990 as recently certified by OECD data (-2.9%), in the face of the further decline in wages as a result of inflation in recent weeks, what is needed is a mobilization of the entire working class.

The action of the steelworkers of FIM FIOM and UILM, partial, weak, in defense of national industry, is motivated at least in part by the concern to fill, in this context, the void of mobilization left by the Confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL, in the face of the, albeit small, step forward of grassroots unionism made with the general strike of October 11.

In order to defend itself from the crisis of capitalism, the working class must be called upon to fight united beyond the divisions between companies and categories. To resist the growing pressure of unemployment, from the necessarily initial factory-by-factory reaction against layoffs, union action must be elevated into a general movement to demand
     – strong wage increases, more for the worst paid categories and qualifications;
     – Reduction of the retirement age, abandonment of the contributory system, pension allowance equal to full wages;
     – generalized reduction of working hours;
     – Single redundancy fund for all workers equal to 100% of the salary, paid by the employers (not paid with the workers’ pension contributions paid to INPS);
     – full wages to the dismissed workers paid by the bourgeoisie and its State.

CGIL, CISL and UIL, who do not want to start a battle even for the misleading goals they proclaim, will never organize the struggle for these class claims, which they have repudiated forever.

It is enough to look at what they have done with pensions: against the Fornero reform they did not move a finger and by virtue of the contributory system pensions will be more and more miserable. For years, workers have been pushed to make up for this misfortune with supplementary pensions; the trade union federations of CGIL, CISL and UIL are the first to promote supplementary pensions among workers, including them in contract renewals (presenting them as contractual increases!), and they manage pension funds together with the bosses. It is against the interests of these tricolor unions to oppose the impoverishment of workers’ pensions.

Only confrontational unionism – grassroots unions, confrontational union areas within the CGIL, groups of combative workers within each union – can take on the task of calling workers to a general struggle in defense of their immediate, economic, basic interests, but it can only do so by acting in a unified way. A class union line can be affirmed only in the unity of action of combative unionism, freeing itself from the straitjacket of the unity of CGIL CISL and UIL regime unionism.

A first step in this direction was taken with the general strike of basic trade unionism last October 11, which saw more than 4,000 workers marching in Genoa, and which was joined by workers and unions of some large metalworking factories, even if they are part of CGIL (GKN in Florence, Perini in Lucca, Piaggio in Pontedera…). It is in this direction that every area and union fraction, group of workers and individual workers must march, regardless of the union organization to which they belong, to be consistent and consistent with the defense of the interests of the working class!

Unfortunately, the leaderships of most of the grassroots unions, instead of promoting a new general strike, have decided in recent days to organize anti-government, political and popular demonstrations, not class and union demonstrations. A step backwards.

This swinging behavior of the current leadership of the combative unionism is not surprising because it is characteristic of opportunism to divert the workers’ movement from the path necessary to its strengthening, slowing it down and pushing it in pursuit of illusory reformist policies.

This confirms that the affirmation of the class union movement is a battle that must be waged on several fronts, against the unions of the regime and against the opportunism of the leadership of the combative unionism.