PARTY’S TRADE UNION ACTIVITY

[GM111)

The report described recent trade union events, greeted by the party with biting criticism and a clear political line. Detailed examinations of the former and more detailed commentaries on the latter have appeared in our periodical press.

[GM112]

In this report comrades were given a review of trade union related events between September 2011 and January 2012. It focused on attacks on the working class in Italy conducted by the Government and the industrialists; on the reaction of the regime’s trade unions and of the ‘base’ unions; and on the party’s activity.

The Italian bourgeoisie’s attack on working class living standards consists of two main elements: dismantling of the national labour contract by the industrialists, with the support of the regime’s trade unions and without direct intervention from the government; attacks on the class’s total wage via a series of financial measures directed mainly at deferred wages (pensions) indirect wages (social services), as well as attacks on the actual paypacket by means of tax increases.

The response from workers has been to grin and bear these attacks without putting up an effective response. ‘Rank-and-file’ or ‘base’ trade unionism is still beset by certain, what we might call, hereditary defects, with its actions still based on practices which are more relevant to political organisations than trade-union ones, the main bad practice being the calling of seperate strikes, whether by the confederal unions, or by the host of variously acronymed base trade unions.

In the face of the Monti government’s harsh and provocatory annual budget, the response of base trade unionism as a whole, which didn’t want to strike alongside the CGIL, was to do absolutely nothing. This is clearly a serious problem. Only the federation of the USB-Lavoro-Privato (a base union particularly strong among public sector employees) took part in the strike on December 12, which FIOM had extended to the full 8 hours for metal-workers (3 hours for the remaining categories). But that choice, although positive, was probably due to the USB doesn’t have many members in the private sector.

The party intervened in the official confederal unions’ strikes on December 12 and 19 and the USB-Slai Cobas’s strike on January 27, with targetted leaflets in which the real economic and political situation in which the class finds itself was described, the party’s general line on the need to struggle was set out, the regime’s trade unions attacked, and there was a direct and explicit critique of the base unions.

As regards activity within base trade unionism, our comrades, both in the workplace and on the occasions when they have attended territorial assemblies, have stressed the need to break with the practice of calling strikes seperately, and called for united action by all workers instead as the best means of fighting the regime’s trade unionism, as incarnated in the CGIL, CISL, UIL and UGL.

To this end our comrades, and other workers, drew up two appeals, both aimed at the USB (Unione Sindacato di Base) leadership, one after the strike on September 6 (opposing the decision to organise strikes seperately) and the other in view of the general strike on December 19 called by the CGIL, CISL and the UIL, in which we call on the USB to participate. The purpose of such appeals is not so much to convince the leaders to change course – which they are unlikely to do – but to promote the correct classist praxis of united action to the members of, and militants within, the base unions.

[GM113]

For the party the keystone of it’s relationship with the trade union organisations is the possibility of conquering their leadership. The party doesn’t worry about being accused of wanting to “manipulate” the trade unions and workers’ struggle. This is because it firmly believes that its trade union policy has produced the best and most enduring results, and on the defensive level as well. As the Communist Party Manifesto states, communists “have no interests separate from the interests of the proletariat in general”.

From 1945 to the late 1970s, the party was open to the possibility that the CGIL could be reconquered, despite the fact it arose from the regime, when it was “reconstructed from above” at the time of the Rome Pact in 1944. But after thirty years of practical experience battling inside this trade union, including participation in important workers’ struggles, by the end of the 70s the party had concluded, based on specific spontaneous arisen tendencies within the movement, that the CGIL had stopped defending proletarian interests or putting up a real fight and that it was no longer recoverable, and that it had gone past the point of no return.

The same cannot be said today of rank-and-file trade unionism, mainly because it hasn’t yet been tested in the fire of a largescale class movement: in the thirty years from the early 80s to now there have been far much fewer workers’ struggles than in the previous thirty years. The party therefore advises its militants working in the base unions, and workers, to organise themselves into an internal current, with a view to combatting the present leadership, by engaging in a struggle against the practise of launching separate actions and with the objective of reunifying rank-and-file trade unionism from below, as the first step towards the rebirth of the class union.

As stated in the leaflet we distributed during the strike on January 27 and during the confederal strikes in December, the party considers its communist trade union policy to be the only one which will produce useful progress towards reorganising the working class into a genuine class union. These are the main planks of its policy:

1) Workers will only take up the slogans calling them to intransigent struggle, will only stop trusting in the conciliatory methods of the regime trade unions when they feel sufficiently strong to do so. For that to happen it is necessary to promote maximum unity of class action, because the more the workers strike together the stronger they will feel, and the closer they will get to achieving that minimum level of energy needed to ignite the struggle. The confederals want strikes with enough participants to show the bourgeoisie they are still in control of the workers, but strikes that are as disheartening and unisnspiring as possible, for the same reason.

2) In Italy, when base unions participate in demonstrations with workers mobilised by the CGIL, CISL, UIL and the UGL, they aren’t, therefore, giving in to the regime unions, but adopting a strategy which is the best way to undermine them. The base unions must therefore abandon the practice of holding seperate strikes and, as far as possible, take part in demonstrations – in particular in general strikes, both of particular trades and the class as whole – alongside the workers mobilised by the confederals.

3) Ever since the base unions first arose in Italy their leadership has been prone to sectarianism, wishful thinking, inter-classism and opportunism, but the energy which originally brought them into being derived ultimately from the class and its struggles. But with the level of this energy remaining low and restricted to particular categories, inevitably the leading bodies have damaged these small trade union organisations over time, accentuating their defects and losing sight of the qualities which gave them their initial impetus.

4) The party supports any group of workers which is prepared to struggle, whether in the regime’s trade unions, in the base trade unions or outside of them, and it supports both them by doing what it can in terms of practical support and by strongly recommending unity of action with all workers, in the prospect of the need for a new trade union organisation that includes the entire working class.

5) The party actively fights to spread the idea that it is not enough, faced with the increasingly harsh attacks by the employers and their state, to call general strikes of just one day; rather it is all-out general strikes which need to be organised, which keep going until the government retracts its anti-working class measures. We aren’t, of course, talking about proclaiming a mobilisation such as this this right now, but rather of preparing for it in day to day organisational work, holding on to a prospect which whilst certainly longer term may well be punctuated by sudden unexpected accelerations of class activity.