Workforce in Italy
The layout of workforce in Italy is typical of those economically developed countries whose productive system has undergone strong delocalization processes: in 2009 there were 23,203,000 (some 60% men and 40% women), arranged as follows, more than 66% in services, more or less 30% in the industry and some 4% in agriculture). Self-employment counts for some 25%. In 2010 official unemployment rate reached 9,1%, but in reality it is likely to be greater than 10%, as many people simply gave up finding a job and do not enlist in the employment bureaus anymore. Among employed people, those who have precarious working conditions (fixed-term contract and collaboration contracts) are about 4 millions, of which 25% is currently in search of a job. In 2010, foreign workers (EU citizens or not-UE citizens, clearly only those with permit of stay) are about 3,500,000.
Precarious work
This plot of data, not easy to explain, clearly says that the classical “guaranteed Italian worker” - i.e. an open-ended contract employee of a medium or big private or public firm – is surely not anymore the prevailing case - even if it remains, in the relative way, the most widespread one - while the weight of precarious work had a huge growth.
This situation has been determined and got worse thanks to the joined action of governments (the first law about precarious work is n° 196 of 1997, called the Treu Act, and the one who let precariousness get widespread is n° 30 of 2003, called Biagi Act) and bosses, determined to defend their own profit, by cutting employees' pays, but also thanks to some agreements with institutional unions (just for example, the one subscribed in July, 1993).
Today, a great part of the population has a fragile and discontinuous relation with their job. This sets some problems, both with regard to their contractual power and with regard to the possibility of organizing themselves, due to their being scattered about. State unions (Cgil, Cisl e Uil) consider precarious workers not so interesting, because they do not guarantee stable revenues for union fees through deductions from the pay packet. A precarious worker is considered a second-class worker, he same for inmigrant workers, who are often targets of welfare-kind actions. The same, unfortunately, happens in some base unions.
Perspectives and struggle plans
The question now is: how can a selfmanaged, libertarian union like ours contribute to the organization and to the struggles of precarious workers within a class, anarchosyndicalist perspective?
The answer obviously is: through a battle on three fronts.
The first front is the cultural one, the second one is the one about real syndacal struggles on the workplace, the third one is the one about concrete selfmanagement realities.
In our view, a cultural battle is a campaign for the retrieval of solidarity and class unity. Every struggle which is out of these coordinates is nothing but a sector-based, corporative and thus weak struggle, bound to be defeated. The first step is to recognize the authonomy and otherness of the proletarians with regardto the actual social economic system, and to stress the incompatibility of their interests with those of capitalists. Solidarity and class struggle must necessarily not confine themselves inside national borders, but relaunch working class internationalism.
For us, syndacal struggle means a struggle which start straight from the workplace, where workers really experiment exploitation, and unifies their demands, whatever the working conditions may be: open-ended contracts, fixed-term contract, atypical contracts, temporary workers, etc. on the basis of the following principle: “same work, same pay, same working hours, same working conditions”.
Only by connecting precariousness with “guaranteed” work we can avoid the risk of neglecting it and making it subordinated, in the workers' concience and in our own head, more than on a technical level. Moreover, we happen to see a replication of hierarchical power on a lower scale between open-ended contract workers and precarious workers: and this, beside being an enemy of class unity, replicates and fosters an interiorization of exploiting hierarchy. It is a hindrance, but it's a battle, even of a cultural kind, which we can not avoid, nor even neglect.
The selfmanagement project
For us, concrete selfmanagement realities means to reassemble again the social tissue on a solidarity basis, which is the most typical and specific element of our conception of trade union. So, it is the inmediate creation of an economic and cultural circuit, which must be alternative to capitalistic logic, which is able to replace progressively, in economic and social life, the idea of solidarity to that one of profit, mutualism to market competition. A meeting place, a plce for facts-propoaganda more than words-propoaganda of our libertarian principles and which, at the same time, would give the possibility to live, and not only to survive, by generating an income, not elicited through exploitation, but freely created thanks to solidal cooperation.
We must provide new cathegories of workers - precarious, compartmentalized workers, inmigrants, unemplyed - with a credible job alternative, which could also be an opportunity of redeeming their lives, that are, knowingly or not, exploited.
We must build up an alternative by creating well-functioning, selfmanaged realities in the sectors of production, distribution and in the services, and by making those workers who are inclined to quit their condition of exploitation come closer to these realities; this would give more strength and dignity to those who, on the contrary, would remain highly blackmailable by the proprietorial system, and moreover would be an effective answer to unemployment and a brotherly hand to lend to inmigrants, who, as in the past, could open new horizons beyond national borders, towards other countries in which mutualism could solve many problems.
Selfmanagement is not a philosophical theory, but something to create concretely, at first hand, by facing reality, constantly experimenting hipothesis of work, till starting a concrete way, which grows and asserts itself as intrinsically valid. A clash will be inevitable, as these realities will suffer an attack and opposition, aimed to nullify all kind of results. We must prepare ourselves to face this clash by activating concrete and actual projects, not only empty words. Selfmanagement fights against oppression concretely through Emancipation and not through politicking violence, which has historically born more oppression, but through a language of Freedom, and if necessary, by defending strongly and resolutely what we would have built: which Prodhoun called “Revolution of Capacities”. Direct action is not a frontal attack to power, but a full participation to the building up of an Emancipation process.
A network of solidarity, cooperation and mutualism
But how can we start to build in facts, a solidarity network? In Italy there are no companies in which workers have replaced their bankruted bosses, like the Zanon, in Argentina. In Italian trade union culture one expects to find a boss to negotiate with, and not to find workers able to manage, organize and produce by themselves. The very circuits of cooperatives, formally widespread, is in reality made up of production and/or consumer companies (small, medium or even very big ones) which chose the form of cooperatives just to obtain advantages guaranteed by law, but that in facts are nothing but private companies, where the earnings turn into profits for few people. In this case, a typical case is the role of the so-called “fellow-workers”, who formally has a share of the gain, but that in reality is a subordinate worker, only sharing losses and with less rights than a common subordinate worker in a private company. Not even the practice, very widespread nowadays, of Solidal Purchasing Groups (collective purchase right from the producer) can avoid being trapped in commercial logics and in institutionalization.
First thing to do is to connect all these small selfmanaged realities, both in the production and in the consumer field, which already exist and are in danger of closing down, because of their being too scattered, against market logic and too high costs of distribution. The second step is to create new ones, or in any case to foster the creation of other realities, on the basis of simple solidal patterns (Selfmanaged Popular Stores, basic tools to shorten the distance between producers and users, supporting local productions who respect quality and work employed), to get to more complex ones: libertarian production or consumer cooperatives, popular ambulatories, popular libraries, solidarity funds, etc. Creating selfmanaged realities which could bring an income for those who are employed in (and not profit) and benefits for proletarians, and linking them in an efficient and capable network, but in opposition to capitalist logic made of market and exploitation.
In this process our union can do a lot, by enclosing our selfmanagement project in the strategy of defense of proletarian interest on the workplace and, where there's no work, in society.
We are not telling or saying anything new: workers' movement, in Italy, had three souls, the resistance leagues, the mutualist one and the cooperative one. The matter is retrieving that originally libertarian tradition, and updating it. But it must be done now, quickening our step, and not only by talking about it.
IN the end, it's to be said, in a strong manner, that all we assert it's meaningless if it's not linked to the defense of territory, of common goods and to the defense of Environment; a revolutionary process cannot do without an armonious recomposition of our relation with Nature and Landscape.
USI-AIT National Secretariat
USI-AIT Executive Committee
National Secretariat of USI-AIT Arti e Mestieri Union
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