Workers shut down Italy for a day
By John Catalinotto
Over a million workers from three trade union confederations
joined for a Dec. 1 general strike in Italy. They were
protesting right-wing media magnate and current Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi's social and economic policies.
Their specific demand was to stop an $8 billion tax cut set
to be accompanied by enormous cuts in social services.
This was the fourth general strike since Berlusconi took
office in 2001.
Despite heavy rain throughout the country, hundreds of
thousands of workers, unemployed and retired people, and
students marched and rallied in 70 Italian cities. The protests
spanned the country, from the northern industrial belt to
Sicily.
According to unionists, some 80 percent of workers took part
in the stoppage. Much of Italy ground to a halt.
In the decades after World War II, such a splendid general
strike would probably have led to the Italian bosses and
bankers making concessions to organized labor. Since the 1991
fall of the Soviet Union, however, the Western European ruling
class has been on a broad offensive against the workers. The
capitalists want to reverse every gain workers made in that
earlier period.
The so-called center-left parties in Italy hope for an
electoral victory over Berlus coni in 2006. However, these same
parties had earlier opened the door to worker givebacks.
Nothing has shown that they would reverse this policy in the
future.
Western European workers still retain many of the social
gains already lost in the United States and Britain since the
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher governments. But everything
is under attack today in Western Europe, from pension benefits
to free education to health-care insurance to decent
unemployment payments. Meanwhile industry moves to areas of
cheaper labor in Eastern Europe or Asia.
Whether under the Social Democrat/ Green alliance in Germany
or the center-right governments in Portugal and Italy, workers'
gains are imperiled. The Monday- night worker demonstrations in
Germany, action days and even one-day general strikes would
seem revolutionary here in the United States,and they are an
excellent sign of workers' readiness to struggle. But in and of
themselves they have not been sufficient to stop the capitalist
offensive.
Reprinted from the Dec. 16, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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