Major strikes hit Italy, France

Walkouts hit Berlusconi’s budget cuts

All three major labor confederations in Italy joined together on Nov. 25 for the sixth time in the past four years for a strike against the budget cutbacks of Premier Silvio Berlusconi. Airplanes sat on the ground, trains and metro lines stopped, schools, post offices and government offices, hospitals and big firms closed.

Every orchestra in Italy played a requiem at 8:30 p.m. to express their solidarity with the strike.

Union leaders attacked the cuts in funds for education, medical care, scientific research and aid to local governments.

Secretary General Guglielmo Epifani of the CGIL, the left-wing labor confederation, led a march of 80,000 people in Rome. Savinio Pezzotta, head of the Catholic confederation CISL, led 100,000 people in the nation’s financial center, Milan, and Luigi Angeletti, the head of the UIL, a centrist confederation, led a march of 30,000 in Palermo, Sicily.

Berlusconi called the strike and demonstrations “useless,” but wherever and whenever the unions called for a work stoppage — which varied from area to area and sector to sector—production came to a halt.

Strikes in France indecisive

Workers in France had the legal right to strike in the 1860s but had to wait 30 years before they won the legal right to form unions.

Even though they have the right to organize and strike, unions in France, faced with determined bosses under strong international pressure from the European capitalists to privatize services that long have been publicly owned, have had to fight hard just to keep gains made since the end of World War II.

The government has sold 15 percent of the national electric company EDF to private investors. The SNCM, the ferry service between Marseilles and Corsica, has been totally privatized, even though the unions involved put up a long and hard struggle. The ferry strike lasted 24 days, and Marseilles, one of the major ports in France, was blockaded for an additional 14 days.

A coalition of unions struck public transportation in Marseilles, both bus and metro, for 46 days, to prevent privatization from being pushed through. The last union on strike went back to work Nov. 25 after some of the other unions involved had started working. Since the unions signed no agreement, it is possible they can resume the strike. The union leaders say this standoff is a setback.

Some of the more militant unions in the French national railroads (SNCF) called a one-day strike Nov. 22 over issues such as night work, outsourcing and additional employment. Railroads in France provide much more intercity transport than in the U.S. This was the sixth strike on the SNCF in a year.

Only one out of four railroad workers—according to management—or one out of three—according to the unions—struck. While the right-wing media in France crowed over the decline of union power that these figures on strike participation indicate, the SNCF management has started to seriously negotiate on the union’s demands. These repeated one-day strikes have cost management a lot of money.

—G. Dunkel