Italian engineering workers have won a pay rise of €100 a month. More than a year after their old contract expired, and after five one-day strikes and numerous demonstrations, management finally agreed to the unions’ pay demand. However, the downside to the deal is that the unions have made big concessions on conditions, agreeing to the piloting of a ‘multi-week’ system for working hours.
The €100 rise will apply to workers, as far as I can tell, mid-way up the pay scale. Others will get proportional rises, although the lowest paid will get a rise of €130. When you consider that back in September management’s best offer was €60 (then the unions were demanding €130 for all), this looks like a pretty good result.
Like any deal, though, it comes with strings attached. Management will be allowed to introduce, on a pilot basis, a ‘multi-week’ work schedule, i.e. workers can be contracted to work, say, 220 hours a month, but 60 of these might fall in one week. Alongside this new system there will be a commission to discuss the percentage of workers who can be employed on fixed-term contracts. If there is no agreement on the latter, the multi-week experiment will be abandoned. There will also be a new joint commission on competitivity, productivity and related issues. Although there is no doubt that the pay rise (about 9%) is very good indeed, the changes to conditions are not (although they do not seem nearly as bad as the annualised hours systems that operate in some places).
The deal will now be put to the union memberships, with a ballot in mid-February. The general secretary of CGIL, the biggest of the union federations (and the one historically linked to the CP) has said that a key factor in winning the deal was the unity between CGIL and the other federations CISL and UIL. Although there were a few wobbles along the way, for the most part they do seem to have stuck together pretty effectively.
I think this dispute has some quite interesting lessons. The unions’ unity is obviously important, but there are other issues too. For one thing, there is often a tendency on the British left to say that one-day strikes don’t win. What the Italian unions did with their one-day strikes, though, was not just to organise a picket line and stop production, but to demonstrate and to go and occupy roads and railway stations (and not only on strike days), creating huge disruption way beyond their own industry, which in turn raised the pressure on the employers to settle. As the final negotiations took place, workers in Naples blocked a railway and a major road; in Trent, Turin and Molise roads were also blocked, creating in some cases kilometres of tailbacks.
I’m sure that one of the things helping the unions in this situation was the unwillingness of the government to pick a fight with them in the months running up to a close general election – and equally the seeming unwillingness to send in the police to stop the protests. Perhaps if the dispute had happened in a year’s time things would have looked rather different. It’s hard to say.