ITALY After the general strike: union bureaucrats running scared THE GENERAL STRIKE of November 15 was an overall success. Participation was particularly high among industrial workers, but smaller in the public services -especially in education (no more than 40 per cent of teachers joined the strike). In the main cities, there were mass demonstrations of tens of thousands of working people. The last general strike of this sort in Italy was in 1981. LIVIO MAITAN work stoppages for a limited time (four hours at most), not providing for new initiatives and a stepping up of the struggle if the objectives are not won. In other words, it is conceived solely as a limited means of pressure.
This time the accounts of the strike and the comments about it in the bourgeois mass media have been different from on previous occasions. In general, they have played up the successes of the strike, without overemphasizing the lack of support in some important factories (Fiat in Turin, for example. They have accepted with much less reservations the unions' own figures on the demonstrations, which are almost always greatly exaggerated. (In Milan, for example, they talked about 70,000 people, while the real number was about a third of that).
A test for rank-and-file committees
The reason for all this is obvious. The government and the bosses want the unions on their knees, but they have no interest in seeing the union bureaucracies outflanked by rank-and-file initiatives, and still less when they come from instruments of struggle more effective than the ossified union structures.
The trade-union bureaucrats, like the Communist Party press, did not hesitate to present the success of the strike as a victory by the unions over the COBAS. This was a very premature judgment. On the eve of the strike itself, union leaders had to register a new loss of prestige in air transport. Rank-and-file bodies carried off a fully successful strike at Rome airport, the country's largest, ignoring a united appeal from the three union confederations. Two days after the general strike, the train drivers' COBAS launched a strike that almost totally paralyzed the railroads.
Still more important, the COBAS in various sectors (education, rail, postal service, subways) have called a demonstration for December 12 in Rome against any restriction of the right to strike. This action will be an important test of the influence of the COBAS and of the weight of the more militant sectors today in the Italian trade union movement. *
T WO ELEMENTS helped to im-
Opel the leaderships of the three union confederations (CGIL, CISL and the UIL) to take this initiative. On the one hand, the government showed that it had little inclination to make even minimal concessions in matters of economic policy (the so-called Finance Law). The straw that broke the camel's back was the government's retreat on the proposed reduction of taxes on wages.
At the same time, the government had put forward a bill for regulating the right to strike, a measure designed to blunt this basic weapon of the workers. It was hard for the unions to accept such a decision, although there are divisions among them over it. The UIL is rather favorable to legal regulation, and the union leaders themselves have largely lined up with the government and the big bourgeois press in criticizing the rank-and-file committees (COBAS) for the repeated strikes in transport. [See articles on pages 6 and 7.]
Countering union leadership's passivity
On the other hand, the union leaders could not be unaware of the fact that broad sections of workers were determined not sit back and take the blows inflicted by the austerity policy of the government and the employers, and the attacks on the level of employment. Major struggles had resumed 28 in industry (at Alfa Romeo, for example, as well as in education and transport. International Viewpoint • December 7, 1987
Since last spring, the phenomenon of the COBAS has taken form. These rank-and-file committees have taken the initiative in waging struggles of various kinds, coun tering the passivity of the union leaderships.
The union bureaucracies faced a clear danger of losing more ground and seeing their role decline. They could not accept the government ignoring their demands, and they could not resign themselves either to be more widely outflanked by the COBAS, or by individual unions or sections of the union movement that had slipped out of their control (as have the unions in the airports and air transport).
So, the leaderships set a demonstration for November 17 in Rome of pensioners and a general strike for November 25. The latter form of struggle has a tradition in the Italian trade-union movement. It is a form of mobilization that has at most very vague objectives. Most times, it involves