After the catastrophic post-election silence of the administrations, Giuseppe Conte announces a demonstration in the square of Rome on June 17th. And it does so with a video on social media that certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed. The screen split in half, in technical terms a split screen, on one side Giorgia Meloni, in black and white, on the other the people’s lawyer in color. The start is up to the prime minister, the video is the famous one in which he announced the Labor Decree of May 1st. When it’s time to start, the speech is interrupted with a special effect worthy of Bollywood, the popular Indian cinema. Conte pushes Meloni out of frame and the entire screen comes back to him. To say what? That the government has introduced “greater precariousness” with “more and more fixed-term contracts, more and more vouchers”. This is a leitmotiv of the opposition, but if we look at it in detail, it is not quite like that. Article 24 of the decree-law of May 1st provides for the possibility of fixed-term contracts without constraint of motivation for a period of 12 months. If companies intend to extend the fixed-term contract up to a maximum of 24 months, they will have to justify it by indicating the reason provided for in the applicable collective agreement. Of the approximately 18.3 million people who perform paid work, 15.3 million are permanent and 3 million temporary; a percentage, around 16.4, in line with the EU average. If we look at the number of new entrants into the world of work, almost two thirds are fixed-term contracts, so why are there so few “precarious” contracts? Simple, because most of them turn into permanent contracts. This does not mean that precariousness is not a problem, but it is certainly not a problem created by this decree.
But let’s go ahead. Second point: the government has cut social spending, so there is no more basic income. The failure of the Citizenship Income as it was thought has been widely attested. In 2022, Istat showed how, since the introduction of the social security measure, the vacancy rate increased from 1.4 to 1.9% in two years; about 115,000 more jobs than when there was no basic income. It is true that this government cut it but to replace it with a measure that supports those who cannot work and tries to find jobs for those who can be employed. Third point: the government does not get money for those in need, but it finds it to send arms and ammunition to Ukraine. A farce already denied at the time by Giorgia Meloni who said: “We don’t spend money to buy weapons that we send to the Ukrainians. We already have weapons that we don’t use and that’s why we don’t take anything from the Italians». From here comes a flurry of “arguments at will”. Schools ‘Falling Down’, ‘Legal Minimum Wage’, ‘Health Heroes’ and ‘Mortgage Rises’. All together so much in social media communication that the content is not important, you need some slogans and two effective transitions.
Source: IL Tempo

Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.