The guarantor of the strike, Paola Bellocchi, appeared before the Chamber’s transport committee to explain the CGIL and UIL’s no to the 8-hour general strike next Friday, with the subsequent request to reduce the duration of the protest to 4 hours : “We explored all interpretative possibilities and it seemed to us that the conditions for a general strike did not exist. In fact, the national general strike must be concerned with most categories, that is, the notice must be open while in this case it was a closed notice because it contained a list of sectors excluded from opposition to the government’s maneuver. This is to ensure the general coherence and stability of the system, otherwise, starting tomorrow, all confederations would go on a general strike à la carte. Each union – continued the Guarantor – would choose the categories that are in and those that are out, introducing instability into a category of strike that has already caused problems for the commission given that the union panorama is full of other acronyms and a notable number of general strikes” .
In recent days, Bellocchi has been accused of political proximity to the Meloni government and minister Matteo Salvini, which would have influenced work on the November 17th strike. But point by point the left’s thesis is dismantled: “There was a media exposure that I would never have expected after a very careful investigation and awareness of the consequences treated with extreme sensitivity also because our dialogue with the CGIL and the UIL, both before and after, has always been characterized by open and frank dialogue. We had already informed informally that this proclamation of the general strike was completely illegitimate and could not fit into the conditions of application of the 2003 resolution. Law 146, in fact, never mentions the general strike and precisely to facilitate its exercise the Commission adopted in 2003 a completely conventional resolution that establishes the conditions and as the Commission created it, it can also interpret its application”.
“The Commission’s practice has been to consider strikes called not for most public and private categories but for sectors, even very broad ones, as multisectoral strikes”, he repeats, formulating some examples: “Strikes in the public sector are not general because concerns an important sector of public work. The national general for transport is general only in union practice, but not general according to the discipline of conventional origin. It is not general in the required sense because although it involves all transport, at a national level, a very large sector of the world of work, it does not have this unifying element that concerns everyone”. “This was the interpretative choice”, the final part of Bellocchi’s speech.
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.
