The unions, the green pass and the controversies
The intervention of Pietro Bertoli
This has been a hot summer, for some due to alleged human-induced climate change, for others due to the succession, in an endless escalation, of measures, interpretations and FAQs (which become new regulatory sources), leaks in forward, statements by virologists, politicians, entrepreneurs and trade unionists, a hot summer that risks ushering in a glowing autumn.
We arrived in summer 2021 after long months of heavy measures decided by the government, months of sacrifices, in which the social partners have found a way to secure jobs and thus allow companies to continue in activities and workers to maintain a substantial working continuity.
To this end, alongside the safety protocols, tools have been arranged to support companies and workers (the CIGO COVID, the blocking of dismissals but also extraordinary parental leave, just to name a few). The system has essentially held up: factories, companies (in general the Italian productive fabric) have never become a hotbed of contagion; the activities have held up well or badly overall, so much so that the feared "green light" for collective redundancies has not occurred as soon as the blockade has lapsed.
Many countries in the world have decreed the end of health restrictions, even in the absence of pressing vaccination campaigns such as the one conducted in Italy, thus returning to an overall normal life (not entering a "new normal") and without recording worrying data on the health side .
In Italy, France, some American states, however, this summer was the time to launch even more restrictive measures, to induce a surreptitious vaccination obligation thanks to the introduction of "certificates" designed to allow the carrying out of normal daily activities only for vaccinated or to whom, apart from the recovered (but in any case with a temporal expiry), can bear the cost of a tampon every 48h (with relative reliability). A heated debate was therefore ignited, with tones far beyond those that should characterize a civil confrontation, between those who support the need for the "certificate" and those who, promptly labeled with the derogatory term of "no-vax", argue, also in compliance with what has been decreed at European level, the illegality of this provision which effectively prevents free movement and places a tombstone on the right to education today and on the right to work in the coming weeks.
Heralds of the "certificate" to join the company all the major exponents of the industrial world and its associations, almost as if we had gone back to February-March 2020, at the dawn of an unknown epidemiological situation and not already with the experience of having successfully managed nearly two years of health emergency.
This position certainly cannot surprise: it is power, in its various forms, that shows its face.
However, in this context, the union voices uncritically lined up alongside the industrialists in requesting, unique in the world perhaps together with Uzbekistan, that a generalized vaccination obligation be ordered to solve the problems generated by the difficulty of interpreting the rules of application of the " certificate "(otherwise known as" green pass ").
It would have been naive to expect all trade union organizations to have a position in contrast to this "pass" which introduces clear and heavy elements of discrimination between workers (and it is not just a problem of how to access company canteens, evident exploitation aimed at achieving " certification "to enter the workplace, but it is, immediately, the end of many health workers and teachers left alone in deciding whether to accept the suspension from work or" freely choose "to get vaccinated).
No, the union, which should protect the weakest and the least and their dignity, openly asks, in a Pilate way, together with the bosses, that the vaccination obligation for all be established by law.
It is the same union that fought for “ the struggle of man in the discovery of his primacy and his dignity against the oligarchies of power; against the economic, bureaucratic, technocratic excessive power and against the political – party excessive power according to the different models of organization of society. It is against them that the human person fights for the conquest of that participation which, by affirming his primacy and that of his dignity, makes the state to measure man and not man to measure the state ".
It is the trade union that shouted "power against power", which means " that in the face of the growing concentration of powers, in the face of the tendency to the authoritarian use of institutions, the Italian working class through its organizations intends to openly oppose its own strength , its desire for innovation and progress. Power against power therefore means a struggle against any design of conservation, against exploitation, against all forms of authoritarianism, cultural obscurantism, use for the purposes of part of the institutions of the State ”.
A little more than 50 years have passed since July 1969 in which Storti reinvigorated that form of representation so fiercely autonomous from "power" that it allowed itself to be defined as "against power".
Today, however, we are witnessing an overall co-optation by the "power", so strong that it has transformed the union from "against power" to "educator union", an organism that must exercise a "pedagogical role" towards workers, making people digest they also the most blatant discrimination ("The unions had to be demanding the Green pass" ruled Savino Pezzotta from the columns of the Sheet ) in the name of "educative" positions that increasingly echo the "everything for the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State ”thanks to their indistinguishable from those expressed by the established power.
In reality this sort of "involution" shouldn't surprise that much.
It is a historical fact that the most stable and most structured organizations are configured as the "quietest", not to say the most corporate ones. Rigola wrote in 1921 “ basically the training process of the trade union takes place no differently from the training process of the States. The deposition of the Lordships, the central government, the authority, the law, the functionalism, the democracy, the universal suffrage, relive in that as they lived and live in these, albeit with different purposes. State and organization are synonymous. […] Those who aim at the revolution cannot believe in the transformative effectiveness of the union ”.
In this historical moment so tense and difficult, in order not to leave the weakest behind, in order not to leave a free hand to what could be interpreted as modern strike-breaking actions (such as the possible replacement of the suspended teaching staff because they are without "certification"), the trade union should rediscover its face as a resistance movement and its ancient mutualist vocation.
An exhortation to the trade unions to go back to being really "against power" and not to aspire to be co-opted into yet another control room: if the health emergency is such as to require more vaccines for everyone, otherwise the national health system will collapse , why accept without clear opposition that the notorious PNRR allocates only 18 billion euros out of the 222 total (less than 10%) to health (health that is configured as the plan with the least number of funding even with respect to the "mission inclusion and cohesion" )?
Instead of speaking in unison with power, with those who dictate the slogans and the rules of the game, the unions rediscover (if it is not too late) their original resistant and mutualistic nature, perhaps even pragmatically, by constituting authentic funds. of solidarity for suspended workers without salary because without a "certificate", returning to be (or becoming) the real "against power" alongside the weakest.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/i-sindacati-il-green-pass-e-le-polemiche/ on Tue, 24 Aug 2021 07:47:38 +0000.