Italy: the Cub, Cobas and SDL independent unions consolidate their march toward unity

The “basic pact”. The three organizations decided to proceed further with the “permanent consultative pact” negotiated in May 2008 by a new “basic pact”, which retains the content and goals while consolidating “the will to pursue common objectives”. The goal is to intensify and facilitate unity of action of the three organizations, which inter alia will manage together “a permanent forum on union representation and union rights, the right to strike and action against the “monopoly of the big union confederations”. Activated at the outset at regional and national level, the pact will subsequently be extended to sectors, territories and workplaces.  The national meetings foresee the participation of “four or five representatives from each organization”, whilst at regional level the “pact will be able to establish stable relations and common initiatives with other autonomous organizations, which may also request their integration”. According to the analysis of the three unions, the government and the Confindustria employers’ association intend to take advantage of the crisis to carry out “structural reorganization of industrial relations”. The reduction of rights, the increase in job insecurity and the control of potential social disputes by future legislation regulating the right to strike (see our dispatch No. 090153) and confining collective negotiations and union rights to the sole signatories of collective agreements, basic unionism seeks to intervene in this framework   in order “to defend the conditions of workers and the right of free choice concerning by whom and how they are represented” and “to revive a period of disputes” in support of their new platform in all workplaces.