The united class union front is the only way to defend workers from attacks by the bosses and the State

The investigation against SI Cobas and USB, with the arrest of eight national and local leaders of the two unions, is the latest attack on class-based unions in Italy. Past police and judicial maneuvers include the arrest of the SI Cobas National Coordinator in January 2017, the searches and arrests in March 2021 against workers and leaders of the SI Cobas in Piacenza, and those in the same month against USB delegates at the Genoa port. But the denunciations, dismissal notices, and prosecutions numbering in the hundreds, and follow the physical attacks carried out on the ground, with the security forces violently breaking up the picket lines during strikes.

Added to this are the maneuvers of the regime unions, organizations that can no longer be won back by the working class, as they belong to bourgeois politics of all colors. For two years now, a CGIL counter-offensive has been underway in logistics, with the signing of agreements with large contracting companies that, while providing for the direct hiring of workers by overcoming the contracting system, also nullify the better conditions won through struggles by the grassroots unions (SI Cobas, ADL Cobas, USB), and excluding the rank and file unions in company negotiations, and reducing or eliminating their members in those warehouses.

Since the logistics sector struggles began in 2010, the regime union federations CGIL, CISL and UIL have always called for government intervention, and collaborated with them, in order to restore “legality” in the sector, that is, to put an end to workers’ struggles, as well as to see their own strength as unions guaranteed and that of the grassroots unions eliminated. Their silence in the face of the arrests of the leaders of SI Cobas and USB is complicit and consenting.

Successive bourgeois governments, with perfect continuity when it comes parliamentary chemistry, have passed measures to attack workers’ struggles and worsen workers’ conditions. Two striking examples of this were the so-called Security Decrees and – one of the latest acts of the Draghi government – the amendment to the Civil Code that nullifies the “joint and several liability” of the employer, which prevents workers from recovering unpaid wages from companies in contract changes.

All this acting and maneuvering – police, judicial, trade union, political – is an expression of an obvious social and political fact: as long as the workers’ struggle is defeated it arouses the hypocritical crocodile tears of the bourgeois press and parties, useful for imprisoning the proletarians in a simple role of helpless victimization; when, on the other hand, it becomes victorious – in terms of determination, organization and ways of struggle – then the bourgeois class and its political regime finds it unendurable, and throws all its weapons at it. Once again it’s proven that democracy is a mask of the dictatorship of capital over the working class.

This new judicial offensive today is far more intense than previous ones, involving the two largest grassroots unions in Italy. This is no accident because the bourgeois regime is greatly concerned about the emerging social situation. The world capitalist economy continues to thrash around in the unsolvable crisis of overproduction. Rising inflation, which has been going on since the second half of last year, has worsened with the outbreak of the imperialist war in Ukraine, and continues to erode wages. Struggles and uprisings are already underway in several countries around the world. The head of the CGIL in recent weeks has warned the government and bosses about the risk of the resumption of workers’ struggles over wages and reiterated the essential function of the regime unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL, UGL) in preventing this from happening. Lastly, the CGIL showed its total servility to the bourgeois regime by manifesting its support for the government.

The bourgeois political theater, for its part, has been debating about establishing of a minimum wage, for the sole purpose of preventing workers from going out in struggle to obtain, through strikes, actually substantial wage increases.

However, this new judicial maneuver had the prompt response of SI Cobas, USB and the rest of grassroots trade unionism, not by crying about supposed democracy being violated and invoking this ideological deception against the proletarians, but with strikes in the warehouses and demonstrations in many cities, in the day immediately following the arrests. SI Cobas, USB and all of grassroots trade unionism have finally responded in a unified and organized fashion with today’s demonstration.

This unity is an example of a UNITED CLASS UNION FRONT and is the correct road to continue on, not only to stand in solidarity with the union militants under arrest today, but to organize the workers’ struggles in defense of workers’ living conditions in the months to come, for large wage increases, for a reduction of working hours for equal pay, against the State, government, bosses and regime unions!