A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, il Cantiere #23: ECONOMIC MANEUVER 2024: A POSITIVE BUDGET FOR THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES - Mario Salvadori (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

On 29 December last year, at the last minute, as often happens to avoid 
the provisional exercise, the Chamber of Deputies definitively approved 
the Budget Law for 2024; It is the second time that this law has been 
approved with this ministerial team, but it is the first after an entire 
year of government. Thus the Executive was able to fully develop its 
economic policy proposals, certainly not disappointing those social 
classes for which it is largely a point of reference. In fact, although 
the financial maneuver is conditioned by European constraints, by 
military expenditure, by participation in the war in Ukraine, by 
speculative inflation and by the increase in interest rates, the costs 
are passed on to the working classes with negative consequences on wages 
and salaries. pensions.

In fact, there is no response in the measures to the real wage emergency 
caused by an inflation which in the last two years has had a negative 
impact of 17% on wages, which moreover come from a long period of lack 
of adequate contractual increases, and on pensions whose revaluation has 
been blocked for many years. On wages, the cut in the tax wedge - 
financed temporarily and in deficit - and the merging of the first two 
Irpef brackets at 23% will only produce negligible benefits on pay 
slips. There is an ever-increasing focus on corporate welfare (tax-free 
fringe benefits which do not contribute to forming income for employed 
work) which, in addition to favoring the private sector, has a negative 
impact on the stability of the welfare state since for the employer 
these amounts are completely deductible from the business income.

The same goes for pensions.

The parliamentary majority, after having promised during the electoral 
campaign to overcome the Fornero law, managed to worsen the social 
security measures, effectively lowering the already insufficient forms 
of exit flexibility, while public workers, involved in the revision of 
the rates of return, will be forced to retire on an old-age pension to 
avoid a reduction in their income. Furthermore, while no intervention is 
envisaged for the full indexation of pensions, the cut on the overall 
amounts over four times the minimum is confirmed: a non-recoverable 
loss, which is quantified at seven billion for the two-year period 
2023/24, which it adds to the one hundred billion saved from 2011 to 
today through the various interventions that have affected the 
revaluation system.

In short, measures that unload the economic contradictions of this 
system on employees and pensions - from which Irpef revenue derives 
almost entirely - while with the flat tax for the self-employed, the 
defense of financial income, the lack of taxation of the huge profits of 
banks business insurance, the revision of Irpef rates, the Government 
seeks to protect the majority of its electorate. Even the total closure 
of even a minimal measure of wealth redistribution, to be implemented 
through a wealth tax, says a lot about the stubborn attachment to their 
social status by the most privileged classes. (1) .

This while today, in Italy, ten percent of people - that is 5.6 million 
- are unable to make it to the end of the month; in fact, poverty is 
growing, even among those who have a job, according to data provided by 
Istat, the national statistics institute. In this situation, the 
lowering of the level of public welfare will have an even greater impact 
on the living conditions of those in economic difficulty, especially as 
regards the healthcare sector which has already been subjected for years 
to cuts by various governments of all "colours"; particularly despicable 
is what is foreseen in the economic package for those who do not fall 
within the categories for registration with the National Health Service, 
i.e. non-EU migrants, who are required to contribute no less than two 
thousand euros to be entitled to the system's benefits. After an 
increase in the ratio between healthcare spending and GDP in the years 
of the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the share fell again to 6.3% and is 
tending towards 6% (below the European average which stands at 6.2 %, 
but far from the over 9% of France and Germany), while the share 
allocated to private facilities is growing due to the boycott of public 
healthcare by the current government and those that preceded it in 
recent decades.

Faced with this serious situation, the response of the confederal trade 
union organizations was fragmented, discontinuous, and consequently not 
incisive. While the CISL launched itself well beyond a few "waltzes" 
with the Government, in particular with Minister Salvini, the UIL and 
the CGIL organized a general strike spread over several days and several 
regions: on 17 November in the central regions , to which was added the 
national one for education and in the transport sectors; November 20th 
in Sicily; on November 24 in the northern regions; on December 1st in 
the southern regions. If the unions' intentions were to prolong the 
strike and make it more effective, we can say that this was not 
achieved; in fact the mobilization, although successful, was dispersed 
and took on a confused character due to the forms of implementation. 
Matteo Salvini took advantage of this and on 17 November he took over 
the transport sector, authoritatively reducing the railway strike to 
four hours (from 9.00 to 13.00), forcing the provisions of the laws 
regulating strikes; those laws which, in his time, had also been 
positively evaluated by the confederal unions themselves.

That Salvini's initiative was not an isolated initiative was seen a few 
days later when he intervened again and heavily against the national 
strike of Local Public Transport called by Cobas private work, USB, ADL, 
SGB, Cub Trasporti, so much so as to induce these unions to move the 
strike from November 27th to December 15th to avoid injunction. In both 
cases, despite their differences, the Government resorted to injunction 
despite the fact that all the rules established by law had been followed 
in the proclamation of the strikes and there were no exceptional 
circumstances to postpone them. This precedent introduces a qualitative 
leap in the Government's management of strikes and poses major problems 
for the entire trade union movement, already severely limited in its 
action in many sectors by laws 146/90 and 83/2000.

The bourgeoisie's attack on the working class therefore continues on 
multiple fronts and using all tools, from anti-strike laws to economic 
maneuvers, from repression to militarization, up to de facto 
intervention in ongoing wars. This situation cannot be responded to in 
an episodic and fragmented manner, but by setting up and continuing a 
mobilization that aims at some essential objectives: salary issues, 
pensions, precariousness, redistribution of wealth from income and 
profits towards work and the welfare state.

The pursuit of these goals, together with an anti-militarist struggle 
and against military spending, can finally make the mobilizations and 
struggles of our class credible and successful.

Note

1) The extraordinary tax on wealth, as a measure to relaunch the 
capitalist economic system, has also been supported in the past by 
eminent representatives of liberal thought.

In this regard we mention Luigi Einaudi, former Governor of the Bank of 
Italy and second President of the Italian Republic, and what he wrote in 
1946 (Luigi Einaudi, L'imta patrimonial. Editrice Chiare Lettere, 2021).

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