italian-trade-unionists

"I once told him, “You're gruff even when you say thank you.”"

"(About Arnaldo Forlani) We will not be late today. We must allow the secretary to go to the Pope. At least for a blessing: he needs it. In every respect."

"A man who has constantly fought to maintain a strong link between institutional structures and the needs of the world of work."

"The country will have to face great sacrifices, and great sacrifices are accepted when one is guided, in having to make them, by high moral dignity. It is that strength that Alcide De Gasperi had in leading Italy out of defeat and toward democratic reconstruction."

"[In 1986] [...] Juventus is a bit like the Christian Democracy party: even when it plays badly, it is always at the top, a little lower, a little higher, but always at the top."

"His lifestyle had the rare strength of a fundamental choice: the capacity for contradiction."

"Democratic balance is also marked by the fact that, on the one hand, financial power controls the levers of the market economy, while on the other hand, the masses, having achieved universal suffrage, can obtain, through parliamentary representation, civil rights and therefore social rights, the welfare state."

"In recent times, Giovanni Goria has been traveling all over Italy with his traveling theater troupe to promote the biggest deal around today: the 200 trillion lire pie that concerns the health and social security sectors and is tempting to the large private groups that manage insurance companies, namely the Agnelli, Ferruzzi, De Benedetti and Berlusconi families. Goria has been traveling around promoting the merchandise. Sometimes I saw the liberal De Lorenzo with him, the man who is now Minister of Health. :*‘’"Goria propagandista d'affari‘’, ‘'La Stampa’', August 12, 1989."

"A life characterized by a refusal to compromise. He paid a heavy price for this conception of political dignity; he was not always understood, and many friends turned their backs on him."

"His intransigence always had popular roots and connections. Alien to secular temptations, freed from instrumental conventions, he strove toward far-reaching ideals. A clear religion. His lesson: never give in."

"As Minister of Labor, he completed, with the approval of the Workers' Statute, a reform that would enhance the role of trade unions and which, in his opinion, would mark the completion of the system of constitutional freedoms in our legal system."

"There is a profile that stands above the political one, and that is the moral profile."

"The then Minister of Labor did not conclude negotiations with the metalworkers until I agreed, after several hours of resistance, to rehire a hundred workers who had been responsible for violence. I remember that, blackmailed by these conditions, I agreed to the rehiring. And the humiliation was not in accepting, or suffering, this form of blackmail, but in returning to Turin and informing the factory production managers that I had given in and that they had to rehire these hundred violent workers. That was the beginning of ten disastrous years of brutality and violence in the factory, which was only corrected after more than three thousand days."

"Renzi has unbridled ambition, sometimes he speaks without thinking, he's just looking for headlines. If he doesn't moderate this ambition, he'll end up going off the rails. (April 21, 2013)"

"With Franco Marini as secretary of the CISL, we were at opposite ends of the trade union spectrum. He was to the right of Carniti, while I challenged Trentin from the left. [...] Franco Marini represented that part of the CISL that had undergone radicalisation in the 1970s and, with the capitalist restoration of the 1980s, had gradually regained control of the organisation, progressively marginalising Carniti's supporters and normalising the FIM, the metalworkers' union, in particular. He was a true Christian Democrat, not particularly left-wing within the party, indeed quite unpopular with De Mita and Martinazzoli's wing. But he was also the expression of a popular and mass idea of trade unionism and politics that has nothing to do with what is happening today. This is why, in today's politics, he could have ended up almost on the extreme left. Not because he had changed, he was always the same, but because the whole political spectrum had shifted to the right towards business and the market."

"And when little socialist Cuba, which has suffered one hundredth of the deaths of Lombardy despite sixty years of blockade [embargo against Cuba], will have its own public vaccine, which will join those of China and Russia, it will be even clearer that the advocates of liberal (i.e. greedy) capitalism are not only complicit in its barbarism, but also in its stupidity."

"Renzi is like Grillo, he is the embodiment of political inconsistency serving third-party interests. (October 16 , 2012)"

"[On his letter of resignation from the PDS] Cremaschi could have sent it one, two, three years ago. I'm sorry he left, but he used to come to meetings and tell us how wonderful Rifondazione was..."

"(About [[w:Carlo Donat-Cattin]|Carlo Donat-Cattin]]]) A life characterised by a refusal to compromise. He paid a heavy price for this conception of political dignity, was not always understood, and many friends turned their backs on him."

"[Regarding the upcoming elections for President of the Italian Republic in 2013] Franco Marini turned 80 last week and is preparing for his last attempt to crown a career marked by prudence, impartiality, good neighbourliness, and always in the name of popular wisdom, of which he is considered a masterful prophet."

"With Franco Marini as secretary of the CISL, we were at opposite ends of the trade union spectrum. He was to the right of Carniti, while I challenged Trentin from the left. [...] Franco Marini represented that part of the CISL that had undergone radicalisation in the 1970s and, with the capitalist restoration of the 1980s, had gradually regained control of the organisation, progressively marginalising Carniti's followers and normalising the FIM, the metalworkers' union, in particular. He was a true Christian Democrat, not particularly left-wing within the party, indeed quite unpopular with De Mita and Martinazzoli's wing. But he was also the expression of a popular, mass idea of trade unionism and politics that has nothing to do with what is happening today. This is why, in today's politics, he could have ended up almost on the far left. Not because he had changed, he was always the same, but because the whole political spectrum had shifted to the right, towards business and the market."

"If there is a moment when capitalist greed has shown not only its infamous immorality but also its inefficiency, it is precisely now."

"(About [[w:Luigi di Maio|Luigi Di Maio]+ and his request of reforming Italian trade unions) Di Maio's recent outburst, with his inconceivable threat directed above all at confederal trade unionism, a threat that includes the intention to reform it authoritatively if he ever makes it to Palazzo Chigi, is certainly indicative of the limits of the ‘Five Star’ leader. [...] Di Maio was the latest in a long line of people to talk nonsense about trade unions."

"[...] there is the particularly serious problem of employment in Italy. The indisputable fact that must be acknowledged is that the blanket of available work is too small. If it covers the over-50s, it leaves young people exposed. And vice versa. Collective bargaining must therefore address, in every possible way, the distribution of available work."

"In reality, nothing shows the criminal stupidity of capitalism like the Covid pandemic and the vaccine debacle. The decision not to close factories and all large businesses, and to call mandatory work without access to education, culture, entertainment and socialising in person a lockdown, was presented mainly by the far right as a health dictatorship. In reality, it is the dictatorship of big business and GDP over healthcare and health. Unlike China and all those countries that closed down seriously when and where necessary, Europe and the United States closed late and only halfway, thus causing a massacre. This has not even prevented an economic crisis, as evidenced by the most capitalist of Italy's regions, Lombardy, with its thirty, perhaps forty thousand deaths, while disaster looms for entire sectors. And now there is recovery in China, but not in Europe."

"(About Cesare Romiti) He was never a right-wing man. He was a man of the centre-left elite. The liberal turn in both the trade union leadership and the left had its architect in him. Prodi, D'Alema and company are disciples, not enemies, of Romiti. In the US and Great Britain, it was the classic right wing that brought about the liberal restoration, while in Italy it arose from within a section of the left, the so-called reformist or improvementist wing."

"British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that his country's (relative) success with vaccines is the result of capitalist greed. Of course, he immediately corrected himself and apologised, just as he did a year ago when he said that his people had to prepare to lose their loved ones and accept it. In reality, now as then, Johnson brutally revealed what the ruling classes do without saying, hiding behind hypocritical statements to the contrary. Liberal (i.e. greedy) capitalism in Europe and the United States has already claimed more than 1.5 million lives, sacrificing all its older generations to business and profit in a generational and social eugenics that continues here with vaccines."

"The reasons why I returned my Cgil membership card after 44 years are simple and brutal. I now feel completely alienated from what this organisation really is, and I am in no position to bring about change. [...] The bureaucratic body of the CGIL is more resigned than the workers faced with the blackmail of the market and businesses. How can it communicate courage if it does not possess it? Of course, there are many comrades who do not give up, who do their duty, who take risks, but the backbone of the organisation is going in another direction, dominated by the fear of losing its residual institutional role, and when there are opportunities to turn the tables, it looks the other way."

"Trade unions and employers collaborate in full autonomy. In an advanced capitalist society, there remains and must remain a dialectical relationship that has moments of conflict."

"I don't think that struggle becomes political in relation to the number of workers; it becomes political depending on its content."

"(Concernong the Renzi governement) Government decisions are made without consulting other organisations, even though consultation is, after all, a form of exchange."

"Interviewer': You wrote on Twitter: ‘Rest in peace, Cesare Romiti. But if we had won in October 1980 instead of him and Agnelli, Italy would be a better country today.’ Would you like to expand on that? Cremaschi: Together with Romiti, I would like to remember the hundreds of workers who sadly committed suicide during the 1980s due to discrimination and redundancy. Our defeat and Romiti's victory represented a turning point for Italy to become what it is today: a liberal country where the market and businesses reign supreme, and where workers are constantly crushed in the name of profit. Romiti's success was a restoration, like that of Thatcher in Great Britain and Reagan in the United States."

"There is no such thing as the political climate, it is determined."

"When Berlusconi said that people don't work much in Italy, he didn't realise that since his government came to power, the number of strike hours has increased dramatically."

"This is a despicable invention of Mussolini, Corridoni would never have been a fascist. He was too honest, courageous and loyal to put himself at the service of the landowners!"

"(On Sergio Cofferati) In truth, he immediately withdrew from the national competition. He chose not to be defeated and to start over.*For me, the magic word is consultation. It's the word I grew up with.*The Reagan right considers consultation an obstacle. The antagonistic left considers it a betrayal."

"Iginia Ariemma (editor), Bruno Trentin. I diari 1988 - 1994, Ediesse, 2017"

"Salvini and Landini, in very different ways, are two television phenomena. But if politics has no connection with reality and ceases to be part of everyday life, it produces characters who are nothing more than talk show props."

"It is unthinkable that someone in our country could unfurl a banner reading ‘Honour to Benito Mussolini’ without anyone intervening. There is collusion, connivance, the idea that things that go against our Constitution can be done with impunity."

"Trentin liked mountaineering. When there was a match with Italy, he rooted against them. Trentin gave off an air of intellectual coldness. But he was very nice. If we argued, we always ended up telling a joke."

"(About Massimo D'Alema) He is not interested in projects unless they are a justification for political action, reminiscent of the caricature of Elikon in Camus' ”'Caligula."

"For me, Landini's ideas are a step backwards, a reactionary act and ultimately the evil of the left."

"(About Robespierre) I feel culturally and psychologically distant from him, yet at the same time close to him on a human level when I rediscover him so alone, so tormented, so consistent (and uncertain) in his anxiety to live in accordance with his morals and hopes."

"(Speech delivered on 16 March 1978, during the general strike following the via Fani ambush) [...] But on this day of mourning, a dramatic moment in the life of our country, we must not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by emotion. We must oppose inhuman violence with reason and a determined will not to bow to the blackmail of murderers, enemies of democracy and freedom in our country. There is talk of civil war. We have known such things, but in this case we are not faced with the struggle of one part, albeit small, of a people against another part. That is not the case. We are faced with a handful of professional terrorists who are attacking our institutions and our freedoms, we are faced with a small group of murderers who are attacking the institutions of Italian democracy; it is true, however, and we must take advantage of this circumstance to reflect on the reality that around this tiny band of ferocious criminals there is a certain layer of acquiescent, passive people who, if nothing else, are morally disengaged or even sympathise with the criminals, with the terrorists, or who stand by and watch. This is not the time to stand by and watch, friends in Rome. At this moment, in this trial, we cannot stand by passively in the face of the destruction that is being attempted against the institutions, democracy, freedom and fundamental values of civil coexistence that we have won through our struggle."

"I feel immense physical, intellectual and emotional fatigue, so much so that at times I feel like throwing myself to the side of the road and dying, just like that, from exhaustion, from an inability to express myself, from a lack of love for life and the struggle, and simply because I no longer want to fight and make myself understood."

"(At 16) There was no more money, so I went to the factory to be a welder. My dream? Playing soccer."

"The historical, political and partisan reasons that led to the division between Italian trade unions no longer exist. Today, we can start a new process of unity between CGIL, CISL and UIL."

"Natta is not Berlinguer, as is only right. I appreciate him for his idea of a secular, non-dogmatic character, free from party schemes and sacred cows."

"He was terrified of divisions within the union. And he theorised autonomy from political parties. Now that political parties no longer exist, this may seem like a dated discussion, but it is not."

"(About the Renzi government) Renzi must acknowledge that he does not have the support of honest people, workers and those seeking employment."