The Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL), the country’s main union, took to the streets this Friday with demonstrations in the main cities of the country to protest against the budgets of the government of Giorgia Meloni, during a day of strike with unequal consequences.
The general secretary of the CGIL, Maurizio Landini, led the demonstration in the city of Florence (center), where he spoke of a “great participation” in a country that “requires a change of direction”while specifying that the marches organized today represent “workers, retirees, students, people who have difficulty making ends meet and who do not find adequate responses to their needs in the budget law”.
“The only public expenditure our country plans is rearmament”“, declared the union leader who denounced the “absurd logic which sees States increasing their spending on arms” while workers cannot make ends meet, wages are low and the purchasing power of employees and retirees is reduced.”
Rome was also the scene of another march which brought together more than a thousand people in the city center at the Imperial Forums to denounce “the bad direction” in which the Meloni government uses public resources, according to María Mora, CGIL trade unionist.
Mora criticized the lack of structural measures against tax evasion and He criticized the increase in taxes on workers and retirees instead of taxing “the significant assets and extraordinary profits of companies that do not pay taxes”.
The demonstration in the capital ended at the Torre dei Conti, where honored the deceased worker in the partial collapse of this medieval building which occurred at the beginning of November, an event which relaunched the debate on job security in Italy.
In addition to the demonstrations, the strike called this Friday had disparate effects in the country: a paralyzed part of urban transport in Milan (north) and Naples (south), This caused the closure of schools and the cancellation of trains in several regions, although in Rome services were operating normally, according to Italian media.
Politically, the far-right Liga, the party of Vice President and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, criticized the strike call and insisted on ironic about the “coincidence” that the mobilization took place on a Friday.
Newspapers on strike
“Landini goes on strike (by chance on Friday), while we we increase salaries to millions of school, health and transport workers,” wrote La Liga on the social network X.
The Minister of Transport visited the operational headquarters of the State Railways this Friday to check the consequences of the strike and assured that “Fortunately, the data is encouraging and very limited discomfort.
On the other hand, the staff of the newspapers La Repubblica and La Stampa due to the negotiations announced by the Agnelli family to sell the GEDI communications group (to which these media belong) to the Antenna group.
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