From the report to the general meeting on 23-24 May

Trade union activity has continued in recent months in Italy.

In addition to activities within the grassroots union USB, most efforts have focused on a new so-called “self-organized” initiative, created with the aim of uniting the efforts of grassroots unions and those of the CGIL.

We recall that a similar attempt was made in 2019 with the Coordinamento Lavoratori Autoconvocati (CLA), which still exists but has, over time, transformed into an organization dedicated to promoting union actions on the issues of Health, Safety, and Repression in workplaces and across the country, organizing initiatives to encourage the broadest possible union participation and forging relationships with certain grassroots unions.

Consequently, the CLA has lost its capacity for intervention in strikes and for connecting the various groups within the union movement that are leading the battle for the unity of action of class-based unionism.

The CLA has become part of a broader coordination body called “Coordinamento 12 ottobre,” which, however, has proven to be less dynamic than the CLA itself and has a narrower focus—specifically, the issues of health, safety, and repression.

The new self-organized initiative, launched last October, is not only operating—for now—in the areas we identified at the outset of the CLA’s work but is also demonstrating, to a small yet visible extent, greater vitality, with the participation of groups of militant trade unionists in Rome, Genoa, Turin, and Milan.

It is made up primarily of militant trade unionists from the CGIL, as well as from the USB, SI Cobas, and the CUB.

The initiative emerged in the wake of the demonstrations against the war in Gaza, which led on October 3 to a united strike by all grassroots unions alongside the CGIL, with the latter having been forced to do so to stem the internal discontent that had arisen when, in response to the previous general strike called by the grassroots unions for September 22, the national leadership of the CGIL saw fit to boycott it by calling, seven days earlier, a separate and competing strike for September 19.

Based on that experience, in response to the 2026 budget bill presented in late October, many workers and delegates in the grassroots unions and the CGIL supported an appeal calling for a united strike against the budget bill, promoted by the Rome-based group of what would later become the small “self-organized” movement, and which concluded with the slogan: no more separate strikes!

This was followed by several assemblies and the formation of an open national executive group composed of about twenty union activists, which has already met a dozen times.

The leaderships of the USB and the CGIL, however, objectively collaborated in promoting two separate strikes instead: on the one hand, the strike by all the grassroots unions on November 28; on the other, the strike by the CGIL alone on December 12.

Both strikes went poorly, revealing, among other things, the ebb of the September and October movement that had brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators into the streets.

That movement was certainly an expression of a deep-seated social malaise that still manifests itself on an interclassist terrain—one of opinions—rather than on the concrete terrain of class struggle, which involves sacrifices such as confronting bosses and strikebreakers in the workplace. Nevertheless, the strikes called by the grassroots unions took a step in this direction.

The division of the strikes against the budget law, however, caused a regression from that more advanced point that had been reached. That portion of new energy that had been set in motion and could have been drawn into the trade union struggle was thus partly squandered.

With the new year, based on the fact that within the Autoconvocati there was a widely held view that war and rearmament will be increasingly prominent issues in the workers’ struggle movement, we proposed issuing an appeal to all unions so that on May 1, a day of struggle and international unity for the working class, to hold united demonstrations, putting an end to the obscene practice whereby in Italy the situation is worse than during strikes: since this is a day of mobilization of the working class that is more politically charged (initiated by the Second International), the mobilizations are often even more divided along party lines, which are often forcibly made to coincide with union boundaries.

In May, the leaderships of the grassroots unions gave further proof of their opportunism, taking another step backward from what had been gained in the field of the union struggle in September–October.

A coalition of grassroots unions (Cub, SI Cobas, Sgb, Adl) called for a general strike on May 29. A half-hearted strike, at a time when it is already difficult to make general strikes succeed in the fall—a period notoriously much more favorable in Italy than the spring and summer.

As if that were not enough, the strike was called in an attempt to revive the movement in support of the Palestinian national cause, following the initiative of a new “Flotilla,” similar to what had happened in September-October.

In this way, the leaderships of the grassroots unions have revealed their endemic opportunistic stupidity, in the specific form of movementism. They failed to understand that in September, what set the masses in motion in Italy was not the Flotilla itself but the horror, fear, and rage over two years of massacre in Gaza—self-servingly broadcast daily by the news programs of the Italian bourgeois regime, which has always cultivated an “anti-American faction” within its ranks; They have failed to understand that that movement ended with the October truce in Gaza, however partial it may be, and no “Flotilla” can reignite it under such conditions. Finally, they have placed the union and the general strike at the service not of the working class but of an initiative alien to its movement and its organizations.

To make matters worse, the USB has called for a similar strike, with the same justifications, separate and in competition, for May 18.

The intent of the USB leadership, of its opportunist political group, is to gain influence within the interclassist movement that for years has taken the Palestinian national question as a symbol of social and political injustices, grounded in the bourgeois principles of “national self-determination” and “anti-colonialism,” and consequently adopting a partisan political line in the inter-imperialist conflict: anti-American and anti-Israeli, pro-Iranian and pro-Chinese.

The demonstrations on May 18 revealed the pitiful failure of this union leadership’s opportunist campaign. There were only a few hundred demonstrators in each city, a pale shadow of the tens of thousands seen in September and October.

Together with other union activists, we distributed a leaflet signed by the Autoconvocati at the Genoa demonstration, which was very well received by the workers present.

In general, we can say that our union activity has found further confirmation of its correctness, both in our accurate predictions of the failure of the opposing opportunist political and union approaches, and in the support we have garnered among militant union activists—well beyond the organizational boundaries of our party—as well as in the new contacts and active collaborations we have established with them.