A series of debilitating strikes by Italian transportation workers has again cast Italy as the land of unceasing work stoppages and walkouts, even as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi campaigns on his economic record.
Workers worried about job security at the slumping national airline, Alitalia, protested by grounding thousands of flights and nearly drove the company into bankruptcy. Trains stopped pulling out of major cities. Factory workers at Fiat quit making cars, and most of Rome's taxi drivers refused to pick up fares.
The issues behind the barrage of strikes have varied, but the combined impact has damaged confidence in Italy's labor market and forced politicians and experts to wonder why these work stoppages are becoming so commonplace.
"There has been an explosion," said Stefano Liebman, a labor law pro-fessor at Bocconi University, Milan.
Millions of Italians have been inconvenienced, but the labor unrest has proved particularly aggravating for Berlusconi, whose first government in 1994 was brought down in part by an enormous general strike.
His popularity will be tested in local and European elections in June, and the current chaos belies the contented grin and the positive statistics on his campaign posters.
Some experts say Berlusconi's labor policies helped provide the climate in which the current storm gathered.
After Berlusconi's election in 2001, his conservative government fiercely attacked left-wing unions, seeking to revise the pension system and make it easier for businesses to shed workers.
"They did not consider that by weakening the organized, deeply rooted union movement in this country they were running the risk of giving rise to small groups that are now completely out of control," Liebman said.
These were the groups that wrought havoc on the country's airports last week. After Alitalia presented a restructuring plan that would cut more than 3,000 jobs to avoid financial collapse, enraged workers caused the cancellation of nearly 1,400 flights, stranded 160,000 passengers and cost the company 40 million euros in only a few days.
A rescue plan was reached, but government officials worried about demands from so many unions at once.
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