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.
PHOTO: AFP
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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion