A proposed new Charter of Universal
Labor Rights will seek to restore lost worker dignity and
introduce new protections, CGIL trade union federation chief
Susanna Camusso told ANSA on Friday ahead of a national campaign
to gather signatures in support of a bill that would introduce
such a charter into law.
"We need to extend rights to all workers, regain lost
protections and identify the ones we need in the new world of
labor," Camusso said. "We're not revisiting the past - we want
to restore dignity and value to labor".
The CGIL campaign to gather signatures for a new workers
statute kicks off tomorrow at stands to be set up in cities
throughout the nation.
The government of center-left Premier Matteo Renzi in 2014
reformed the existing 1970 Workers Statute, rolling back key
protections from unfair dismissal in a bid to shake up Italy's
stagnant labor market and stimulate new job creation.
The reform known as the Jobs Act raised high-voltage
protests from two of Italy's big three union confederations, the
CGIL and the UIL, which staged a 2014 general strike against it
and the government's 2015 budget law.
"Our ambition is to rewrite Italian labor law," Camusso
went on.
The CGIL campaign will also be gathering signatures to
propose three referendums - one banning the practice of using
10-euro vouchers to pay for occasional work, one to reintroduce
contractors' obligation to pay social security benefits for
their subcontractors, and the third to introduce new norms for
the reinstatement of workers who have been unfairly dismissed
from companies with more than five employees.
"Legislation passed in recent years, culminating in the
Jobs Act, has focused the debate solely on how to cut labor
costs, transferring the onus on making it easier to fire people,
without dealing with job insecurity," Camusso said.
"The CGIL initiative is not about going back to the way we
were - we are looking forward (to a new Statute) that won't
divide workers from one another and won't fragment rights and
protections".
The Jobs Act gives gradually rising levels of
labour protection to people hired on open-ended permanent
contracts, but it also softens protection against unfair
dismissal.
The aim is to replace a plethora of temporary and other
low-paying, no-benefits contracts that have proliferated in
Italy in recent years, meaning a regular full time job is
increasingly hard to find.
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