New Charter to restore labor dignity (2)

(ANSA) - Rome, April 8 - 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.