Ivan Maddaluni | Railway Workers Collective Against the War (Italy)
Good morning, my name is Ivan. I’m an Italian railroad worker—specifically, I work as a train conductor for Trenitalia, which is part of the FS Group, the national Italian rail transport group. I am part of a collective called the Railway Workers’ Collective Against War, which is trying to organize our sector not only in principle against wars, but also in terms of mobilizing against the war economy and against what that entails for workers as well.
In fact, I’m also a member of a grassroots union called CUB (“Confederazione Unitaria di Base”, that is Unitary Grassroots Confederation), which has been active in Italy for many years now, promoting an alternative form of unionism to the confederal model—which, in the railway sector in particular, has been signing terrible contracts for workers for decades.
From the core group of a magazine called “Cub Rail”—the magazine for railway workers affiliated with CUB-the Railway Workers’ Anti-War Collective was formed, with the goal of expanding and reaching all colleagues, or at least a large portion of them, regardless of their union affiliation, which in Italy is highly fragmented. Our work focuses on opposing Military Mobility—that is, the dual-use of railways for both military and civilian purposes.
Specifically, infrastructure normally used for commuter and civilian trains is being utilized for military purposes; in other words, convoys loaded with tanks, missiles, and weapons of war are being transported on those very same lines. To do this, the railways are taking advantage of European funding—which, however, is not free money; it is money that European workers pay for through their taxes.
With these billions in funding, they are extending the length of the tracks—because, as you know, military trains are very long—they are widening tunnels so the trains can pass through, reinforcing the strength of loading ramps, and the load-bearing capacity of freight train platforms so that tanks can be loaded onto them.
And then, of course, there is that major European project known as Rail Baltica, which aims to adapt the track gauge in Eastern Europe to the European standard so that military vehicles can be rapidly transported to the Ukrainian front. Let’s keep in mind that this type of project costs European citizens many billions—for the purpose of death, because that is what it serves. In all this reasoning we’re presenting to our colleagues, the key point is the connection to our contract disputes.
We are a group in Italy that is highly mobilized around this contract dispute, and we are on strike. In the last two years alone, we’ve held a dozen national strikes to finally secure a decent contract—and I want to emphasize this again here—while the signatory unions, which unfortunately are, at least formally, the most representative ones, continue to sign terrible contracts. Even though there was a new renewal in between that we didn’t like, we continue to strike.
We’ve held twelve national strikes over the contract in the last two years, with extremely high participation.
We’ve gradually combined these with specific strikes, both internally and externally, because over the last two years there have been six general strikes against the war and the war economy, and we’ve linked these two issues: that is, we’re trying to make our members understand that the system of exploitation—which creates terrible contracts for us and seeks to exploit our labor—is the same imperialist capitalist system that creates war and finances war instead of funding public services, including transportation.
The same could be said for healthcare or education, which are now truly in disarray here in Italy as well. So, we’ve started working with a publication—a bimonthly magazine called Bollettino dei ferroviari specifici contro la guerra (Railroad Workers’ Bulletin Against the War)—which comes out every two months and provides the entire workforce with information on what’s happening in terms of the militarization of the railways.
So, this is our work, and we’re seeing excellent results, because in the most recent strikes, the level of participation in the specific anti-war strikes was equal to that of the contract strikes—something that had never happened before. Furthermore, the sector is becoming aware of this fact: namely, that those who are enemies of humanity—those who destroy and those who promote these warmongering policies—are the very same people who determine the neoliberal and capitalist policies that exploit us.
Amid all this, another major obstacle we must fight against is precisely that of union fragmentation.
There are large confederal unions-unfortunately even larger ones in this country—which, as I’ve already said, we now consider to have sold out to the logic of power and are therefore in collusion with big corporations; but even the other, more militant unions—known in Italy as “grassroots unions”—are diverse and, unfortunately, in constant conflict with one another; there is a major struggle for dominance, as well as a great deal of narcissism and opportunism within these organizations, making it difficult to bring them together to build a united struggle—this is what is important to achieve.
We must overcome these dynamics, and together we can succeed in achieving results. This is the situation as far as we’re concerned in Italy, We hope that in the future, once we’ve managed to achieve this level of unity here, we’ll be able to achieve it with other European countries as well. It would be an important step toward truly concrete results for us and for our children. Thank you all!