Mass protests against health cuts
Labour Party conference of the needto win the support of the f400 a week docker!) or the leaders of the Labour Party, who see a strike as an electoral liability and have already pursuaded the TGWU to delay the announcement of the ballot result until after the local elections. They do not speak for the labour movement on this however. All the signs are that the movement will respond to a dock strike as the did to the miners by organising a mass support movement throughout the country-
Alan Thornett THE ITALIAN government is trying to out-Thatcher Thatcher with its latest deep cuts in the country's health service.
A government budget decree at the beginning of April included the imposition of 'hotel' charges of nearly E5 a day for the "privilege" of being a hospital patient. People will alno have for the first time to pay for X raysand other tests. For good measure the prescription charges were jacked up too. Plans are underway fo replace regional political administration of the hospitals with autonomous units led by business managers... where have we heard this before?
The huge Jalian public sector deficit would givo Thatcher and Lawson apoplectic fits. It in the time-bomb ticking away at Haly's so called cconomic success-stoty.
The omployers want the goverment to faice Inugh action - even if this means some roduction in the ruling parties" political patronage through the public sector. So there is much talk in the modin and political circies about the Thatcher example. Craxi, the Socialist Party leader, wants to impress the middle ground by showing that he can take the tough decisions that the Christian Domocrats have shirked for so long. His man, Amato, is the nethor of the infamous April decree.
Fortunately - and to most observers" total suprise - there was a magnificent response to the April decree from the rank and file
T 70 per cent of cargo is handled by registered dockers. of the labour movement. Protest strikes broke out almost immediately after mass mectings had been held in many been workplaces to discuss this attack on working people. Whole cities ground to a halt in the first week of April as day after day worters left their workplaces en masse and marched down to the main squares. Thin encouraged people who had to pay the charges on the first day to voice their anger rather than meekly submit.
Police had to be called at some hospitals as people staged protests. Health workers made their solidarity with the patients very clear -they know their jobn and working conditions are next in the firing line. Medical and admin staff have developed various strategies to nullify the decree's effect. Patients bave been asked to sign promises to pay if the decree is transformed into a proper parliamentary law. In other places they have been promised refunds in writing if the decree becomes invalid.
Calls were made fmm the start by the factory shop slewards.committees for a un 3 tional general strike: At no BI time had the naleaders called g for strike ne-e tion. Powerless a to stop walk- 2111 outs they Britaln, France, now Italy: cautiously ap
DA m Italy plauded local initiatives from the sidelines. Bruno Trentin of the largest trade union federation, the Communist Party-led CGIL, joined his fellow trade union leaders to denounce talk of a general strike. Instead they called up a team of experts to conjure up alternative package of mcasures to solve the health service's financial crisis. They accept the goverment's general framework of making 'savings to reduce the deficit, but want working people to pay a slightly smaller bill for it. On the April 10 there was a regional goneral strike in Milan, organised by the more militant soctors opposed to the national leaderships line, and a demonstration of 50,000. After. this the mion leaders could no longer block the momentum towards coordinated national action, and agroed to a national one day general strike for May 10, thinking it better to try and control the protest than to let regional or rank and file structures start to or-
OBSE
CL the fight for health services ganise nationally.
Already the force of the protest hascaused rifts within the govemment. Donal Cattin, the Christian Democrat health minister, has pleaded it was nothing to do with him, but was all down to Amato, the Treasury minister. The decree will become invalid after 60 days if parliament does not discuss and pass it as legislation. Party bosses in the five-party coalition are already manoeuvring with a view to gaining a percentage point here or there in the June Euro-elections. The last thing they want is sustained protest against an unpopular government measure. Craxi's Socialist Party in already trying to distance itself from the decree,
The wave of protest does show that the hard left minority in the labour movement still retains a capacity for taking a lead against the reformist trade union and Communist Party leaders, despite the long string of defeats over the Last ten years. Struggle pays off. Apart from the disarray in the govemment, concessions have been won, the governmont has increased the number of categorica exempt from the new charges such as low-income pensioners. women with difficult pregnancies and the chronically ill. The May 10 general strike is vital if the government is to be forced to drop the decree; but the union bureaucrats would like nothing better - if they are given the chance - than to call it off in exchange for some shoddy compromise.
Dave Kelloway
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