Second day of strike for the renewal of the journalists’ employment contract – of a package that includes six abstentions – Friday 27 March. A third day of strike has been planned by the journalists’ union for 16 April.
The positions of the Fnsi
“Dignity. This is the slogan that pushes Italian journalists to another two days of strike”, states the Fnsi in a note. «We want information to be recognized with the necessary dignity and above all to guarantee it a dignified future. Today this is not a given, on the contrary. Our employment contract has expired 10 years ago, our salaries have been eroded by inflation and have lost 20% of purchasing power. We are the only category to have waited so long for renewal. There is a clear economic issue and there is an equally clear issue of the authority and independence of the press.”
«What the publishers want to dismantle piece by piece», continues the National Press Federation, «is the same contract that the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, has defined as the “first guarantee of the freedom of Italian journalists”. This is the connection between our fundamental economic demands and the freedom of information that citizens, readers, viewers and web users must demand in order to be free themselves. Publishers pocket millions of resources from the government (from this one, as from the previous ones), but invest little in their companies and to strengthen professional information. On the contrary, they send 62-year-old employees into early retirement, pay incentives for other types of exodus, empty the editorial offices and resort to collaborators and VAT numbers paid a pittance. They reject basic rules for the use of artificial intelligence, evidently ready to replace journalists, the true core business of information. They pretend to ignore the law that requires them to pay journalists for editorial content transferred by companies to the so-called Over the top (Ott), i.e. the large companies that provide content and services online. They would like the journalists of the future paid even less than today and the path paved in the exploitation of self-employed work, so much so that at the fair compensation table, before the government, they formulated an even lower proposal than the one rejected in 2016 by the Council of State. For all these reasons we go on strike again. We do it for us. For our dignity. For our future. We do it for you and for our and your freedom as citizens. Let’s ask ourselves how free a journalist forced on the information assembly line is; how straight a piecework worker can keep his back; how peaceful an editor will be who will no longer be able to count on the indispensable contractual protections.”
The position of the publishers
The position of the publishers is quite different. «The Fieg editors point out that we are in the presence of a national employment contract anchored to business models that no longer exist and which guarantees privileges that are no longer sustainable, such as, for example, the payment of former holidays abolished 50 years ago or the automatic percentage remuneration mechanisms which, moreover, have largely kept journalists harmless from the effects of inflation».
“This is the reason”, continues the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers, why the union did not want to address either the issue of the overall modernization of the contract (which would indeed be essential as a competitiveness tool) or the introduction of more flexible rules to encourage the hiring of young people, preferring instead to limit itself to exclusively economic requests. And also on the subject of collaborators, Fieg has constantly expressed its desire, even in the relevant institutional bodies, to improve the rules and compensation in force”.
«We remember that it was precisely to protect employment and in order to avoid layoffs that early retirement was resorted to and this has always happened with the consent of the union which signed all the crisis states. Despite the lack of willingness on the part of the unions to innovate the contractual rules in any way, the publishers have repeatedly formulated – with an unchanged and not “dismantled” contract – an economic offer which is higher than that of the last renewal and adequate to the conditions of the sector and reiterate that they will continue to do their part, investing in products and in enhancing professionalism”.