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After the truce obtained with hauliers, farmers and fishermen, the front against high fuel prices is heating up again with mobilizations and meetings of taxi drivers and NCC with demonstrations and meetings, for now without blockades or interruptions of service but without excluding the possibility that the protest could lead to a strike.
Today, Monday 26 October, It Taxi, Uritaxi and Unicoop will give life to a demonstration in front of the MIT which will be joined by the Unitrav NCCs while numerous trade unions representing taxi drivers will converge the following day in Florence for a large trade meeting. Furthermore, on Tuesday the announced round table with representatives of the hauliers will take place at the MIT: once the political issue has been resolved, the structural issues of the sector remain to be addressed.
Italy’s request to the EU on CAP aid
Meanwhile, today’s news is that Italy has asked the EU Commission to extend targeted CAP aid to include increases in fuel prices. Rome shares the proposal with the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia and will present it to the Agrifish Council tomorrow. In detail, the request provides for the extension of exceptional and temporary aid from the «European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD)» also «to the increase in fuel costs incurred by farmers».
Taxi drivers and NCC, the crux of the tax credit
As far as taxi drivers and NCC are concerned, if the fronts and squares of the demands are not unitary, the main request is however unequivocal and which had already been made in a letter to the government in September: the one regarding the tax credit which «year after year has been reduced to the minimum», explains Carlo di Alessandro of Federtaxi Cisal. «This is an easily practicable measure and can have an effect on management costs which have increased by 25-30% since the crisis began». “We are determined and among the various forms of protest on the table there is also a strike.”
Then there is the request from some acronyms for the extension of professional diesel (but taxis are now almost all petrol or hybrid or electric) and for an extraordinary compensation fund.
Tomorrow the road haulage table at the MIT
On the other hand, the request for certainty on the tax credit also in the medium term is one of the main points of the demands of the road transport representative associations who will meet the Minister of Transport Matteo Salvini and his deputy Edoardo Rixi at the MIT tomorrow, Tuesday 27th.
From the first meeting of the «Permanent table for road transport of goods and logistics», established last 8 October «with the aim of encouraging discussion between transport companies and clients in the definition of intervention policies and government strategies in the road transport and logistics sector», no immediate news is expected: it will rather be a first interlocutory meeting to put on the table the structural interventions to be addressed, after last week’s emergency measures with 105 million allocated by the government to the sector.