ITALY: ImF demands wage cuts

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The political shadow-boxing in the Italian Parliament last week over the relationship with the Vatican served principally to disguise questions of more direct class importance.

The minority Christian Democratic govenment of Papal protege Giulio Andreotti - kept in office only by Communist Party support - presented the Chamber of Deputies with a new draft pact with the Vatican which preserves most of the economic privileges for the Church written into Mussolini's 1929 Concordat.

COMPLETE Meanwhile the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaders of Italy's main trade union confederations began "consideration' of the legal wage-cuts demanded by the IMF.

Andreotti has withdrawn his proposals for a complete freeze on increases for higher wage earners. But the IMF is now insisting, as the condition for a further loan to support the lira and underwrite government spending, that the production costs of Italian industry be drastically cut in order to restore their profits.

SAVAGE CUTS

Andreotti is now demanding that the 'escalator' clauses built into many wage agreements, which provide for automatic pay rises reflecting increases in the official cost-of-living index, should be set aside.

The effect of this - with price inflation continuing unabated in all basic consumer goods - will be swift and savage cuts in real wages.

The willingness of the trade union bureaucrats even to consider these demands splotlights how little the escalator' clauses have to do with a sliding scale of wages under workers control - the only policy that can actually defend workers' living standards against price increases.

The 'escalator' clauses, in any case, have never given anything like full protection against inflation. And now, in the hands of the bureaucracy, they are being turned into bargaining counters at part of the 'historic compromise' whereby the Stalinist and Socialist Party chiefs back the Andreotti-IMF attacks on the working class.

At the same time the threat is being levelled that if living standards are not cut in this way they will suffer through other policies - basically transferring employers' social security and insurance contributions into taxes falling directly on workers.

In Italy as in Britain the role of the IMF - acting as the undisquised economic instrument of American imperialism - is to demand (and get) the fullest cooperation of the labour bureaucracy in forcing through policies to make workers, and workers alone, carry the burdens of the economic crisis.

SMOKESCREEN

In Italy the 'critical' noises being made by the Stalinist and Social Democratic deputies over relations with the Vatican are nothing more than a smokescreen to divert from In Barcelona and Madrid hundreds of women have protested against the trial of a woman under Spain's barbarous adultery laws.

Women face imprisonment of their collaboration wage-cutting.

The Communist Party leadership in particular feels the need to rescue some political capital for themselves in this field. Their support, particularly among working women, is threatened by the fact that they have all along sought to reach a reactionary compromise with the Church against the provision of abortions.

The tact that the Church enjoys all the privileges and power it does on Italian soil is the direct responsibility of the Communist Party. It was Stalin's faithful servant in the leadership of the Cr, raimirc Loglatti, who demanded in 1946 that the agreement between Mussolini's fascist state and the Vatican should be written intact into Italy's post-war "democratic" constitution.

Their inclusion was opposed even by the Social Democrats, but Togliatti - acting with the full approval of Stalin - demanded them "in order not to alienate ourselves from Christian workers."

Spanish police in action.

up to six years for adultery. For men (who are anyway hardly ever prosecuted) adultery is oniy an offence if it is "flagrant and persistent.