Temporary school teachers protest across Italy for the cuts made by the Ministry of Education. Approximately 60,000 jobs lost, of the 130,000 that according to the Government must be cut by 2011. In part, these cuts are absorbed by retirements, but this year are just 35,000, so at least 25,000 people will remain without work. The largest mass layoff in the history of the country.
The leftist unions talk of 40,000 layoffs between teachers and school workers, the other unions to 25,000, but everyone agrees that the cuts have created a real social emergency. Many of the precarious teachers that this year will not have a job worked in Italian schools for years but never became tenured. Then there are nearly 300,000 graduates in public school rankings, and nobody knows what future they will have.
The consequences on the lives of the students are more crowded classrooms, elimination of the afternoon school and remedial courses, the need to ask parents for money to pay overtime to teachers, a deluge of cuts in teaching hours to survive. The government says there is no money and the cuts are necessary, and this is all the justification they need to actually destroy the lives of thousands of people.
Yet for private schools they were ready to find the money, and just recently the minister Gelmini repeated it and confirmed the hard line: "It is intolerable that in Italy the public school is used as a social welfare network". So where would be in Italy social safety nets? Other works in humanitarian professions that don't exist? Unemployment benefits for precarious workers that there aren't? What would thousands of people do if they remain jobless and have no chance of finding another job, with the Italian unemployment rate that will soon reach 10%, since the situation in factories and companies is not better than in the public school? What's the solution of this government? Perhaps according to them young Italians without jobs, precarious workers for years, should avoid complaining and starve on the streets.
A serious government cannot plan thousands of layoffs without providing a solution, otherwise it creates a situation of explosive social protest. The stupidity of this strategy, or rather the absence of any sensible strategy, it's shocking. But perfectly in line with the general action of this government. While in other countries around the world governments are trying to encourage the public sector at all costs to avoid a dramatic worsening of the crisis, the Italian government cuts, even if the investment on education is still below the European average. Thursday, September 3rd, there will be a meeting with the unions to find a solution to the first emergence of an autumn that is expected to be particularly hard for Italian workers, and even more for those who do not work at all or had lost their jobs.
The most tragic aspect of the Italian public school is that before this government it had so many huge problems to solve. Now the minister in charge, that these problems don't intend to solve but rather try to aggravate, has become the biggest problem.
Francesco Defferrari
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