Letter from Lhasa, number 283.
Grillo’s Schiavi Moderni
by
Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Grillo, B., Schiavi Moderni. Il precario nell’Italia
delle meraviglie, beppegrillo.it, 2007.
(Grillo 2007).
Beppe Grillo
This is a book with
texts of Beppe Grillo, Joseph E. Stiglitz e Mauro Gallegati. They comment the
testimonies precarious workers have written to Grillo and the book reports.
For Stiglitz, more
flexibility should combine with more social assistance. For Grillo, the Biagi Bill is the Black Death because it introduced in Italy precarious labour, so it
created modern slaves. Instead of favouring juvenile work, it just transformed
young people in low cost commodities. Italy became the fatherland of low cost
labour. Jobs are scarce. What remained has been low cost labour. For Gallegati,
under-paying labour is not a solution for a country pretending to be developed.
...It is not sure Italy be and will be...
This book is a long
outburst of precarious workers of a predatory Italy where it is impossible to
reform whatever. Instead of simply liberalizing the labour marker, but with
some social assistance and legal protection, they have simply bureaucratized precarious
occupation and even without any real legal protection (minimum wage per hour
etc).
If from one side, there
are super-protected (not always super-paid!) workers, from the other side there
are not only less-guaranteed workers, who always existed, but now, with left’s
and right’s labour reforms, workers super-exploited and without any future.
This means that this decaying Italy is progressively marginalizing itself at
all levels and that is absolutely evident, more than ever, since the contempt
it has for its human resources.
Grillo and his movement
do not have a real modernizing culture. So they published this work just as a
demagogic agitation against modernity. Such pathologies actually derive from
the absence of modernization. Whatever modernization is firstly founded on the
careful and efficient utilization of human renounces. What in Italy is not and
the situation is progressively worsening.
Only an example of this dramatic
and now unreformable situation of this decaying and self-marginalizing Italy:
in 2010 the employment rate was 78.6% in Switzerland, 71.1% in Germany, 71.1%
in Japan, 69.5% in the UK, 66.7% in the USA but only 56.9% in Italy. And, in
Italy, people are generally hired without any connection with their education
and skills.
For decades, in Italy,
they have condemned to anticipated retirement million people with the excuse of
letting free positions for young people. Now there is no work for old as well
for young people, while there is certainly abundance of useless and well paid
public employees.
Grillo, B., Schiavi Moderni. Il precario nell’Italia
delle meraviglie, beppegrillo.it, 2007.
