Don't Panic When Public Transit Workers Go on Strike

EVERY TIME A STRIKE TAKES PLACE IN PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, THERE IS ANGER AND BEWILDERMENT FOR THE INCONVENIENCE CAUSED TO CITY USERS. YET, EXISTING ITALIAN LAWS ALREADY CONTAIN MECHANISMS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS WHILE GUARANTEEING THE EMPLOYEES' RIGHT TO STRIKE

by Stefano Liebman
Translated by Alex Foti


The debate on the need to strengthen legal guarantees against disruption affecting users in the event of a strike in public services has recently returned to the fore. In the aftermath of a labor agitation that ended up blocking the Milan transit network, the general manager of ATM, the public transportation company owned by the municipality of Milan, criticized this manner of calling strikes, by proposing that in order to call a strike the relevant union must have represent a minimum of 5% of all employees. In addition, the manager has invoked prior notification by employees about their willingness to join a strike or not, in order to define the extent of the inconvenience beforehand. Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, gave his backing to the boss of ATM, on the one hand, by asking "to balance the right to labor protest with the rights of all people the use public transportation for their mobility", and on the other, hoping for an early expression of the individual will of workers to take part in the strike.

Let’s start from the wish of Milan’s first citizen regarding the need to balance the right of collective action with the individual right to mobility. It was the same jurisprudence of the Italian High court to elaborate and corroborate the theory of external limits, understood as constraints based on constitutional norms that protect competing subjective positions of equal or even higher rank with respect to the right to strike. In line with this orientation, the Italian legislature in 1990 regulated the strike in essential public services in detail. In extreme synthesis, we can say that the Law n. 146/1990, as amended in 2000, already strikes a balance between fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution that are at play here.

In detail, the law requires to guarantee "essential services" and give notice to the company and the police prefecture at least ten days before the strike, listing modalities and motivations of the strike. Linked to this, there is the duty for the company to inform public transit users at least five days before the start of the strike, by letting them know times and modes of labor agitation  and thus limitation or suspension of service, and when public transportation will be fully restored. If you think about it, it is precisely because of these communication duties that the media are capable of forewarning readers about "public transport chaos".

Collective bargaining has included in many agreements not only a list of practices aimed at guaranteeing indispensable services, but also a conciliation clause, an obligatory attempt to cool tensions and reduce the impact of labor agitation. Agreements between employers' organizations and labor unions may also provide for some workers to abstain from striking to ensure minimal operations, staggered provision of the interrupted service or the indication of a minimum time-interval between the occurrence of one strike and calling for the next one.

With regard to the idea about having employees disclose their personal willingness to strike, we must be clear that this is too much to ask. The objective of any genuine labor stoppage is precisely that of causing discomfort and force the employer to sit at the bargaining table and make concessions on a range of disparate demands. As for political strikes or solidarity strikes, the vast coalition of workers who abstain from working have the goal of showing their muscle to interlocutors, whoever they may be, thus counterbalancing their claims. We can object to the soundness of some claims, but in the private arena as well as in the public sector, conflict is conflict. And conflict is a sign of healthy industrial relations. There should be therefore less clamor about the expression of a constitutional right.


On the other hand, the issue of unions’ representation and representativeness also re-emerges from time to time in Italian public discourse. Since the coming into force of the Republican Constitution in 1948 there have been numerous failed proposals and surprising turnarounds on the thorny issue of how union delegates should be elected. A messy series of solutions has generated a de facto system of labor relations, defined more by custom and agreements (the famous government-unions protocols of understanding) than by laws, often left unimplemented. In 2014, with the Consolidated Law on trade union representation, a big step forward was made on the measurement and certification of unions’ representation of workers in negotiations with employers. There is therefore no dearth of tools to prevent abuse by labor unions, as well as guarantees to defend users of public services. Already today, it is possible to achieve a virtuous balance between the two competing interests.