Since dawn this morning, a police operation has been underway at the instigation of the Piacenza Public Prosecutor’s Office against USB and Si Cobas logistics union leaders. With no less than 350 pages of ordinance, a real ‘judicial theorem’ is being built on the basis of an endless list of ‘criminal facts’ such as pickets, strikes, warehouse occupations, assemblies, etc.. Numerous trade union leaders were placed under house arrest and searched.

Logistics is one of the central hubs of the new-generation capitalist economy, the movement of goods is a decisive link in the value chain, and it is there that the contradiction is expressed at the highest level: exploitation of labour, mostly foreign and blackmailed, unrestrained use of contracts and subcontracts to cooperatives with infiltration, not even too subterranean, of the organised underworld, non-existent trade union rights and systematically violated, and therefore it is there that the struggles and conflict are harder and more determined, and there that the repression strikes.

The USB has been in the crosshairs of the Ministry of the Interior and the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in half of Italy for too long now, from the barrage of denunciations against those who oppose the war and the sending of weapons, to the condemnations for those who demonstrated against the murder of our logistics delegate Abd El Salam during a picket in Piacenza for which no one paid, to the ‘discovery’ of a gun in a bathroom of the National USB Federation that is being tried to blame on a logistics union leader.

It is therefore clear the attempt, this criminal, to try to prevent that in the logistics warehouses, in the places of production and marketing of goods grows and strengthens the class union, conflictual, that does not give an inch on workers’ rights.

The USB is proclaiming a general strike in the logistics sector from 8 p.m. today, 19 July, to 8 p.m. tomorrow, 20 July, and is calling on all its federations to activate protest garrisons in every city, and is evaluating with its lawyers the judicial counter-offensive to dismantle this real anti-union theorem and further initiatives of struggle.

USB