The Annual Report on the activities carried out in 2025 by the Commission for the Guarantee of the Implementation of the Law on the Right to Strike in Essential Public Services (CGSSE) has been presented and, as was to be expected, both the Report and the speech by the Chair, Prof. Bellocchi, completely ignored the rejection of Law 146 of 1990 by the European Committee of Social Rights (CEDS). This is a veritable slap in the face that Italy has dealt to the Council of Europe, whose ruling is not even taken into consideration.
The CGSSE has not merely ignored the CEDS’s ruling, but is marching at a brisk pace in exactly the opposite direction. Armed with the club of ‘balancing’ the various constitutional rights, the CGSSE claims the right to progressively broaden the scope of the law’s application, in step with the evolution of social conflict.
The year 2025 highlighted “the spread of political strikes characterised by a strong transnational dimension, in which the conflict in Palestine and criticism of the so-called war economy emerged as powerful catalysts for cross-sectoral mobilisations”. “We have witnessed,” continues the CGSSE, “hybrid protest platforms capable of combining contractual issues (wages, safety) with radical foreign policy demands, such as the termination of international memoranda or withdrawal from military commitments within the EU and NATO”. This use of the general strike against war is a source of serious concern for the CGSSE, which is why “a specific fact-finding process has been launched with a view to adapting the regulatory framework”. Strikes against the arms trade, conscientious objection to the war economy, and general strikes aimed at expressing the utmost dissent against warmongering policies therefore constitute the new frontier on which the CGSSE is preparing to intervene, in order to further restrict the right to strike.
The arguments put forward by eminent legal experts – not to mention common sense – regarding the obvious inconsistency between arms, particularly when destined for active theatres of war, and essential services have fallen on deaf ears. In the CGSSE’s view, anyone who blocks the movement of arms, through their actions, causes “repercussions on the operational capacity and security of national logistics, leading to delays and a knock-on effect of disruption for the public”, and must therefore be penalised. Nor is it justified to resort to an immediate strike in response to international political events, such as the genocide in Palestine perpetrated by the terrorist state of Israel and the strike on 3 October, in relation to which the CGSSE calls for sanctions to be imposed on the organisations that have breached the rules.
The Report also mentions the extension of the application of Law 146 to the logistics sector, which is described as “an act of regulatory clarity”, whilst acknowledging that logistics extends far beyond the supply of essential goods. In this case, the Commission’s intervention amounted to yet another abuse of powers that do not fall within its remit, as the CGSSE cannot be entrusted with the task of determining what constitutes an essential service or what must necessarily be excluded from it.
It is worth recalling that, had the CGSSE taken the CEDS’s ruling into account, it would have had to completely alter the direction of its action and address the three principles of the European Social Charter which the CEDS recognised as having been violated by the anti-strike law in force in Italy: 1) an excessive broadening of the concept of essential services and, consequently, of the scope of application of the law; 2) the obligation to give advance notice of the end of industrial action, which the ECSR recognised as a factor severely undermining the right to strike; 3) the abuse of exemption periods and the concept of ‘rarefaction’, which have severely restricted the timeframes within which it is actually possible to call a strike.
The fact that the CGSSE has deliberately chosen to ignore all this is a sign that the right to strike is under attack and that further tightening of Law 146 is already in the pipeline.
