Fnsi trade union communiqué

Dignity. This is the watchword that drives Italian journalists to two more days of strike: 27 March and 16 April. Yes, we want information to be accorded the necessary dignity and above all to be guaranteed a future that is also dignified. Today this is not a given, on the contrary. Our employment contract has been expired for 10 years, our salaries have been eroded by inflation and have lost 20 per cent of their purchasing power. We are the only category that has waited so long for a renewal. There is an obvious economic issue and there is an equally obvious issue of the authoritativeness and independence of the press. What the editors want to dismantle piece by piece is the same contract that the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, called 'the first guarantee of the freedom of Italian journalists'. This is the weld between our fundamental economic demands and the freedom of information that citizens, readers, viewers, web users, must demand in order to be free in turn. Publishers pocket multimillionaire resources from the government (from this, as from previous ones), but they invest little in their companies and in enhancing professional information. On the contrary, they send 62-year old employees into early retirement, pay incentives for other types of redundancy, empty editorial offices and resort to collaborators and VAT numbers paid a pittance. They refuse basic rules for the use of Artificial Intelligence, evidently ready to replace journalists, the real core business of information.They pretend to ignore the law that requires them to pay journalists for editorial content ceded by companies to the so-called Over the top (Ott), i.e. the large companies that provide content and services on the Net.They would like the journalists of the future to be paid even less than today and the road paved in the exploitation of self-employment, so much so that at the table of fair compensation, before the government, they formulated a proposal even lower than the one rejected in 2016 by the Council of State. For all these reasons we go back on strike. We do it for us. For our dignity. For our future. We do it for you and for our and your freedom as citizens. Let us ask ourselves how free a journalist forced onto the assembly line of information is; how much a collaborator paid piecework can keep his back straight; how serene an editor who can no longer count on indispensable contractual protections will be. Ask yourself whether you would still want to inform yourself on the pages of those newspapers, listening to those news broadcasts, scrolling through the social and online pages of those newspapers.
Italian National Press Federation