Italy’s CGIL Confirms November 20 General Strike Against Austerity and Rearmament

Italy’s largest trade-union confederation, CGIL, confirmed a nationwide general strike for Friday, November 20, after a November 13 meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government failed to produce changes to the 2027 budget. CGIL general secretary Maurizio Landini called the discussion at Palazzo Chigi “courteous but politically useless” and said the full-day stoppage would proceed.

The strike is scheduled to cover workers across the public and private sectors. An official notice from the City of Rome lists CGIL alongside USB, COBAS and SLAI COBAS among the organizations calling action on November 20, while CGIL says legally protected essential services will be maintained. The strike is therefore not a symbolic rally but a coordinated attempt to interrupt ordinary economic life over the direction of public spending.

CGIL’s platform joins demands that are usually split into separate bargaining fights. It calls for higher wages and the renewal of labor contracts, stronger pensions, progressive taxation, investment in the public health service, schools and universities, workplace-safety measures, affordable housing and an industrial plan capable of creating stable jobs. The union also wants money shifted away from military expansion and toward social needs.

That last demand makes the conflict larger than a conventional dispute over a single line in the budget. ANSA reported after the November 13 meeting that CGIL describes the package as austerity combined with rearmament: households and public services are pressed to absorb fiscal restraint while military commitments gain political priority. The government presents the budget as a plan for stability, tax relief and investment within Italy’s fiscal constraints. The clash is over who pays for those constraints and which needs the state treats as non-negotiable.

FILE — Maurizio Landini, now CGIL general secretary, at a labor event on May 18, 2013. Contextual archival photograph. Photo: Ivan Crivellaro / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The budget’s distributional fault line

Independent scrutiny gives substance to the union’s criticism. Italy’s Parliamentary Budget Office told lawmakers on November 12 that the three-year package uses essentially all available fiscal space. Its analysis said the benefits of income-tax changes are concentrated among higher earners, warned that reduced pension indexation would have permanent effects, and noted that nearly 40 percent of the additional health allocation would fund a 300-euro individual card rather than directly strengthen the national health service. It also said the financing of higher defense spending becomes uncertain after 2028.

The government’s bill was introduced in the Senate on October 30 and formally assigned for examination on November 4. Reporting by Rai and Reuters has put the 2027 package at roughly €26 billion, including tax measures and additional revenue sought from banks and energy companies. Those measures are part of the government’s defense of the package, but they do not settle the distributional question raised by the unions: temporary concessions can coexist with long-term pressure on wages, pensions and universal services.

The November 20 strike will test whether CGIL can turn that budget argument into broad workplace power. The confederation is not asking workers to wait for the budget’s effects to arrive one sector at a time. It is framing pay, pensions, health, education, industrial policy and military spending as parts of the same political decision about the allocation of social wealth.

That approach connects the Italian mobilization to a wider European labor response. Spain’s unions called the country’s first general strike in 14 years around housing and pay, while Italian call-center workers have already struck over restructuring and the threatened loss of 13,000 jobs. In each case, workers are confronting a model in which insecurity is treated as an adjustment mechanism and public policy protects investment targets before household stability.

The scale and effect of the November 20 action cannot be known in advance. Participation will vary by sector, and essential-service rules will limit some stoppages. What is already clear is that CGIL left the government meeting without withdrawing its call. Italy’s 2027 budget will now be contested not only in Parliament but in workplaces and streets across the country.