Strike in Cosenza, students and workers in procession, including tractors

Over 1,500 students and workers gathered this morning in Piazza Loreto, in Cosenza, to join the general strike called by USB. Students, school and university teachers, farmers with their tractors, lorry drivers, small entrepreneurs, activists and trade unionists marched in the procession.

"Today we are here in the square - said a student - because in a poor region like ours the cost of living has become unsustainable. The government must give clear answers because up to now it has only managed to demonstrate inadequacy with respect to the social malaise which is becoming increasingly evident throughout Italy. We are all united in the same struggles because the issue of the high cost of living and war concerns us all: we are here students, farmers, lorry drivers, university students, families, workers, in short, all of us together, because we believe that the struggles are must do it together, because only united can we win."

The national mobilization was born to denounce the surge in prices, of fuel in particular, with the shopping cart now increasingly prohibitive, in the face of wages and pensions that the union indicates have been blocked for years or not adequate for the current cost of living. At the center of the protest is dissent towards the policies of the Meloni government, accused by the demonstrators of favoring banks and oil companies and of allocating tens of billions to rearmament and war spending rather than to social services, schools and healthcare.

"Today we are in the streets for the USB general strike - said Stefano Catanzariti, USB representative - called at a national and international level to reiterate that we must say enough to this war economy. We want the government, Europe, to look at families, to look at what we are suffering daily with the increase in fuel prices, the cost of energy, the cost of trolleys and that we move away from war, military spending, by investing in work, on wages, on the family economy, putting the dignity of people back at the centre".