Following the arrest of Aldo Milani, national coordinator for base union SiCobas, by police in Modena, strikes have started in the logistics warehouses of Emilia Romagna and Milan, awaiting the spreading of the mobilisation to other regions.

Updates to follow…

This evening (26th January 2017) Modena police have arrested Aldo Milani

In the late afternoon today, 26th January 2016, our national coordinator Aldo Milani was taken away by the police, arrested and transferred to jail in Modena and, even now [in the early hours of January 27th - Ed.], his legal defence has not been enabled to contact him.

It’s clear that we find ourselves in front of an unprecedented repressive escalation: the bosses’ state, unable to stop the struggle with sackings, threats, hundreds of charges, expulsion orders, baton attacks and tear gas that in recent years has blown the lid off the cesspool of exploitation in logistics and the deep system of collusion and complicity between bosses, institutions and cooperative systems, now seeks to stop anyone who has dared disturb the those driving that system.

After the laws killing workers’ rights, after the reduction of wages to misery, what workers had won up to now with their blood, sweat and tears is being put in the sights of an immediate repression that seeks to strike whoever dares rebel and, above all, dares practice a political action that goes within the tradition of liberation from wage slavery.

The repressive plan wants to divert attention from the situation of exploitation experienced by the world of work and the logistics sector in particular: against this barbarism a movement of struggles has risen that, in recent years, has no equal in the toughness of the forms of struggle nor for results achieved.

The substance is simple: with the arrest of Aldo Milani they want to outlaw the right to strike!

If the class enemy deludes itself that it’s able to free itself of SI Cobas, the managing class are mistaken big time!

To this full-frontal political attack we will respond immediately with the only weapon that workers have at their disposition: self-organisation and struggle.

From now we are calling a mobilisation in all workplaces, and we call the networks of sympathisers to mobilise for the initiatives that will be called by SI Cobas in the coming hours against repression and for the immediate release of Aldo.

Other statements will follow as soon as we have updates.

26/01/2016

SI Cobas

Translated from Infoaut.