CGIL to cultural heritage minister Bonisoli: don't make propaganda about hiring

A long of list of criticisms has been addressed to Cultural Heritage Minister Alberto Bonisoli by the CGIL. In a letter signed by the national coordinator of the CGIL cultural heritage, the minister is accused of making propaganda about hiring, of inability to draw up a serious reorganization plan for the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, of devising a weak reform, and of failing to keep promises. Following is the full text.

"Mr. Minister,

la politique d’abord in this case, as indeed in many others in the recent history of this country, has conditioned your action to such an extent that it led you to hastily issue two Reorganization Decrees on August 13, asking us trade union parties to provide an opinion by mid-August, so as to justify a premise of your decrees that is only required by law, such as the one that provides for ’having heard the Trade Unions’. And, immediately afterwards, disseminate a propaganda video highlighting the consequences of the breaking of the government pact, hinting at wonders for the Ministry’s staff, challenged by the crisis, as if to give us a signal to keep us quiet. Don’t make propaganda about recruitment, the numbers are not enough to justify it, and these new recruits are only a partial exercise as much as they are due to avoid the ultimate organizational meltdown, given the average age and consistency of terminations.

You see, Mr. Minister, we do not barter. We bargain and entrust to bargaining the noblest demands that in public services must always combine the rights of workers with those of citizens, in this case enshrined in Article 9 of the Constitution. And we certainly will not barter judgment on a reform of the reform that, in the issuance of these Decrees, reveals its profound weakness and inability to have a serious reorganization project.

You see, Mr. Minister, even in our basic disagreement with the proposed structure, we had appreciated your willingness for dialogue and confrontation, particularly on the application phase of the DPCM believing that in that phase we would have had the opportunity at least to mitigate some of the perverse effects contained in the DPCM, effects that instead are revealed in all their deleterious connotations. In one fell swoop, the method of democratic confrontation, which had begun to take shape even in the Higher Council, was neutered and a bureaucratic settling was produced that simply worsens the already disastrous premises produced by his predecessor.

His management of this Ministry is turning out, and not only because of the impending government crisis, to be a sequence of broken promises. To which we are direct witnesses: he had announced that the new Directors of the Autonomous Museums would be selected with the criteria of public competitions and nothing new has taken place; on the contrary, one of the little norms for which his predecessor was famous has even been used, which provides for the renewal of appointments for another four years, without any reasons being given, and we are absolutely curious to see in the evaluation of the work of the confirmed directors what the objectives achieved are. He had announced the return of the Historical Libraries attached to the enhancement circuits, and instead we find BIASA still entrusted to the former Latium Museum Pole, and this will certainly be the case for the other Historical Libraries attached to the autonomous Museums. Perpetuating a real crime against the cultural heritage for which you, in so doing, make yourself co-responsible.

Instead, a promise kept is the demolition of the Appia Antica Park, an operation by which you have only struck the weak link in a chain without making any dent at all in the effects of a crime perpetrated against Rome’s archaeological heritage, which continues to remain fragmented and scattered in different institutes, capable only of perpetuating for a two-year period a useless civil war over the definition of structurally insufficient logistics. What will it be replaced with, the Vittoriano Museum? What sense will this operation make, if not to mortify an extraordinary territory in the name of a newfound and incomprehensible operation entirely celebratory of national identity?

The same could be said for the abolition of the other autonomous Museums, of which only for Villa Giulia is foreshadowed, but a solution of recomposition of that archaeological territory upset by the Franceschini tsunami is postponed to a later phase. Instead, we wonder what sense the amalgamation of the Galleria dell’Accademia with the Uffizi makes, if not that of organizational phagoction.

Otherwise, these decrees have simply confirmed the worst predictions: the territory loses executives to the center, which has now assumed stratospheric dimensions; the distribution of executives does not change the imbalance worked toward the sectors of Libraries and Archives; nothing changes in the geography of SABAPs; the famous Museum Networks produce further improbable mergers and expansions of territorial areas, while they could have been a useful opportunity to revise the museum system on the basis of affinities of cultural paths, the incredible hierarchical subjection of the State Archives to the Archival Superintendencies remains, and even the incomprehensible unification on an organizational and scientific level of the State Archives of Palermo with the Archival Superintendency stands out. To end up with the District Secretariats that will have to take care of increasingly vast territories, sanctioning a further very serious retreat of the State from the management of the protection of the historical and cultural heritage, the effects of which will be better seen in the arrears of the logic of differentiated autonomy.

You see, Mr. Minister, we do not know what the outcome of the government crisis will be and whether a new political figure will take over in your place who will perhaps force us and the stressed ministerial machine into a new exhausting exercise of applying ideological schemes, but if the’issuance of these decrees was aimed at curbing new ’reform’ thrusts, then think again, you are always in time to restart the democratic confrontation with us and with the world of culture that is increasingly dismayed at unacceptable mortifying spectacles for all that our priceless heritage represents.

Best Regards

Claudio Meloni

FP CGIL MiBAC"

In the photo: the Appia Antica Park

CGIL to cultural heritage minister Bonisoli: don't make propaganda about hiring

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