THE Italian left and unions have strongly condemned the Giorgia Meloni government’s decision to overhaul a social welfare scheme for poor families called Citizens’ Income. 

The far-right government decided to end the scheme benefits for 169,000 families across the country from August 1. The leftist party, Potere al Popolo (Power to the People), and trade unions such as the Unione Sindacale di Base joined the citizens’ protest denouncing the cuts in front of the National Institute for Social Security (INPS) office in Naples on July 31. 

The Citizens’ Income scheme targeted households with a monthly income less than the poverty line figure of €780 (£672). It was introduced by the Five Star Movement (M5S) and approved under the Giuseppe Conte cabinet in 2019. 

It provided a sum of up to €780 for single people and €1,300 (£1,120) for a family with two children, benefiting millions of poor households, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis which peaked with the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. 

The Meloni government, which has been critical of the scheme since the beginning, has decided to replace it with two new schemes by January 2024 — an Inclusion Cheque exclusively reserved for households with underage, elderly or disabled family members, and a monetary aid scheme for vocational training of unemployed persons who don’t come from families receiving the Inclusion Cheque benefits. 

The new policy will effectively exclude thousands of families from social welfare. With this, the government aims to reduce the existing welfare spending on poor families across the country by €2.5 billion (£2.2bn). 

Protesters said that the far-right government under Meloni had instead increased military spending for the war in Ukraine and legitimised tax evasion for big business.

According to reports, the decision to terminate their Citizens’ Income was notified to the families through an SMS from the INPS. In the Campania region, over 37,000 families received this message — over 21,000 in the city of Naples alone. 

Maurizio Coppola from Potere al Popolo told People’s Dispatch on August 3: “With the cut of social aid payments for 169,000 families defined as ‘employable,’ the government wants firstly to send a strong message: the state will not support you when you are in need. 

“The ideological attack on the social welfare state and the attack on the recipients of social welfare payments themselves — poor and jobless people — go hand in hand. But the problem lies behind that. Today, in Italy, irregular and underpaid work is so predominant that it is impossible to get to the end of the month; to be working poor has become normal. It is a characteristic of Italian capitalism. 

“There are even collective agreements in which the defined salary is €5 or €6 (£4.30-£5.16) per hour, which is not enough to survive. Without huge public investments in good jobs and strict regulation of labour, the problem of poverty and poor labour will never be solved.”

During the protests denouncing the cuts, Potere al Popolo reiterated the demand for a minimum wage of €10 (£8.60) per hour in Italy.

This article appeared at peoplesdispatch.org.