“It hasn’t been a simple week for Calabria. There were various economic and social indicators that attested to its delay compared to the rest of the country”.
This is what Mariaelena Senese, general secretary of Uil Calabria, states in a note.
“Calabria has once again turned out to be, as attested by data from the Ministry of Economy, the poorest region in Italy”.
“The data speaks clearly and describes a situation of perennial economic difficulty which brings with it the denial of civil and social rights: Calabria is the region with the lowest income (17,160 euros)”.
“Svimez – continues the note – in launching yet another acceptable alarm on the civil consequences of differentiated autonomy, has highlighted those infrastructural delays that create two Italys: one, the northern one, fast and interconnected and the other, the of the south, in eternal trouble, which moves on a single track and does not know high speed and which, while the politics of the high society is engaged in the debate on the Messina Bridge, is forced to deal with an inadequate state road 106 , dangerous and deadly.”
“A state road which, despite having been included in the European Ten T network, does not receive the right attention from the Government which has chosen to neglect, guiltily, the section from Catanzaro leading to Reggio Calabria for which there would be a need to bring an upgrade on alternative routes has been completed while no concrete modernization interventions have been planned”.
“Italy cannot pretend nothing happened. The inclusion of this artery in the Ten T network means that the European Union has recognized the value of this infrastructure, not only as a local value, not only as a national but a European issue, thus binding the Italian Government to finance or co-finance it”.
“But not only. The situation – states Senese – is even more burdened by the delays with which the Calabrian health system is called to deal, always at risk of infringement, incapable of responding to the need for care of many Calabrians, crushed by an eternal commissionership which has only produced cuts and ended up putting one of the sectors in plaster, if not the most important sector for our territory both from an economic and social point of view”.
“Today, more than ever, it is necessary to eliminate the waste of the Regions, increase the percentage of GDP to be put on healthcare to 8 percent, to prepare a National Health Plan that is able to enhance what we have defined as the two cornerstones of the Health Service national: the staff and the territory”.
“For staff, it is necessary to proceed with an extraordinary hiring and stabilization plan, renew contracts and accelerate local bargaining, knowing that it is necessary to make healthcare professions more attractive for young people and stop their exodus towards foreign countries. Furthermore, the contractual conditions of private healthcare workers and those working in the third sector must be equalised.”
“It is clear that wages must be adequate, but it is essential to address issues such as the valorisation of operators, their protection and pursuing the guarantee of sustainable working conditions”.
“But, above all, specific resources are needed for Calabria to remove territorial imbalances, to improve healthcare buildings which are obsolete and inadequate. In terms of local medicine, it is still necessary to ground the amount of investments envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. To date, however, the delays are accumulating and, due to a dramatic lack of information, we do not know what stage the projects for the construction of community homes, community hospitals and territorial operations centers are at.”
“This seriously damages the health of local medicine. A regional health system that has been waiting too long for the four new hospitals, promised over ten years ago, to become operational realities. Calabrian citizens do not have equal dignity in access to services and this is unacceptable”.
“Svimez, in her report presented to the Chamber, speaks clearly: “the acceleration given to the implementation of article 116 third paragraph of the Constitution seems to interfere with these basic questions, jeopardizing the aims of equity and national solidarity of federalism”.
“The problem, unfortunately – he continues – is that in parliament there are many more deaf people, those who move with a convinced spirit of political camaraderie, those who cannot say no to the current leaders, than those who pay attention to these analyzes punctual.”
“Unfortunately, the principle of equalization is struggling to find confirmation in our legislation and so, while the gap widens more and more, our political class of government is struggling to support the project of a secession of the rich which would end up dealing the blow deadly to the regions of southern Italy, breaking up our nation into many small states, allowing the richer regions to keep for themselves a substantial share of resources which should have been used to bridge the inequalities between territories, risking dealing the blow of ko to Calabria and the other southern regions”.
