Strikes driving tourists away from Italy

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 11

Strikes driving tourists away from Italy

(Newsweek Feature Service)

ROME. Ever since the early port-war years, Italy has been Europe’s No. 1 tourist mecca. Last year, more than 14 million foreigners poured into the country and paid out some $1.5 billion.

But if present trends persist, within a very few years Italy is likely to attract about as many tourists as Greenland.

Consider the recent visit of one hapless couple from

Montreal. They arrived in Rome at the end of April, just in time for the postal strike. They moved on to Florence and Venice, where all the hotel porters were on strike.

Flying to Naples via Rome, they were hit by a strike of all airline ground personnel, so they had to unload their bags from one plane, lug them to another, then stow them aboard.

Everything was fine in Naples for 24 hours, until the whole hotel staff struck and all the public beaches were closed because of pollu-

tion. So the couple flew back to Rome where the staff of their hotel was on strike, the streets were filled with garbage because the garbage men were on strike and there was a critical water shortage because of some water-company dispute.

Yet the Canadian couple were relatively lucky. They missed the four-week walkout that closed every museum, art gallery and archaeological site in the country. The mail strike didn’t start until they' had confirmed their hotel reservations; so unlike thousands of other tourists, they had rooms. Lost luggage Somehow, their bags were not among the 3500 pieces of luggage lost during the airline muddle. And because they didn’t have to call on municipalities for special services, they were barely inconvenienced by the strike of traffic policemen, marriagelicence clerks, street sweepers and grave-diggers. The worst may be yet to come. For now that the summer travel season is shifting into high gear, Italian workers are threatening to step up the pace of their strikes for higher wages, shorter hours and better working conditions. The nation’s 220,000 hotel workers are still staging “checkerboard” strikes: hitting five or six hotels in a city one day with little or no warning, then moving on to a few more hotels the

next day. At the airports, ground personnel promise to continue their so-called “hiccup” strikes, suddenly walking off the job at peak periods. When that happens, planes that don’t have automatic boarding ramps are forced to discharge their passengers down emergency, chutes. Some airlines, as a result, are thinking about suspending all services to Italy. If the strikes are a nuisance to travellers, they are a disaster to the Italian

tourist industry, which has been hurting for nearly a year anyway because of the multi-national recession.

Spending less True, the number of tourists who visited Italy in 1970 was up from 1969, but visitors were spending less time and money. Furthermore, Italians themselves have been travelling abroad more frequently, so what was once a healthy $l.l billion favourable tourist trade balance has now dipped to about $9OO million. Since the strikes began, hoteliers have been reporting a drop in reservations of between 15 to 20 per cent, and as the horror stories spread more and more bookings are cancelled.

"Many travel agencies, especially American agencies,” reports one financial journal, “are guiding their clients toward ‘cahner’ countries like Spain, Jugoslavia and Greece.”

Public reaction has ranged from dismay to outrage. One hotel manager told me he thinks “we need martial law in these situations.”

And as a government official watched the country’s foremost industry slip down the drain, he said wearily, “Our workers seem to think that tourism is a flowing spring that will never dry up.” As for the country’s service workers, they claim that pressure tactics are the only way they can hope to wrench a living wage out of employers. For instance, a young bartender in a Rome hotel now makes $l3O a month, of which $BO goes to rent To feed his family, he must work a 12-hour day behind the bar, then moonlight in another job during his off-hours. “Our contract expires on October 31," he says, “but if we don’t strike now, while the tourists are here, nothing will be done to improve the

next one. Things will go on as in Spain—you know, everything will be put off until tomorrow.”

On the other hand, if the strikes go on, all the tourists may well be in Spain.