The note from the National Federation of the Italian Press on the journalists’ strike called for 28 November 2025
We publish the union statement from the National Federation of the Italian Press which explains the reasons for the strike of the category called for Friday 28 November 2025.
Today Italian journalists are on strike. We are striking because our employment contract expired 10 years ago and above all because we believe that journalism, a fundamental safeguard for the democratic life of the country, has not received the necessary attention from the Fieg publishers: many cuts and little investment, despite the millionaire public subsidies. In over 10 years, the reduction in editorial staff and the reduction in journalists’ salaries through states of crisis, dismissals, early retirements and contract blocking have had very strong repercussions on pluralism and the right of citizens to be informed. In these 10 years, the number of employed journalists has decreased, but the exploitation of collaborators and temporary workers has increased dramatically: paid a few euros per story, without any rights and without a future. In these 10 years the purchasing power of journalists’ salaries has been eroded by inflation, by almost 20% according to Istat: this is why we ask for an increase that is in line with those of other collective agreements. The publishers have proposed a negligible increase and asked to further cut the salaries of new hires, thus aggravating the generational divide in the editorial offices in an inadmissible way. Let’s not make it a corporate battle. We think that truly free and plural information, which is under democratic control, needs authoritative and independent journalists who are not economically blackmailable. We ask for a new contract, which protects rights and which looks at information with new digital professions, regulating the use of Artificial Intelligence and obtaining fair compensation for the contents transferred to the web. We want to push publishers to look to the future without continuing to cut into the present. If Fieg really cares about professional information, it must invest in technology and young people who cannot become low-cost intellectual laborers. It owes it to us journalists, but above all it owes it to the citizens protected by Article 21 of the Constitution.