The appointment is tonight at 8pm at the Welcome Hotel at the Dogana WTC, with participant registration: this marks the opening of the fifth confederal congress of the Unione Sammarinese Lavoratori (USL). Proceedings begin at 8.30pm, and at 9pm the Secretary General Francesca Busignani is scheduled to deliver the keynote address.
The date carries symbolic weight: exactly one year ago, on 23 September 2025, San Marino was living through the first of two general strikes against the IGR reform.
After the address, from 10pm the floor will pass to institutional guests.
Tomorrow, Thursday the 24th, proceedings resume at 9.15am with speeches from the other unions, international guests and employers’ associations. From 2.45pm it will be the delegates’ turn. Friday morning brings the most anticipated moment: the renewal of the union’s leadership bodies.
The congress title, “Eighteen years of trade unionism, on one side only — the side of the people”, hints at an address that is anything but a routine formality. The congress theses, already made public, put several issues on the table.
The first is the stable protection of wages and pensions from fiscal drag.
Then there is the trial of reduced working hours with no cut in pay, along with clear rules on the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Finally, there is ICEE, whose trial phase begins on 1 October, and the Association Agreement with the European Union.
There is also one line that other confederations will read closely: representativeness, USL writes, “is neither inherited nor presumed — it is measured”.
For the Republic’s youngest union, which now claims the role of the country’s second-largest, this is the moment to take stock of eighteen years and to state where it wants to go in the years ahead.
Insider will be following proceedings across all three days.
