By John Phillips
ROME
Italy's Senate voted to approve Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's labor market reform package on Thursday, despite protests by left-wing trade union activists around the country.
Senators voted by 166 to 112 to approve the package, meaning that it becomes law since it has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Italy's parliament.
"Italy is really changing," Renzi said on his twitter account, "this is the right time. And we are going forward."
Nevertheless, three people were injured in clashes in the center of Rome when demonstrators opposed to the Jobs Act tried to break through a police cordon and reach the Senate during the voting.
Before the demonstration started, police arrested 10 university students found in possession of firecrackers and smoke bombs to be hurled during the protest.
Carabinieri paramilitary police said they seized a number of wooden clubs and street furniture steel poles that demonstrators were carrying.
The most controversial part of the Jobs Act is the abolition of Article 18 of the labor code, which guarantees that workers who have been unfairly dismissed must be reinstated to their jobs.
Italy's trade union federations threatened to call a general strike over the legislation.
In Milan, opponents of the legislation threw a tin of red paint at a cooperative near the Milan headquarters of Renzi's Democratic Party.
A former Italian Communist Party, the Democratic Party has since taken a social democratic direction and renounced Marxism.
In Turin, some 40 students occupied the local Democratic Party headquarters to protest the Jobs Act.
www.aa.com.tr/en
