Italian wages are among the lowest in Western countries. Confirmation comes, on a regular basis, from international agencies and economic study centres, which show that they are far surpassed not only by the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, but also by those countries which up to twenty years ago they were in line with Italy like France and Austria, or below like Belgium, Ireland and Spain.
La the main cause of this situation is generally identified in the so-called tax wedge, or in the difference between the net salary received by the worker in the paycheck and the total cost borne by the company, burdened by direct and indirect taxation and by social security contributions, as well as low labor productivity. Because the The cost of labor now represents on average only ten per cent of the total costs of a company, following the widespread industrial automation and/or the outsourcing of organizational processes, the tax wedge alone is however not sufficient to explain the atrophied wage dynamics of the last twenty years.
The root cause must be identified in the practice of "concertation" initiated by the then Ciampi Government in 1993 and still today invoked by many as a method to implement labor reforms. Since then, the concertation between the social partners has had wage regulation as its objective, delegating to national bargaining the coverage of inflation with the increase of minimum wages, and to the company bargaining the salary increases linked to the profitability and productivity of the company.
In reality the concerted method has demonstrated all its weakness and dangerousness (according to Prof. Mario Monti's judgment a few years ago) in not knowing how to deal with the problems of competitiveness, productivity and flexibility of companies, since, assuming the consent of all the interested parties (Cgil and its category organisations) he continued to favoring national wage bargaining to the detriment of company bargaining.
The result was that, in order to obtain the consent of all the unions, the national labor contracts were renewed for several rounds with wage increases higher than the planned and real inflation, justifying the incremental differentials with alleged increases in the productivity of the manufacturing sectors (sic!) to the detriment of the economic resources to be allocated to the productivity wage of company bargaining.
In this way, with a system that has maintained the twentieth-century archetype, dear to old syndicalism, of the mediation of the national contract with the salary released from the individual company realities, space has been removed in the last twenty years from the evolutionary dynamics of salaries linked to the new forms of motivation and incentives, causing the decline in Italian wages compared to those of our Western competitor countries.
The 2009 interconfederal agreement on the reform of the contractual system signed by Confindustria, Cisl and Uil, but not by the CGIL, has tried to remedy it, anchoring the renewal of the national contract to inflationary coverage alone and leaving the definition of the productivity wage to company bargaining, as is the case in all European countries, including Germany which for some years now has also abandoned the practice of the national contract in favor of the corporate one, at least in large companies.
The national contracts signed after the signing of the interconfederal agreement have however, the objective was not met, demonstrating the reluctance of the entrepreneurial and trade union system to change: all the contracts, excluding that of the metalworkers, have in fact been renewed by recognizing salary increases higher than the programmed inflation according to the old logic, maintaining the supremacy of the national contract over the corporate one and in exchange obtaining the signature of the various product categories of the CGIL, despite the CGIL itself had not signed the interconfederal agreement on the reform of the contractual system.
Moreover, thehe start-up season for contract renewals in almost all categories, which had already started with telecommunications to end within the year with the metalworkers, could be an opportunity, albeit with narrow margins in the presence of a strong recession, to relaunch the productivity wage in the corporate sphere, according to the rules established by the interconfederal agreement of last June-September on collective bargaining, signed this time by the CGIL.
Also the Government could do its part with two measures, at no cost, to encourage wage growth and contribute to the relaunch of consumption through a preferential taxation of the productivity wage. The Government should reintroduce the facilitated taxation of the 10% rate, as in force in the years from 2008 to 2011, for the part of the company salary linked to productivity and other elements of competitiveness. By not extending this concession for 2012, the Government has in fact burdened workers' payrolls with a higher tax burden of around two percentage points, given that the productivity wage and any tax-exempt overtime work fluctuate on average between 10 and 15 percent of salary.
Another measure to be taken would be incorporate the accrued severance indemnity portion into the monthly salary. For a temporary period, and until the recessionary phase is over, the monthly quota of the severance indemnity (severance indemnity) instead of INPS companies could pay it directly to workers in payroll, with the separate tax regime of the severance pay. A similar provision could be adopted, again temporarily, for workers who have opted for the payment of the severance pay to a pension fund instead of INPS. In this way there would be an increase in the monthly salary of 7,5 percent due to the value of the severance pay , which, added to the advantage of the tax relief on productivity wages, would lead to a net increase in the payroll of around 10 percentage points.
