In the more comprehensive context of monitoring the effects of the labor reforms and policies adopted during the crisis, the ministry in Via Veneto is verifying the relative trends for each of the main institutes, of which we are able to provide an elaboration of an official though not yet definitive nature, which we illustrate below.
From these first considerations of the ministerial monitoring it emerges that the Redundancy Fund has represented an effective barrier against the possible loss of jobs generated by the economic crisis. The costs of wage subsidies have been significant; in 2014, as shown in the INPS Social Report, the amount of expenditure for layoffs amounted to 6,1 billion euros.
This was one of the reasons why in 2015 the Government deemed it appropriate to intervene (within the scope of the jobs act) to make recourse to social safety nets more rational during an employment relationship, at the same time strengthening both protections in the event of termination of the employment relationship (through NASPI), and the tools for activating and retraining particular categories of workers included in corporate restructuring processes.
Recourse to layoffs has always made it possible to absorb production crises, reducing the social impact of the suspension of production activity. From a strictly statistical point of view, since the workers on layoffs are accounted for to all effects in the basin of the employed, the fluctuations in employment with respect to the economic cycle are attenuated, even in the presence of a significant reduction in working hours. To some extent, therefore, especially in phases of strong negative shocks, the employment figure will tend to underestimate the impact of the crisis on the quantity of work both during the recession phase and in its immediate resolution phase, as the layoffs basin plays a role of accounting and remuneration of hours of work not performed.
It is always necessary to bear in mind the discrepancy between the hours of Redundancy Fund requested (and authorised) by companies and the hours actually used. On the one hand, the authorized hours can well represent the expectations of the employers regarding the work input assumed on the basis of the company's activity trends, as well as represent the index of the cautions that entrepreneurs express on the future of their businesses; on the other hand, the hours actually used represent the real figure of production conditions, job orders and, in general, the trend in demand for goods and services compared to more prudent expectations.
And it is for these reasons that the monitoring considers it more correct to deal with the layoff hours actually used and to verify the impact of the social safety nets on the employment variable at an aggregate level. The data for the analysis, referring to the period January 2009-September 2015, were made available by INPS on a monthly basis. The use of layoffs during 2015 significantly decreased compared to previous years, reflecting a general recovery in production. In particular, in the first half of 2015, the hours of wage integration treatment used decreased by 39,0% compared to the same period of 2014, going from just under 276 million to 168 million and 300 thousand.
The component of extraordinary and derogating interventions is the one that has shown the greatest decrease (-43,1%), which was in any case significant also in the component of ordinary interventions (-28,3%). Moreover, the introduction of progressively more restrictive criteria for recourse to the Redundancy Fund in derogation as early as 2014 had significantly contributed to the differentiated trend by type of intervention. The reduction in the use of working time reduction schemes financed by the redundancy fund concerned all the main production sectors, with the exception of the production and distribution of energy, gas and water, where the number of hours used increased in the first semester 2015 by 34,5% compared to the same period of 2014.
The only other visible increase in the aggregated data is the use of ordinary treatments in the financial assets sector (+22,5%) offset by a marked reduction in the use of extraordinary and derogating treatments. Manufacturing recorded an overall contraction of 59 million hours used (-36,4%), with an overall reduction both in recourse to the Ordinary Redundancy Fund (-29,3%) and in the extraordinary and by way of derogation (-38,7 .27,3%). Equally significant is the reduction in work suspensions in another sector with a high draw, that of construction, in which the hours of ordinary treatment go down by 48,3%, and the extraordinary and exceptional ones by XNUMX%.
As noted, the function of the Redundancy Fund is to amortize the possible social consequences of the suspension of work through a wage supplement for the hours not worked. This implies, among other things, that this instrument makes it possible to mitigate the possible job losses resulting from a reduction in the work activity of the companies. On the other hand, when the economic cycle recovers, the effect on employment is attenuated by the need for companies to reabsorb workers into the CIG before proceeding, possibly with new hires. It is possible to calculate the impact of the redundancy fund on the employment variable by transforming the number of hours not worked into equivalent work units (AWU), i.e. a fictitious number of full-time workers working 40 hours a week. This transformation is generally performed by dividing the hours not worked by a standard divisor equal to 2000 hours/year.
The summary of the exercise, reported in the Table, offers important points of interest. During the years of crisis, in particular, wage integration tools in constant employment relationships have safeguarded an average of workers equal to about 300 full-timers per year, with a peak of 318 equivalent work units in 2013. As can be seen from the data, it was the companies in the North that made more consistent use of the protections of wage integration in the event of a production crisis. And therefore to save even a greater number of jobs that would otherwise be destined for unemployment. Which is also understandable if we take into account the fact that our industrial heritage is concentrated in that geographical area. Even if - in the last period considered - there has been a drop in the use of the CIG, manufacturing activities still remain the sector of choice both for ordinary treatment (where it absorbs 51,2% of the hours used) and for overtime and in derogation (66,0% of the total hours used).
