Will it be negotiating tactics or will it be cultural confusion on the real challenges facing our country, which not only must overcome the crisis of confidence on the part of the markets, but above all must resume a development process that has been interrupted for too long, the fact is that Camusso continues to take refuge in the defense of the whole system of industrial relations and the functioning of the labor market which has by now shown all its defects both in terms of safeguarding workers and in determining Italy's overall loss of competitiveness.
This is what can be deduced from the intervention of the general secretary of the CGIL Susanna Camusso at the debate organized for the presentation of the 2011 Labor Yearbook edited by Massimo Mascini. The debate was attended by Aurelio Regina, president of Confindustria Lazio, Raffaele Bonanni, secretary of the Cisl, Luigi Angeletti, secretary of the Uil, and the deputy minister of Labor Michel Martone. The introduction was made by prof. Carlo Dell'Aringa who rightly recalled how the issue of work, neglected for some years, returned already last year, and even more so in these first months of 2012, to the center of attention and economic and political debate. Already in 2011, the Fiat case and the June agreement between the trade unions and Confindustria on the new bargaining rules had re-proposed the theme of labor productivity and the need to link wages more closely, but today the Monti Government has urgently faced with the social partners the need to profoundly review the rules of the labor market to ensure greater flexibility both in entering and leaving the workplace, to transform the current layoffs system into a system of economic guarantees and above all training for re-employment, to modify the procedural rules so as to be able to close any legal proceedings quickly. Dell'Aringa, among other things, on the one hand warned the parties not to increase too much the costs for businesses of entry flexibility, and on the other hand recalled how the question of article 18 is not decisive in itself but it is certainly influential on the overall functioning of the labor market and on the possibility of sending a message of renewal to all potential international investors.
Surely neither the trade unions nor the government could make public statements on the eve of new important meetings aimed at seeking an effective compromise to end the game by February. However, even limiting herself to talking about general issues, it is striking that Camusso, on the one hand, attacked the Government which, in her opinion, does not have a clear social policy objective (beyond that of financial recovery which, moreover, is preliminary to any social policy to do) and on the other hand has entrenched itself behind the old and superseded formula by the events of "No to article 8 and Yes to article 18". That is, a no to the prevalence of company bargaining with the related issues of factory representation, and a yes to maintaining article 18 as it stands.
Yet Camusso complained that in recent years there has been a devaluation of work, a reduction in wages, a decline in education which has increasingly moved away from the labor market and finally a decline in concertation practices as if they were something negative and paralyzing for the whole country. But in saying these things, the CGIL secretary did not realize that she fell into profound contradiction with her own position of clear opposition to the change of rules and practices of the labor market which certainly contributed to determining that situation of "devaluation" of work, rightly complained. Centralized negotiation has not allowed wages to be linked more closely to productivity, the confused and rigid labor market rules have blocked flexibility, giving rise to wild precariousness, discouraging investment and keeping young people away from the labor market, the protection offered by the Redundancy Fund, as well as being discriminatory against the many who do not have it, it has constituted a brake on the requalification and reintegration of those who have lost their jobs. The same art. 18 has very little protection for those who have found themselves in companies in crisis, and in any case it is applied only to less than half of the workers.
Undersecretary Martone recalled on the one hand that the labor market is a piece of a wider range of measures aimed at restarting the country's economy, and on the other hand that the Government is doing everything possible to launch an incisive reform with the consent of the social partners, as hoped again yesterday by the President of the Republic. The objective of social policy is to increase productivity and to link it to increases in workers' wages.
Beyond the negotiating tactics which are always legitimate and which must also take into account the existing positions within the various organizations, what seems to be desperately needed is a real cultural leap. Monti argues that his goal is to change the "habits" of Italians, but perhaps the term used is reductive: the "attitudes" should be changed, i.e. the culture of the citizens of a country who for too long have deluded themselves that they can live on the (hypocritical and hairy) "goodism" of politics.
