The instruments of public intervention, some of which inherited from Fascism (pp.ss., industrial credit, protectionist barriers), were largely rationalized in the XNUMXs, degenerated (for one reason or another) in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs , fell in the XNUMXs, and with them the lira inevitably fell. At that point, only concertation remained as an instrument for sharing economic and social policy guidelines.
It is widely believed that concertation was born in 1993 with the protocol of 23 July at the behest of the Ciampi technical government and wore off with the centre-right governments of the 1975s. In my humble opinion, however, the concertation was conceived in analogy to the abortive attempt of the government in 1999 and ended politically in XNUMX with the left-wing government, well before the XNUMXs.
In Italy, two protocols deriving from the Maastricht Treaty (February 7, 1992) were signed, both aimed at containing the economic-employment crisis by setting parameters that the individual countries would then have to respect. The first protocol, signed on July 31, 1992, repealed the escalator; the second, signed on 23 July 1993, fixed income policy objectives. These objectives linked the growth of wages to the increase in production and corporate profits, led to the planning of an inflation rate to contain public spending and, in this way, aimed at greater competitiveness, better economic growth, strengthening of the employment base.
The analogy of the 1993 protocol with the 1975 attempt was in the method of (as it were) triangulated sharing. The difference was that while the 1975 protocol focused on the institutional responsibility of the subjects (government, industrial and banking entrepreneurs, workers' unions) and was rooted in a nineteenth-century culture of duties, the 1993 protocol was targeted, operational, important but circumscribed , and was based on a sort of armored contract between opposing parties.
Other examples of concertation in the following years proved too ambitious and ultimately inconclusive. For example, on 24 September 1996 the so-called “Pact for work” was signed by the government, Confindustria and trade unions. It had the aim of restoring flexibility to the labor market, but in reality it extended to topics such as training, apprenticeships, research, the IT company, pensions.
On 21 October 1998, with the fall of the Prodi government, without general elections, an executive led by the secretary of the Democratic Party of the Left was born. The hope of that government was among others Confindustria, which presumably was short of ideas and was not aware of the inconclusiveness of the 1996 Pact. So it asked and obtained that the program of the new government be centered on concertation and on a new pharaonic “Social pact for development and employment”. The signatories, in addition to the government, were very numerous, as many as 32 business and trade union organizations.
The structure of the document was encyclopaedic: four parts, a premise and six annexes. The pact aimed at the transformation of the Public Administration through delegation, qualitative improvement of the regulations, reorganization of the administrative system; the government pledged 330 billion lire on this part.
The agreement would have involved local authorities, would have been divided into sectors (public utility services), would have devoted attention to the South, would have included new direct public investments for new infrastructures in the Finance Law, as well as the taxation of social security contributions for the South and contributions, would have favored the emergence of undeclared work, training would have returned to the fore, the entire education and training system would have been reformed, the interpersonal fund for continuing education would have been set up, a one-stop shop would have been set up especially for the South of productive activities, the contributions paid by companies to the National Institute for Accidents at Work would have been reduced. To reduce the tax burden on companies, the Dual Income Tax would have been strengthened, the tax wedge would have been reduced.
From a mere contract between the parties, concertation became a government programme. It became a sort of last resort, and this was politically delicate and entrepreneurially very risky, because it inextricably linked industrial strategies to the fate of a government led by the largest parliamentary force on the left. And, in fact, the government lasted just a year and two months, the Pact was never implemented, investments from that moment collapsed. The concertation lost credibility. Italian uncertainty increased. We were at the end of 1998.
Prime Minister Renzi has repeatedly declared the era of concertation to be over.
