Italy, which has not yet managed to emerge from the global financial crisis, needs many things, except for a tense climate in industrial relations. With high unemployment, with young people who can't find work, with companies that have a shortage of demand, there's really no reason to have union tensions. Yet we find ourselves with a strong clash in Fiat, where the company is unable to apply an agreement voted by the majority of workers. And now we learn that, on the eve of the negotiation with the ABI, the UIL canceled the 1993 agreement to avoid repeating the union representation criteria set forth in that agreement.
In reality, there is no clash between companies and workers in the country. It could be otherwise, given the bad conditions of our economy, where both companies and workers are looking for a way to survive. Instead, there is a clash between the workers' unions, with CGIL on one side and CISL and UIL on the other. And there is the interference of the Minister of Labor who openly sides with CISL and UIL, yearning for a return to the time of the split of the Valentine's agreement of the now long-gone 1984.
The climate of confrontation between the unions is so heated that it seems impossible to put them at the same table. Yet an agreement is needed. Not so much to find a new system of industrial relations, which seems impossible with the current positions. But at least to agree on the representation of the workers' unions, when they go to sign agreements. Since it now seems certain that a non-negligible part of the next agreements will see a union split, it is necessary to find a system that establishes when an agreement is considered valid for all workers, because it is signed by the representatives of the majority of the workers themselves.
Bringing everything to a workers' referendum after exhausting negotiations between the parties, as was done in the Fiat case, does not seem to be the best solution. This would end up delegitimizing the unions and transferring the tensions that accompany the stipulation of a contract to every sector and every company. It is therefore necessary that the trade unions, before negotiating, can prove their real representation through the number of members. And if there is no agreement on the criteria of representation, this is the case in which the Government must intervene with a law to impose a simple criterion, which can then be replaced when and if the unions have reached a different agreement. In this sense, Senator Pietro Ichino presented a proposal in 2010 which was also approved by the Senate Labor Commission. We could therefore start from this proposal to define the representativeness of the trade unions. If then the latter, together with Confindustria, are able to find an agreement they deem better, this can be incorporated into the law, as Ichino's proposal itself suggests.
With all the problems in our country, it would be useful to defuse this mine that is producing social tensions that are really not needed.
*Economist, president of UBS Italia and of the University of Trento.
