Let us ask ourselves a question: why is it so difficult to reach an agreement on industrial relations? At first I am tempted to answer in a paradoxical way. For at least ten years Confindustria and CGIL, CISL and UIL have been sitting at a negotiating table to redefine the rules of collective bargaining and representation for one reason only: to bring the CGIL back into the system. But this objective, like a matryoshka, contained another that conditioned the first: "normalize" the category of metalworkers who could no longer find the team to stipulate a unitary contract.
To do this however - we are always uncovering the matryoshka - it was essential to bring Fiom back on the correct track, whose unavailability (a real Aventine) had become the cause of disaffection for any conclusive negotiation of the CGIL itself. Basically, even when the CGIL had agreed to sign an agreement in 2011, this remained practically on paper because Fiom had turned up its nose. Then came the turning point - sudden and unexpected above all in terms of content - of the Fim-Fiom-Uilm unitary contract of November 2016.
“It's done – I said to myself – the metalworkers are back to supplying the line; the stewardship will follow”. Instead it wasn't like that. Indeed, evaluating the positions in the field, one gets the impression that the parties are looking for a "third way" and that the approach of the metalworkers constitutes a case that has not been denied, but tolerated. Above all, it is not taken as an example by the other categories (as has always happened in post-war trade union history) and by the confederations themselves. On the other hand, one would say that it is up to the CGIL to find a line of compromise which - at this point - is also shared by the other categories, reluctant to follow the example of the metalworkers.
The situation is certainly more complex than the "quadrille" we have described up to now, but the problems are more or less always the same: what balance to find - also in terms of resource allocation - between the different levels of bargaining. The fact is that the interconfederal negotiations have followed paths and schedules unrelated to the appointments of the most important categories with their contractual renewals. Thus, admitted and not granted that Confindustria and the trade union confederations "dare" to sign an agreement before the elections (with the concern of bringing water - for or against someone - in the context of political competition) it would in any case arrive in time to extinguish the lights of a contractual season that is already behind us.
It is not the first time that the confederal bodies enter the scene in the last act although the script of the comedy would like to see them play their part in the first. It would have been one thing to orient the negotiations before they began, another to get things done. The vexed question of the role of the national contract - in a scenario that has seen the intervention of the law in the regulation of the employment relationship greatly expand - is now limited to safeguarding the purchasing power of wages in relation to the trend in the cost of life in a stage whose inflation is kept alive with artificial respiration.
Providing now a formulation of a general nature would become a sort of arbitration between the solution found in the chemists' contract and that envisaged in the metalworkers' agreement. Not only would this not make practical sense; but it is doubtful that the confederations can have the necessary authority to mediate within an unimportant batracomiomachia, because the solutions found by the two categories have both received the consent of the workers concerned.
After the elections, the scenario could be different: in the electoral programs of the most responsible forces, there is talk of a legal minimum wage and the law on representation, in order to deal with a fragmentation of representation itself which has seriously affected the collective bargaining structures where they are always more recurring and threatening, on the one hand, the downward "piracy" of the rules; on the other, the spread, even in sectors once "vaccinated", of the pestilence of grassroots radical syndicalism. But in order to redesign a stable and solid model of industrial relations, political power should, first of all, guarantee itself these preconditions. The doubts are understandable. And disturbing.
