On the occasion of the recent meeting of the builders of the metropolitan area of Milan, the President of Ance, Claudio De Albertis, raised a very disturbing alarm which does not seem to have garnered much attention (Gianfelice Rocca's report to the Assolombarda meeting did not even cited the construction sector) on condition of widespread illegality in which companies that work correctly find themselves operating on construction sites, besieged by the lobbies of a sector in which the rules have been broken and unfair competition is rampant.
On what assumptions is this alarm based, which comes from a long-time leader of the entrepreneurial associative world? On the one hand there seems to be a turnaround in the sector after the unfortunate 2008-2015 parenthesis in which more than 40% of the payroll and almost 50% of the hours worked were lost, but the data relating to the payroll collected by the Cassa Edile, to which all workers working in the sector should be registered, go in the opposite direction. In fact, there is a further reduction estimated for 2016 of 8,53%.
In the same period, the number of employees increased from just over 34 to just under 25. The construction of Expo itself did not bring great benefits to the Cassa Edile. How do you explain all this? What worries most is that the contractual rules applied to a large number of workers usually present on construction sites are different from those of the contract for construction workers who are registered with the fund.
Furthermore, the presence on construction sites of companies which, while carrying out work similar to construction, if not substantially equivalent, apply to workers collective agreements of commodity sectors other than the construction one it is a phenomenon destined to widen because the construction sector will increasingly be characterized by integration with other plant engineering and service activities.
In other words cheaper contracts are used, also from the point of view of safety and social security and insurance framework, to ensure greater competitiveness by creating a sort of social dumping that circumvents regulations by distorting competition to the detriment of companies that respect the rules. It is evident that this mechanism, if the causes are not removed, like the bad money that drives out the good one, will stop only when the construction contract is applied only to residual groups of workers. In the words of President De Albertis, "either we are all saved or we disappear".
It is true that not all the activities on a construction site are necessarily attributable to the professional circumstances of the construction contract, but faced with the evidence of such a serious anomaly, concrete proposals that are as clear as they are effective are immediately needed. We must start from the awareness that it is the legal and contractual system in force that allows this degeneration.
The non-implementation of article 39 of the Constitution, despite a jurisprudence that tends to recognize the general effectiveness of contracts signed by the major trade union organizations, allows not only the signing of contracts for companies, sectors or professional areas, but also the coexistence of different contracts signed for the same sector by different contractual subjects, whether they are more or less representative. Added to this is that the union itself has always opposed a law provision establishing the so-called "minimum wage".
The most linear solution, put forward by the builders' association and shared by the building trade union, would certainly be that of construction site contract, integrating the "new" professional profiles and extending the effectiveness of this contract to all personnel present on the construction site who would be guaranteed the safety protection and performance of the bilateral bodies, starting with the construction funds.
It would come at the same time eliminated at the root of what we could define as contractual avoidance and the wage bill for workers would increase. It can be argued that this would not cancel black work or even could make it grow but it can also be argued that the controls for tax and social security evasion, they would be made simpler and more effective by a uniform contractual structure.
The reals enemies of this project they nestle numerous not only between the entrepreneurs who, taking advantage of circumstances that permit it, apply less onerous contracts than that of construction, but also between trade unions who organize and represent workers to whom a contract other than the construction contract applies. They are the subjects who express legitimate but conservative interests of a status quo which, in the opinion of the builders' association and the building trade unions, is at the basis of serious distorting phenomena if not of the spread of the use of undeclared work.
Una intermediate compromise solution but it is possible. It would be a question of providing (an ad hoc legislative provision would cut the bull's head off), for all companies that carry out activities of any kind on a construction site without exception, the obligation to register their employees with the local building fund (which in Milan today controls only 30-40% of the workforce entering the construction site) to allow them to receive the same protections and all the benefits guaranteed to workers to whom the building contract is applied.
The same obligation should apply also for individual entrepreneurs, against which it is absolutely necessary and urgent to establish strict and selective regulations for access to the profession. Action for legality sometimes obtains the best results with gradual but effective steps to neutralize the conservative lobbies that lurk almost everywhere and also feed on the opacity and overlapping of rules which, perhaps in the name of the free circulation of workforce, allow too much room for discretion. If, as De Albertis says, it is necessary and possible to find the solution by the end of the year, we will have to hurry.
