“The big freeze” is how the Economist defined the wage stagnation that has been going on for ten years now and which affects more or less all the countries affected by the crisis. Wages no longer grow or grow too little and this is bad. What suffers is not only demand, which decreases, but also labor productivity, which stagnates, and innovation itself, which lacks one of the fundamental incentives, i.e. earnings.
"Low wages, low productivity, low consumption": this was the compromise on which the planned economies of the East were based which, precisely for this reason, first experienced a long phase of stagnation (the Brezhnevian era) and then collapsed . It is a very dangerous spiral which must be broken. As? With adequate wage strategies which, unfortunately, seem to be lacking at the moment not only by the union but also by entrepreneurs and the state.
Let's start with the state. Postponing the renewal of employment contracts for Public Employees for the second time may also be an obligatory choice (as Minister Madia says: we don't have the money!), but if it becomes a rule it is a wrong choice. The right choice is the radical reorganization of the PA along two fundamental lines: the outsourcing of activities that can be ensured equally or even better by private individuals and the opening up of the market for services to competition (transport, waste collection, energy, health, school , etc.).
The State is by no means destined to disappear as some fear, it just has to change. In other words, it must increase its policy-making and control capacity through independent Authorities and, above all, by equipping itself with super-qualified and adequately remunerated Contracting Authorities, and it must concentrate on activities that today (tomorrow it may no longer be true) only the State can do and try to do them well.
Proper trade union bargaining, which focuses on the merit, professionalism, productivity and responsibility of each public employee, would certainly help to move in this direction. The transformation of the State in the sense of a less invasive and more incisive State also passes through a new system of industrial relations.
For industry and other productive sectors, the choice to be made is, if possible, even more radical. For many years now (at least since 1992) the Italian union has no longer negotiated wages intended as consideration for a specific job. In other words, he no longer negotiates the concrete contents of work, which are fatigue, professionalism, productivity and responsibility. Content that varies from sector to sector, from company to company, from worker to worker and which can only be negotiated at the company level.
Since the "wage cages" were abolished (which, in reality, made it possible to take into account the diversity of the cost of living in the various territories) and since the strategy of equal wage increases for all was established (on the basis of the mistaken belief that technological development and the scientific organization of work would have eliminated the differences between the different jobs).
The union has gradually shifted its action to other areas. For the salary trend (considered by many to be an independent variable) he relied on the income policy defined from time to time through the practice of concertation; for productive development it has focused on sector plans negotiated with business organizations and with the Ministry of Industry, while for reforms (taxation, health care, etc.) it has aimed directly at an agreement with the government, bypassing Parliament itself.
All of these choices turned out to be wrong in the end. The result of a political and trade union culture that has now come to an end. Along this path, the Italian trade union has lost weight within companies without gaining any in society. Thus he took the path of irrelevance which today allows Renzi to shrug when Camusso or Landini threaten strikes or hot autumns.
If it does not want to disappear completely, the union must radically change its wage strategy and must do so as soon as possible. It must restore the centrality of articulated bargaining and link the wage trend to that of productivity. It must re-learn to take into account the concrete conditions of the company (accepting the part of business risk that belongs to the workers) as well as being able to evaluate the economic and social conditions of the territory in which it operates. This strategy will certainly determine differentiations between workers and territories. It is absolutely inevitable that this will happen but it is not necessarily a bad thing.
After all, before the union took the path that turned out to be wrong, things worked exactly like this. It was the articulated bargaining that allowed the workers of a specific company to win improvements which the union then tried to extend, if it succeeded, to all the other workers in the sector through national bargaining, not vice versa.
Just as it is with the reduction of the tax wedge, ie the cost of labor, and not with the simple reduction of taxes for workers, that the government can help create room for wage increases linked to increased productivity, not vice versa. Entrepreneurs could also contribute to this breakthrough in wage bargaining. It would be enough for them to follow Marchionne's example!
But today it is up to the union to make the most difficult choices and, unfortunately, at least until now, there are no personalities capable of doing so within it.
