The debate on minimum salary between:
- who would like it but it must be of a significant amount and therefore not minimal thus expanding the illegal working area
- who believes that, having defined a minimum threshold, there will no longer be the push for a demanding bargaining aimed at defining a correct correspondence between work performance and salary and the minimum wage would become the alibi for not increasing the already low Italian salaries ...
is leading to the impossibility of addressing the issue of minimum salary as an aspect of the necessary correlation between the economic system and the Industrial Relations system.
On the legislative level, the recent labor reforms between attempts at liberalization and the introduction of constraints (see the fluctuating legislation on term contracts or on the use of voucher) have not led to the revitalization of the Italian industrial relations system.
The distrust of Confindustria and trade unions on legislative interventions
The Trade Union Confederations and Confindustria have always seen with suspected the intervention of the legislator. It may be sufficient to recall the ratification of theinterconfederal agreement of September 2011 with which the parties have excluded from making use of theart. 8 of Law 148/2011.
The art. 8 in support of proximity collective bargaining, recognized the efficacy towards all personnel of the agreements signed also in derogation of certain provisions of law and contract provided that they were approved by the majority of workers.
La Confindustria he could have objected that the article was too demanding for the companies because it introduced an obligation to the agreement while in the past the legislative regulations mainly imposed on the companies an obligation of "consultation procedures" but he preferred to confirm the choice of self-referentiality almost of a corporate nature of the signatories.
It is worth remembering that that article was widely contested, a repeal referendum was even proposed but it served to resolve many situations of business continuity with respect to expiring fixed-term contracts and legitimized the behavior of the then FIAT Group which was able to apply an autonomous contract to its employees who, despite the judicial warfare, came out legitimized and recently renewed by the Companies: Stellantis IVECO, CNH, Ferrari even in the absence of the continuity of the FIAT Group.
The above demonstrates that the legislative intervention has not reduced the negotiating possibilities of the social partners, on the contrary it has widened them.
Is the minimum wage required by law?
The question to ask then is: is a minimum wage introduced by law needed or not and if so, why?
It is not enough to argue that it is necessary because all the other European states have it and because the European directive asks us to do so.
The feeling is that they don't really want to make this law, because following the various reasoning that the parties involved give, one has the clear sensation that we have remained on the ground of the ideological clash and the "terror" of losing power, that power that some unions believe they can only have by controlling (not always negotiating) the National contract of the various categories. And with the excuse of the doubt that the introduction of the minimum wage by law does not represent an additional protection to those that already exist, but that it is a replacement protection, we do not want to address the problem.
Fears, real or supposed, of whatever kind always block the confrontation which instead must remain "pragmatic". So again why introduce a "minimum wage" by law?
Why introduce a minimum wage by law?
A minimum wage law should represent the correct application of thearticle 36 of the Constitution which assigns to pay not only proportionality "to the quantity and quality of his work" but also a social purpose because in any case it must "be sufficient to ensure a free and dignified existence for himself and his family".
The quantification of the minimum wage can be easily defined without further negotiation by reference to the value of the ceiling recognized by INPS for workers placed on layoffs defined for 2023 in 1.352,19 euro monthly and no one has ever disputed that this value did not respond to the constitutional provisions of Article 36, but any wage supplements were from time to time the result of company bargaining.
You should be reminded that this amount refers to 174 average monthly hours equal to 2.088 paid hours per year (40 hours for 52 weeks plus day) and consequently the hourly rate it stands at 7,77 euros per hour, an amount that would automatically be adjusted to the values of the INPS ceiling.
This amount ensures a minimum threshold to be applied in any case to unemployed workers and contracts with marginal wages, but it is still lower than the main national collective agreements and therefore does not prevent its evolution, indeed having defined by law the respect of the social aim of the art. 36 of the Constitution, national bargaining will be more oriented towards defining new contractual wage levels linked not only to the inflationary process but consistent with the trend of the economy and the extension of the social security and welfare system, while company bargaining will be able to range salaries more correlated to productivity, quality of service, economic-productive results, competitiveness, assigning to the results of the bargaining an additional salary flexibility that sets no limits to the amounts recognized (see, for example, the amounts paid recently in Ferrari).
The minimum wage as a barrier to the exploitation of those who are not covered by the National Contracts
It is worth mentioning that if the minimum wage is related to 2088 paid hours the hours worked per year are significantly lower as it is necessary to deduct the hours for: holidays, paid leave, public holidays, paid intervals such as canteens, absenteeism and consequently the company has a decidedly lower number of hours available annually for work performance and is on this number of hours that the attention of a part of the supplementary bargaining can be concentrated by creating those conditions of competitiveness that the current system has failed to achieve.
And again, even if the problem to be solved in Italy is that of lower labor incomes compared to the other G7 countries, the introduction of the minimum wage must become an effective barrier to exploitation for sections of the labor force currently not covered by the guarantee of the National Contracts or which are in that gray area between self-employment and subordinate work which is increasingly spreading and would represent a push to make workers' wages transparent and comparable.
