In a country where it is fashionable to argue, what is needed instead is the ability to bring new ideas into play and - around being - being able to team up.
No one - Government, companies, trade unions - can think of doing it alone: you need to know how to question yourself, because the old schemes of the past or ordinary maintenance are no longer enough.
It is always said that competitiveness and innovation are the challenges that companies will have to deal with in the globalized economy. That's true, but the same goes for the union and the government. Because after the crisis nothing will be the same. In eight years, industry has lost 600 jobs and a third of its productive fabric: figures worthy of a war report. But the crisis alone might not have caused so much damage if it hadn't been aggravated by the unpreparedness of Italian companies, which after the great transformation of the 90s have not been able to keep up with the changes. In some cases, or rather, they didn't want to: otherwise the drop of 80 billion experienced by investments in the same period of time could not be explained. In many cases the capitalists of our house have preferred to take refuge in income, in others they have brought wealth out of Italy (not always in a legal way).
As the Fim also argued in the hearing in Commission X Productive Activities in the Chamber which was held on Tuesday 1 March, Industry 4.0 is a revolution that has already begun. The Government must now do its part courageously to make up for the sensational delay accumulated in recent years: major investments are needed in new technologies (starting from broadband), but also a profound cultural change and new organizational models, in which trade unions and workers can play an important role. Firms must restart investment programs that have been postponed for too long and achieve true employee participation in corporate strategies. It is also necessary to fill the gap in professional skills through the introduction of training as a subjective right and school/work alternation. New methods and innovative tools for organizing work must also be tested, such as smart working and co-working.
In short, a positive and planning vision of work needs to be recovered.
What our country needs today is a major industrial and strategic plan, essential for recovering productivity, a plan that encourages back reshoring and above all repositions Italy among the world leaders in industrial manufacturing.
In the engineering sector, which represents 7,4% of the wealth produced in Italy, the union has acted as a barrier: bargaining, defending employment, pushing the industrial system to become more competitive.
In these days the renewal of the metalworking contract is being discussed with Federmeccanica, one of the most difficult renewals in history, which affects over 2 million people. The negotiation comes at a critical moment: inflation close to zero requires a decisive re-orientation, a leap forward, of trade union and industrial relations. To achieve it, there is a need – on everyone's part – to overcome ideological prejudices rooted in the past and position rents.
For its part, the Fim has said right from the start that it is not interested in tactics. The metalworkers of the Cisl are in fact convinced that the reform of the very way of doing bargaining must take into account the innovations that are developing on the technological front, starting with Industry 4.0.
The distances are still considerable compared to the platform presented by the industrialists. The orientation of the Cisl mechanics is known: maintenance of the two contractual levels, while avoiding overlaps and redundancies; a national contract which remains an instrument of regulatory and wage guarantee, and which therefore reaffirms the objective of protecting wages from inflation, making the contractual minimums the reference wage for all employees in the sector; ample space for decentralized bargaining, both at company and territorial level, which increasingly becomes the ambit in which productivity is measured and the results are redistributed. This is because wealth must be distributed where it is generated, i.e. within the company.
Unfortunately, in many Italian companies a defensive attitude towards competition prevails; that is, it is believed that it can keep pace only by squeezing the cost of labor and focusing on extreme flexibility. This also explains the increase in cancellations of supplementary contracts, in particular of their salary components.
Such an approach runs counter to best practice. In this regard, it is all too easy to cite the virtuous example of the FCA – CNHI Group, which thanks to the agreements signed with the Fim Cisl today has allowed the country to hook up to the recovery, a large part of which is centered on the positive performance of the automotive sector. Those agreements, it should be remembered, did not cut anything, neither rights nor wages, which demonstrates how the best way forward, even on the bargaining front, is certainly not that of low-priced gaming.
Obviously bargaining alone cannot make up for the shortcomings of the system – Italy. In order to grow productivity and employment in a stable manner, it thus becomes essential to work on the economic environment in which companies operate: the reduction of the cost of energy, the streamlining of bureaucracy, the certainty of justice, investments in tangible and intangible infrastructures are perhaps the most important knots to untie.
But even more important is the question that we can define as cultural.
And, on this, the challenge of participation will be decisive. Which can be of different types, depending on the model that is taken as a reference. The Fim, for its part, chose not to neglect anyone from the outset. Thus, alongside a participation that takes the form of information and consultation rights, which pays close attention to social responsibility practices and the development of corporate ethical codes, which is measured on organizational well-being and contractual welfare, which seeks to encourage training as an instrument of individual and collective growth, there is also a strategic type of participation. That is, the one which, along the lines of what is already happening in Northern European countries, aims to affect the governance of companies through the introduction of workers or their representatives in control and supervisory bodies.
Indeed, one thing is certain: involvement, while indispensable, is not sufficient to ensure a virtuous reconciliation between productivity and quality of work and life. Only those unfamiliar with a modern factory can deny it. Instead, we need real participation.
This is also demonstrated by the results of the most important research on factory work in recent years, “People and the factory. A research on Fiat-Chrysler workers in Italy”, carried out by Fim Cisl in collaboration with the Milan and Turin Polytechnics. More than 5 workers interviewed, regardless of political-union orientations, to listen to their voices and identify solutions for the sustainability of the system and not mere denunciation.
The moral is that, in order not to be relegated to marginality or reduced to hostages of television lounges, we must return to the workers, listen to them, study their work, with the respect, attention and curiosity of those who know how to set aside their slogan to open up to innovative ideas.
Furthermore, the great challenge of modernity is won with widespread sharing and a strong alliance between all those subjects who, not from today, practice innovation in deeds and actions, overcoming dogmas and positional rents. Of course, to be in the field, all the subjects of the representation need to come to terms with their own capacity for self-reform. Ordinary maintenance is no longer enough, we are called to make radical, refounding and regenerating choices. Radicals, because modernity requires a change that is above all cultural. Refounding, because in many respects we have distanced ourselves from the great intuitions on which the union was founded. Regenerating, because positive values, trust in progress and equity must be the hallmarks of organizations capable of planning the future and restoring hope and perspective to young people.
