When in May of last year it was signed at Palazzo Chigi the Electrolux deal with the withdrawal of 1200 redundancies and recourse to solidarity contracts, firmly desired by Matteo Renzi, it was quite clear that the reform of the social safety nets would be based on the weakening of the redundancy fund, limiting the causes and duration, enhancing on the other hand the " contract of solidarity”, an institution that has not been used so far by companies, either due to a certain management rigidity or due to the availability of more flexible tools such as layoffs in its various forms (ordinary, extraordinary, by way of derogation) or mobility ( voluntary or linked to retirement).
Il solidarity agreement, introduced by the law n. 863/1984, is a company contract that creates forms of solidarity among workers, through reductions in hours partially or totally at their expense, according to the union slogan of the time “work less, work all”. The law provides for two types of contracts that can be stipulated between the company and the workers' unions adhering to the most representative confederations:
- that "defensive", which establishes a temporary reduction in working hours in order to avoid, in whole or in part, the reduction or declaration of excess personnel, also through a more rational use of it. The wages lost by the workers, following the reduction of the agreed working hours, is partially compensated by the intervention of the extraordinary redundancy fund with no ceiling, with full coverage of notional contributions for pension purposes;
- that “expansive”, or structural, which is aimed at increasing the workforce with permanent hiring through a stable reduction in working hours, with a proportional and flat reduction in wages, and with the granting of tax breaks.
Experience to date has revealed an overall limited but diversified use of the two types of contracts: contained, but not without relevance as in the Electrolux case, in the "defensive" model; almost nothing in the "offensive" model. It can therefore be deduced a certain stability of the internal solidarity among employed workers, and a failure Complete of external solidarity between employed and non-employed workers (unfortunately a problem that is also occurring with the so-called "generational relay" between senior and junior personnel in the regions where it is currently being tested).
And it could only be like this, particularly in these years of prolonged crisis, given the convenience for workers and companies to use the redundancy fund first and foremost, almost without time limits, and only once all the possibilities of its use have been exhausted, resort to the solidarity contract: as for the workers of the FCA logistics center in Nola, which, in layoffs since 2008, will now be placed, without interruption, in solidarity for another 24 months.
In the new scenario of rationalization of layoffs, it is in any case probable that the solidarity contract will find greater use also in the light of the legislative decree implementing the Jobs Act regarding the reorganization of social safety nets, now being examined by the Labor commissions of the Chamber and Senate for a non-binding opinion.
With the reform, the ordinary redundancy fund, the extraordinary one and the solidarity contracts are considered as one unicum that can be used in a maximum period of time. In particular, the duration of the ordinary and extraordinary fund is set at 24 months for each production unit to be calculated in a mobile five-year period, against the current 36 months in the fixed five-year period.
That of rolling five-year period is a salient point of the reform for the temporal reduction of layoffs: with the fixed five-year terms ranging from 5 years in 5 years (the last from August 2010 to August 2015), if the fund was used in the last 36 months of a five-year , it could be extended by another 36 months in the first three years of the following five-year period, thus reaching an uninterrupted period of 6 years of layoffs.
The solidarity contract also has a duration of 24 months but it can be extended up to 36 months, even continuously, since the period of the first 24 months is counted, for the purposes of reaching the 36-month limit, only half: for example, a 24-month period will be worth 12 months, a 20 months will be worth 10 and so on; beyond 24 months the duration of the solidarity contracts will be computed in full.
The implementing decree also establishes the 60 per cent the maximum limit for the average reduction in daily hours, weekly or monthly of the workers involved in the solidarity contract, while for each worker the percentage of overall reduction in working hours cannot be greater than 70 per cent over the entire period for which the contract is stipulated.
With this tool, therefore, the needs to downsize personnel are met not through collective redundancies or zero-hour suspensions of a corresponding number of workers, but involving a larger number of workers in a reduction of working hours (hence the term "solidarity"), in order to achieve an overall reduction in working hours equivalent to those that would have been worked by the excess staff.
The value of the Solidarity Contract, which tends to minimize the social impact of corporate intervention on personnel, reducing the economic sacrifice and distributing it to a wider audience of workers, however, at the same time constitutes its intrinsic limit in terms of usability for companies. In fact, the tool is not concretely applicable in all situations of redundancies, especially in cases of redundancies characterized by highly inhomogeneous elements (direct/indirect personnel, etc.) or in the presence of non-fungible tasks.
