The internalization of markets and the globalization of production systems have, in the last twenty years, radically changed the paradigms of international competitiveness and productivity. The length of the annual working hours, the flexibility of the work performance and the rapid adaptation of the workforce to the needs of the demand can make the productive allocation of a company in a given area of the world more or less convenient.
In the global world, those countries that enjoy fewer contractual or legal constraints are favored, such as the Anglo-Saxon countries or those of the Bric, and in particular a correlation can be found between the growth rate of these countries, and more generally of the emerging countries , and the amount of annual working time.
According to the data of the international survey promoted by the Industrial Union of Turin, in collaboration with the Association of Industrialists of Lyon, carried out in 41 countries and in more than 200 production plants, the effective work performance of a shift worker, including absenteeism and overtime, varies from the Eurozone average of 1.510 hours per year, with a gap between the average 1.426 hours in France and 1.675 hours in Austria, and, among the remaining European countries, between about 1.700 in Poland and from Croatia and over 1.800 from Romania and Serbia, up to over 2.000 from Turkey.
Among the countries with an Anglo-Saxon tradition, they range from around 1.800 in Great Britain to almost 1.900 in the United States and Australia and, in the BRICs, from a minimum level of 1.600 average hours in Russia to over 2.000 in Brazil or 2.200 and more in the China and India.
Basically, in countries with progressively increasing annual working hours, there is a stable or sustained growth rate, while the lower annual working hours in the Eurozone countries correspond to a lower if not negative growth rate, with the exception of Germany, which compensates for working hours in line with the Eurozone average (1.527 hours per year) with higher productivity due to the greater intensity of hourly work.
Current European working hours, which may, at first glance, seem to favor the quality of life, are however the result of that neo-pauperist culture, of Catholic and socialist origin, of "working less to work all", which has been favored in Germany by the social democratic government of Gerhard Schroeder with the solidarity contracts of reduced hours applied mainly in large industry, in France by the law on the 35 hours per week of the socialist Martine Aubry, at the time Minister of Labor, and in Italy by the political-trade union drive to reduce working hours through national labor agreements, if not on a weekly level to 35 hours, as promised in his first government by Romano Prodi to Fausto Bertinotti, at least on an annual level with the reduction of pro- you understand.
With the introduction of annual contractual permits for reduced working hours (from 12 to 15 paid 8-hour permits per day according to the various National Collective Labor Agreements), the theoretical annual working days, after deducting permits, holidays and midweek holidays, in Italy have been brought in fact 213 out of 365 in the calendar, or in other words about seven months of work out of twelve.
In this way, the Italian annual working calendar is about two months shorter than, for example, that of the United States: one could therefore say that in the last six years, from 2007 to 2012, an American worker worked one year more than an Italian worker!
If in France and Germany today we can detect a tendency to define trade union agreements to review the weekly working time and bring it back to values closer to those in place in other industrialized countries, thanks also to the national regulations on working hours which have become more attentive to the problems of competitiveness, in Italy it still seems difficult, if not impossible, to think of interventions aimed at promoting growth with an increase in the overall quantity of work.
Proof of this is the recent proposal by Undersecretary Polillo to give up a week's holiday in order to have a positive impact on GDP of about one percentage point, a proposal which has given rise to a rather heated debate, but which has not been fully accepted by the unions either difficult to intervene on the rights acquired by workers, nor by companies, which, among the interventions adopted to deal with the production slowdown phase, have resorted to the total use of backlog holidays and those accrued during the year.
Among the measures of the "August manoeuvre" of decree 138 of August 13, 2011, the previous Government had already intervened on the annual work calendar, to reduce the opportunities for "long bridges" with the well-known negative effects on GDP, shifting, on the basis of the most widespread European practice, on the Friday before or on the Monday following the first Sunday immediately following civil holidays (April 25, May 2 and June XNUMX) and religious holidays, excluding concordats (essentially the Patron Saint).
Like much of the "August manoeuvre", this intervention on the annual calendar was also the subject of controversy due to the symbolic value of the three dates of civil holidays affected by the provision, so much so that in the process of converting the decree law into law 148 of 14 September 2011, in addition to the concordat holidays, these three civil holidays were also excluded from the shift, reducing the possibility of de facto scheduling the feast of the patron saint to Friday or Monday only, the date of which must be fixed by a decree of the Presidency of the Council by November 30 of each year.
For 2012, since the Government did not issue the decree by 30 November last year, all the patron saints are still celebrated according to tradition, with a singular coincidence that on 24 June San Giovanni, patron saint of Turin, Genoa and Florence, this year it fell on a Sunday, while on Friday 29 June, SS Peter and Paul, the patron saint of Rome was celebrated, and always on Friday it will fall on 7 December Sant'Ambrogio, patron saint of Milan.
1977 is now far away, the year in which the then Minister of Labour, the Christian Democrat Tina Anselmi, in agreement with the social partners, in order to increase, as was said, the competitiveness of the production system and contain the dynamics of labor costs , increased the annual working days by abolishing seven holidays, five religious (Epiphany, Saint Joseph, Ascension, Corpus Domini, Saints Peter and Paul) and two civil (June 2 and November 4), two of which were subsequently reintroduced (January 6 in 1986 and June 2 in 2001).
Moreover, as Professor Renato Mannheimer pointed out in his recent survey, the hypothesis of giving up a week's holiday, for equal pay, to stimulate growth, is shared by over half of the population, evidently more aware than others to find every remedy to overcome this phase of crisis.
The trade unions should take this into account in the now open season of renewal of the main national labor contracts, to start an antidepressant maneuver with the reduction, for example, of 5-7 annual contractual leave with the corresponding monetization, rather than a reduction of holidays that could have a constitutional constraint for at least the first four weeks. If the Government then proceeded to detax and decontribute these monetized amounts, a possible initiative since it is a positive differential with respect to the current forecasts of tax and social security revenues, an increase of about three percentage points in net wages would be obtained to boost consumption and encourage GDP growth.
