Work less to work all? The way is not the French one

It is not often that an employment lawyer is able to influence the employment policies of a government. Let's avoid naming names and giving examples, just to avoid equivocal comparisons. Not all labor lawyers, maitre à pénser, elevated to the rank of advisers to ministers, have given good suggestions; not all governments, on the other hand, have been able or had the opportunity to fully understand and exploit appreciable technical-juridical proposals. Today the "regime" jurist is Pasquale Tridico, to whom Luigi Di Maio, "dazzling in his throne", entrusted the custody of the jewels of the pentastellata family and in particular of that of "citizenship income" which was supposed to change the history of the country.

Tridico put his effort into it and has set up a complex provision, so articulated as to always be at risk of losing the common thread. But he managed to get over it, even if only some of the provisions of Legislative Decree No. 4/2019 are operational, while others (digital platforms, outplacement, etc.) are messages locked up in a bottle entrusted to the waves of the sea.

Tridico identified himself so much with his creature that he wanted to follow it, right from the first cries, from the command bridge of theInps, the largest social security and welfare institution in Europe, for which the elusive Citizenship Income is just one of the many services provided, not even among the most important. But the iron must be struck while it is hot; and success cultivated while there is.

With the intention of being the protagonist of a new (or an old?) season of labor law, prof. Tridico has embarked on another challenge: that of the length of working hours. So he started dusting the old theory of “work less to work all”. "We are stuck in Italy at the last reduction in working hours in 1969," Tridico said in recent days, giving a lecture on inequalities in financial capitalism at the Faculty of Economics of the Sapienza University in Rome. «There have been no reductions for 50 years and instead it should be done. Productivity increases must be distributed either with wages or with an increase in free time. With this reduction, employment would increase».

With these statements, the ministerial adviser inserted a flea in the ear of Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio according to which the issue raised "deserves further study and maximum discussion with companies and workers' representatives". In reality, the professor's arguments are more complex. Lorenzo Savia reported on Corriere della Sera a more complex reasoning that Tridico had carried out, on a previous occasion and as a scholar, in a post on the M5S blog. Employment policies, Tridico wrote at the time, will also have to take into account the advance of robotization which puts jobs at risk. To counter this trend "the first step will be the reduction of working hours for the same wages to increase employment and encourage the productive reorganization of companies". In that post the professor also proposed the "hour bank as a tool to overcome overtime and the possibility for the worker to determine the beginning and end of working hours within a mandatory attendance range».

So far the story. There is no doubt that the departure of the new INPS commissioner (and future president) caught both the world of politics and the trade unions unprepared. This circumstance should lead to a self-critical reflection on how the two identity issues of Citizenship Income and pensions have been tackled by the political, social and cultural forces that oppose the current yellow-green majority and the government it expresses. While on "quota 100 and its surroundings" a red thread was clearly visible from the beginning which linked, albeit with an arabesque development, the positions of the League to others variously present in the union and on the left inside and outside the Democratic Party, on the Income of citizenship the attitude of the opposing camp was that of incredulity, of the belief that it was a trial balloon destined to remain such and therefore not to be taken seriously. And instead we find ourselves in the company of a robust tampering with the Fornero reform and the institution of the Citizenship Income: measures mixed, cooked and eaten in the boudoirs of the majority.

For heaven's sake, mine is not a regret for a lack of collaboration with this majority and its policies. It's just the underline of theinability to propose an alternative perhaps in advance. As he writes Marco Leonardi in the essay "Reforms halved" the REI - a more organic and less messy measure of the citizen's income and aimed at combating poverty - arrived too late and with scarce resources available. “In January 2017, when the baton was handed over from Renzi to Gentiloni, the enabling law on poverty was still to be discussed in the Senate, with no certainty about the timing, so much so that there was the risk of going to the elections without having finished the process. An agreement was found - continues Leonardi - not without some difficulty which provided for the government's commitment to write the implementing decrees very quickly ... in exchange for the Senate's renunciation of not presenting amendments to the enabling bill ". Practically on 2017 December XNUMX the REI became operational, but effective publicity was not organized and, above all, the elections were now only a few months away. In essence, argues Leonardi (former adviser to center-left governments), if the scale of priorities had put the adoption of an instrument to fight poverty before other measures, perhaps things would have gone differently. It wasn't like that, despite the well-known propaganda commitment of the M5S on the basic income.

And what about the salary issue? Had it been addressed the right way through a reduction of the tax wedge and increase in productivity also through greater use of proximity bargainingperhaps we wouldn't be here today having to chase after a bill on the minimum wage to thwart its devastating effects on bargaining, labor costs, businesses and consequently employment.

It is therefore appropriate to go back to dealing with working hours, before finding ourselves having to deal with a law affected by a "French bug" which claims to reduce the weekly working time to 35 hours, in a general and abstract way, in order to counter the advent of new technologies. Beyond the Alps they fell into the 35-hour trap at the end of the 90s and thereafterThey were better able to get out of it, despite the obvious failure. In Italy in those same years the mystique of the 35 hours persuaded the Communist Refoundation to withdraw its support from the first Prodi government. Retracing those steps would be a problem, because the same rule would be applied to situations in flux and to gradual processes of work organization changes. One thing is make use of the tool of the reduction of working hours in parallel with the entry of new technologies that change products and the way of producing, with the aim not only of safeguarding employment levels, but of ensuring that flexibility in working hours that companies need, within which they can also find a response to the needs of workers (for example thanks to a greater diffusion of smart working, perhaps through the revision of a regulation that is now plastered).

 It is necessary then an extraordinary commitment of the trade unions, at least up to what developed in the late 50s and early 60s of the last century. In recent years, the unions have been more involved in pensions than in employment, going so far as to protect young people for when they retire. Few (see the contribution of Marco Bentivogli in the book "Controrder companions") try to imagine and propose policies of claims capable of keeping pace with technological development.

One of the greatest trade unionists of the last century, a teacher for entire generations of union leaders, in his letter-will addressed to CGIL, CISL and UIL, wrote: ''Among other things we should add the need for a division of work. Obligatory stepif the goal of full employment is to be taken seriously. Or the need to intervene on the tax wedge which today weighs unequally on dependent work compared to other incomes. Or again on the urgency of improving the skills, and then the productivity, with investments, not purely symbolic, on "human capital" and therefore on continuous training''. At the time, the reference to the "obligatory passage" of the distribution of work was considered - with too much haste and little vision - a nostalgia for the past.