When I was a boy and accompanied my mother to the Mercato della Piazzola, I was enchanted by listening to the oratory performances of a character who was very popular among the people of Bologna at the time, who sold razor blades. His name was Biavati (I don't remember his name, but everyone knew him only by his surname). He extolled the quality of his product with a rhetorical technique that would make Marc'Antonio's speech in front of Caesar's corpse envious. If you think about it, the skill of a salesman is to convince even those who don't need it at the moment to buy his product. It was easy to sell razor blades to those who came specifically to buy them, but by limiting yourself to this market you wouldn't have made ends meet.
Obviously the Piazzola hawker was busy singing the praises of his product, perhaps with some obvious exaggeration that earned him more sympathy. I always think of Biavati (absit iniuria verbis) how much I listen to the statements of Maurizio Landini who persists in describing a condition of the labor market in which precariousness is rampant. There is nothing that can induce him to change his representation. Nor the XXIII Annual Report of the INPS where a situation in progress is described: "The recovery of the labor market after the pandemic crisis has been fast and consistent. Despite a decrease of 652 thousand units of the working-age population between February 2020 (the eve of the pandemic crisis) and May 2024 (last month of observation available at the closing date of the Report), the number of employed people increased by 912 thousand units, and the employment rate went from 59,0% to 62,2%, the result of a change in the male and female employment rates of +2,8 and +3,5 percentage points respectively". Furthermore, always comparing February 2020 with May 2024, it should be noted that the share of employees with temporary contracts, on the total number of employees, dropped from 16,7% to 15,3%.
A trend that is confirmed by the half-yearly report of the Cisl which is still a union: "In the trend comparison, that is to say the year-on-year comparison, therefore compared to the same quarter of the previous year (2023nd quarter 329), employment grew by 1,4 thousand units, equal to 2019% in a year, while in 1, immediately before Covid, it grew at a rate of less than 3,3% per year. Even in the trend data, the increase is concentrated on permanent employees who grow by 6,7%, while fixed-term employees continue to decline (-0,6% in a year); the gradual recovery of self-employed workers also continues (+5% in a year) who are returning to pre-pandemic numbers, exceeding the symbolic figure of 1,2 million. The growth in the employment rate is more marked in the South (+0,9 points) and in the Center (+0,1) compared to the North where it remained substantially stable (+1,7). In particular, in the centre, female employment grew by XNUMX percentage points in one year.
But the aspect that leaves most perplexed is the silence on the successes of the union in its main mission, the collective bargaining of working conditions. Anyone who has the patience and courtesy to read these notes will realize that they have never heard them mentioned in one of the interviews with union leaders, as if these results had to be kept secret so as not to obscure the catastrophic representations that allow demonstrations and strikes that are now two-way (Cgil and Uil). When in Italy there was discussion about the legal minimum wage, the Cnel which holds the National Archive of contracts certified that as of June 30, 2023, of the 976 Ccnl relating to the private sector, 553 had expired (57%). Private workers with a contract expired at that date were 7.732.902, 56% out of a total of 13.839.335. Punctual as a Swiss chronograph, the Cnel has released the data relating to the first half of the current year. In absolute terms, employees with a Ccnl that had not expired made a leap forward from 5.828.481 to 7.939.646 workers, with a six-month increase of 36%. Conversely, employees with an expired Ccnl decreased in the same period by 25%, going from 8.564.606 to 6.443.387 workers.
Specifically, with the round of contractual negotiations in the first half of the year, 22 renewal agreements and 16 economic agreements with a salary adjustment were filed with the Cnel Archives, which involved (according to Uniemens data updated to 2023 and excluding the “Agriculture” and “Domestic Work” sectors due to lack of reporting) 750.506 companies, for a total of 4.837.339 employees. The following table highlights at a glance a scenario that has changed significantly in the space of a few months.
But it is better not to talk about these aspects because they are yellowed attitudes. Today a union of yesteryear it deals with politics, organizes referendums on institutional issues, delimits the boundaries of the broad field and defends them with its organizational strength, indicates the main path to follow.