On 15 June Maurizio Ferrera published an editorial in the Corriere della Sera in which it is highlighted that the escape from the great crisis that began in 2008 is integrated with the entry of the economy into the 4.0 phase and that the digitization in manufacturing, commerce, services to the company and to the person it will produce a half revolution in the Labor Market. “Work will certainly not disappear, but – argues Ferrera – it will become increasingly fluid, routine tasks will contract rapidly and the various production sectors will be exposed to real «tidal» effects: sudden expansions followed by contractions, not entirely predictable”. "To manage these dynamics in an inclusive way, we need to reorganize social solidarity".
Furthermore: “today the protection systems are centered on subsidies accompanied by active policies to bring people back to work by helping them in the meantime. However, the rapidity of the changes underway requires the introduction of other tools, of a preventive nature and which support, protect and increase the ability of workers to reintegrate into a structurally changing context. It is the so-called “employability” that has been talked about for about twenty years”. Ferrera says that in many European countries it has been declined in concrete forms of aid: “the Scandinavian countries are experimenting with systems of inter-sectoral and inter-professional sorting of workers to cope with the tidal effects. In the Netherlands and Germany (but also in Canada and Australia) workers carry out periodic "employability" tests, which allow them to ascertain the status of their skills".
In our country, the closest thing to this model is Continuing Education, which is institutionally managed by the Regions (through unopted quotas of 0,30%) and by Interprofessional Funds through the 0,30% that individual companies choose to pay . In general, both the Regional Continuous Training and that of the Funds finance training projects presented by individual companies for their employees. On the other hand, projects presented by companies and/or bodies are financed on the basis of notices which set out the training target: for example innovation, prevention, etc.
The common denominator of this type of training dates back to the CGIL CISL UIL Confindustria agreement of 1993, which imagined (rightly so at the time) continuous training as a tool for retraining employees, desirable both for the employee and for the company but however fully functional to implement the professional performance of the worker within the organization of work. The acquisition of new skills by the worker was much more considered for the purposes of career development (change of category) than for a possible marketability on the labor market. If Ferrera is right, without abandoning this, let's say, maintenance trend, it will be necessary to create training that has as its objective the transmission of skills that are more transversal and oriented towards digital skills, and therefore usable on the labor market.
This operation, which is a sort of social insurance against unemployment, certainly cannot be dumped on the shoulders of companies or the State, both in terms of costs and for the definition of targets and training methods. Instead, it is necessary that the training we are talking about is rooted in a knowledge of the labor market and its changes which today do not belong to any public entity, but which can be reconstructed in the ambit of bilaterality between the social partners. I am referring above all to the Interprofessional Funds, which can mobilize knowledge of the supply-demand relationship based on the experience of the social partners and the relevant skills of the best Training Institutions and Universities.
Of course, assuming this competence implies significantly broadening the mission of the Funds, but it is in this way that, in the most linear and coherent way with their core business, they can implement Active Policies, as requested by many. However, three obligatory steps, political and regulatory, are necessary:
– recognize Permanent Training aimed at employability the status of Active Policy on a par with outplacement
– increase the financing of the Funds for the new mission: the 0,30% (or part of it) previously paid by the Companies for the mobility allowance and the unopted 0,30% that today use the Regions for tenders for Continuing Education. This does not mean expropriating the Regions, but creating integrated networks between Regions and Interprofessional Funds that overcome the episodic and frankly unsatisfactory experiences of "Common Notices" recorded so far
– of course all of this implies, in addition to a change in the legislation governing the activity of the Funds (and which among other things would make the claim that the Funds operate with the rules of public bodies a little more founded), also a review of the real consistency, representativeness and reliability of the various Funds, perhaps assuming the criterion of their traceability to the most representative Employers' Organizations and Trade Unions, pending a law on the representativeness of the Associations.
The difficulties of realizing this prospect cannot be underestimated, but it seems to us the only one capable of bringing into play both public and private resources, deploying the knowledge and skills of the Social Partners, Operators and Universities without setting up a some useless, expensive and huge public carriage.
