When the categories relating to innovation and conservation are brought into the debate, to verify the appropriateness of the appellations, there is only a lighthouse, the facts and the merits of the dispute. The national contract for metalworkers, which involves over 2 million workers, is among the most significant in our country, but also among the most difficult, due to the critical situation facing the industry but also due to the historic resistance of Federmeccanica , the Confindustria of the sector, to compete with advanced trade union relations.
Not only that, given the contextual difficulties and the extreme heterogeneity of our sector in terms of economic performance and size of the companies, our Contract collects all the need for a change in industrial relations on an innovative basis. Too many think it's enough to make an agreement, whatever it is. In reality, if we do not do something new, we will facilitate the decline of industrial relations.
The union begins to deal with the problems of representation. Employers' associations react like a "played boxer" when faced with leaving their ranks without thinking that, even on that front, radical change is needed. Representation and the industrial relations system are no longer "mendable" and must be regenerated on new bases.
Before the presentation of the platform, in July 2015, we were aware that it would be a complex renewal, due to the context of deflation, the industrial crisis, the absence of rules in the contractual system, the production fabric mainly consisting of small businesses, and these months of negotiating rounds confirmed all the difficulties.
TRUE INNOVATION
Everyone talks about innovation, but few choose it with the necessary courage and with the right priorities. The path traced by the FIM-CISL with the renewals of 2009 and 2012 must be developed further, focusing on new rights, to respond to people's needs and anticipate changes, and experimenting with a new contractual structure in the reality of the category. We are very clear that the contractual structure inherent in the recent renewals of metalworkers also needs to be profoundly rethought.
This means rediscovering the centrality of the person, together with the essential protection of health and well-being, and the need for his valorisation and realization in work, with the full assumption of the human dimension in the reality of work. Grounds that others leave to conferences and which must be verifiable in working conditions.
On the contractual level, we have operated as FIM-CISL with strength and conviction in recent years, often in solitude, for the relaunch of professional training as a subjective right of the worker, for the consolidation of apprenticeship and school-work alternation, for the creation of a new professional framework capable of recognizing skills and roles, for the strengthening of welfare, in particular of supplementary healthcare, to improve the level of protection, and of supplementary pensions, to give security above all to young people, for new forms of working hours, also with agile working methods, for the reconciliation between life and work, to make the involvement of workers in the organization of work and participation in company decisions effective.
All important and decisive innovations that look to the future of work and collective bargaining, and it should certainly be appreciated that in Federmeccanica's proposal there are, finally, openings on these historical claims of the FIM-CISL and the trade union movement.
SALARY AND CONTRACTUAL STRUCTURE
On salary, the positions are still very distant. Federmeccanica has gone from an initial offer of a 2,67 euro increase over three years, to a willingness to discount the difference between the increases acquired with the 2012 Contract entered into by FIM-CISL and UILM-UIL with respect to actual inflation, up to the guarantee salary proposal presented on 22 December last. A proposal, which has remained almost unchanged in these long eight months, anything but innovative, which proposes recipes of unlikely efficacy and sustainability. But the problem is not trivially one of quantity, we, who never deceive the workers, said in the assemblies that the focus of the renewal will not be on the wage chapter alone.
Federmeccanica plans to adjust the contractual minimums for only 5% of workers, through the mechanism of the so-called guarantee wage, which effectively excludes all workers who have individual superminims and company contracts from increases. A mechanism that is not only unfair, but which weighs more heavily on small companies and those most in difficulty, leaving all the others free to unilaterally provide individual super-minims, without any connection to transparent criteria of professionalism and meritocracy.
Behind the guaranteed salary, an old objective of companies is hidden, that of alternating and exceeding the two contractual levels. A wrong overlap, which would lead to the loss of purpose and specialization of the two levels of bargaining, with the double negative result of making collective representation residual and preventing the full deployment of the commitment to improve production processes and corporate realities.
Variation of the levels that exists in other countries, such as Germany, where alongside the collapse of the coverage of the percentage of workers (in 10 years from 80% to 30% of workers covered by the Lander bargaining) in 2015 the legal minimum wage, alternative to bargaining. In this regard, Germany is not an example to be imitated.
In Federmeccanica's proposal, the National Contract is dismantled without any push towards contractual decentralization. The only push is precisely towards the fake meritocracy which is the ad personam salary, without any criteria and any transparency. Just like in the 800s.
Today, the go-ahead for substantial contractual deregulation would take shape, first in terms of wages and then inevitably in terms of legislation, with the result of accentuating the tendency for companies to leave the system and calling into question the role of representation and collective bargaining of the social partners and the stability of the industrial relations system itself.
The path we have followed in FCA is virtuous and innovative, since then, unfortunately, many have pushed Federmeccanica's top management to enter into a "suitcases in hand" contract, precisely to easily exit Federmeccanica and the contractual system, thinking that companies will can get by on a proliferation of minimum wages. Legal balkanization useful only for litigation and regulatory instability. Giva is well aware that the maintenance of the national contract (erga omnes), also of the normative part, also of the workers of non-associated companies is based on equal minimum wages. The companies the next day will say, but if I'm not bound by minimum wages, why do I have to be bound by legislation?
I agree, however, that we need to be more daring, but daring doesn't mean closing ourselves in taboos or obsessing over totems. The National Contract brought back to a guarantee function, as we ask for the defense against inflation (very low anyway) will not seize any resources from decentralized Bargaining. The real innovation is to overcome the "but also" that the circularity between ideological trade unionism and the old corporate culture has imposed on us since the 90s.
It is within a new National Agreement that the drive to spread corporate and territorial bargaining can be built. It is necessary to clearly define the roles and the non-overlapping of the two levels as regards the subjects and the nature of the salary of each level.
We are aware that, without prejudice to the objective of full protection of purchasing power, through the increase in minimum wages for all workers, it is necessary to further enhance the whole range of tools for safeguarding disposable income, such as welfare, and focus decisively to the increase in real wages through negotiation and decentralized redistribution of the wealth that is produced.
SALARY AND PRODUCTIVITY
As FIM-CISL we have long and convincedly supported the need to link bargaining to the challenges of productivity and quality, to intervene on critical factors, to improve quality and innovation, and thus to build the conditions for perspective and sustainability of our industrial system.
We are all in favor of freeing up and deploying bargaining in the workplace in this sense, but what Federmeccanica maintains, which moreover reconfirms the rigidity and difficulty also in the establishment of territorial bargaining for workers in small companies, contradicts and prevents this process from taking place .
NEW INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
The system needs to be renewed on solid foundations and this is essential to support a new phase of strengthening, relaunching and innovating our manufacturing system.
The challenge is for everyone, including Federmeccanica. The participation and involvement of workers must be relaunched, with a real choice of quality of trade union relations, of a more advanced and virtuous ground for meeting between business and organized work. There is no innovation if the Contract is not done quickly and well.
We will therefore continue the contractual battle with determination, which we consider vital for the prospects of our system, because we are the union that does not give up and intends to contribute to building hope and the future for workers, industrial relations and the trade union movement of our Village. In the field of innovation we were born ready, but we will always oppose the responsibility of participation to the discretion without rules.
In FCA many steps in this direction have been taken but now it's time for a leap in quality. It's called participation and it requires new corporate and trade union cultures and a higher ground for meeting between the two.
Federmeccanica is well aware that everyone, at home, must silence those who have always bet on common defeats by focusing on intransigence.
It is the moment of discernment and responsibility, of a few challenges to be faced all together.
Marco Bentivogli is general secretary of the FIM-CISL.
