A worker metalworker he earns an average of over 40 thousand euros and wages, also thanks to the so-called separate agreements, have increased up to 2021 more than inflation. Compared to many other sectors, there is less use of precarious contracts and more concrete and sustained levels of protection, while gender pay gaps are lower. This is what emerges from the "1st Dashboard of work in metalworking" the survey of Fim Cisl and Research center REF.
"We strongly wanted this analysis on metalworking to better understand how much it has changed and the new challenges it brings with it - commented the general secretary of Fim Cisl Robert Benaglia –. The change in work is even more pervasive and accelerated in our sector and must lead the whole union to change objectives, strategies and ways of representing the increasingly qualified blue-collar workers, capable of expressing productivity and growing skills."
Meltal mechanics in the years of crisis
The engineering work is interesting about 2 million workers in Italy. “Metalworking industrial production, driven by 241 billion of exports in 2021 higher than those of 2019 which was 224 billion, while productivity, the black beast of Italian industry, has grown by 10 percentage points in the last 15 years, employment has recovered pre-Covid levels and real wages remained stable before the 2022 decline due to the war and the energy shock and inflation,” continued Benaglia.
The problems of metalworkers
However, problems remain. There are 206 crisis tables, especially in theauto, metallurgy ed appliances. But for almost eight percent of companies, the difficulty of hiring new resources is a problem for carrying out the activity. There is a lack not so much of specialized figures as of low-skilled workers compared to the needs of the companies, as well as the weakening of the metalworking presence in the South of the country.
This is why Benaglia concluded: “However, we must not sit on these results. The risk that the Italian union runs is that of agitating twentieth-century slogans that are less and less understood in the workplace. On the basis of this investigation, Fim Cisl is even more convinced that a "reform bargaining" is needed capable of completing the set of protections starting from recognized skills, from raising wages linked to expressed professionalism, from the ability to accompany metalworkers in the many work transitions that characterize them”.
"It is a new time for work, especially in our sector, the inequalities we still find must be attacked with innovative proposals", concluded the secretary.
