Once again, the German industrial relations system has shown a great ability to find suitable solutions both to meet the expectations of the world of work and to offer companies solutions that keep competitiveness high. Significant wage increases well above inflation, accompanied by significant experimentation in the flexible management of working hours with voluntary choice on the part of the workers, make the pilot agreement in Baden Wuerttemberg (which should extend to the total of about four million German metalworkers) an objective reference model.
However, we must not ignore the economic context in which the agreement was reached: full employment, the lowest levels of unemployment since the country's unification, high productivity and a fairly long period of wage break. Good news for our economy too, because Italian producers (and workers) will also benefit from the probable growth in consumption on the German domestic market. In particular, the combination of hourly reductions from 35 to 28 and increases from 35 to 40, all on a voluntary basis, will meet the different needs of families while maintaining the efficiency of the industrial apparatus.
The worker's right to decide on a short period of holidays, even if unpaid, is also introduced. But to what extent is the "German model" applicable in our country? The precondition is of a cultural nature, as it is for co-determination, for contractual articulation and for professional training: if the awareness that there are strong common interests between capital and and work even the best reforms will struggle to establish themselves.
This does not mean that the conflict should be shelved (and the stories of the IG Metal workers are tangible proof of this) but not necessarily (as was once said and as is often still thought) a contract without strikes is not a good contract. It is true that the Italian business world also shows symptoms of backwardness but for this very reason it must be challenged in terms of modernity, investments and the quality of work. The antagonistic conceptions, even if openly advocated only by minority political areas, risk bringing only frustrations and defeats to the workers.
However, the German agreement is an important opportunity for the Italian union which has to deal with an economic situation different from Germany and with an "industrial dwarfism" which does not simplify bargaining and makes the mechanical transposition of this model problematic.
For this reason, the challenge of the Italian trade union returns to the field of company bargaining, the area in which new employment, wage growth, productivity, new technologies, organization of working hours can be reconciled more effectively and, above all, a role of active participation to the workers concerned.
