Knowing how to read between the lines (and getting to know "our chickens") was not a useless meeting that took place - in terms of pensions – between Minister Andrea Orlando and union leaders on 27 July. Just read the statements released to understand how things stand for now.
“We explained what our platform is,” he said Maurizio Landini, secretary of the CGIL - but we also explicitly asked that the government tell us whether it can be opened or not a negotiation on our platform. In September, therefore, it is necessary to enter into the merits, because the type of answers that will be given to us are important and we intend to make a real dispute on this, to start a mobilization» (A Mauri'! Facce Tarzan!).
Then, someone must have asked him: "But who pays?". With regard to resources - write the agencies - Landini observed that «we need to go back to separate assistance and pensions, because if we separate these two expenses, social security expenditure in our country is not higher than the European average».
A confederal secretary should know that statistics at a European level are carried out according to uniform criteria and that a country is not allowed to "submerge" an important item of expenditure amalgamated with the social security one. Obviously, if the criteria of the statistics were to be revised, this could not happen unilaterally, like "socialism in one country". All Member States would be able to write off the costs that the state budget incurs to cover the deficits of the pension systems. Thus Italy would still remain the country that spends the most. But let's forget it, for the sake of the country.
From Landini's words (closely followed by the other general secretaries), however, it is clear that the minister listened to the illustration of the trade union platform in silence and remained silent after the trade unionists had spoken. Orlando however he did not want to be a stony guest, as is clear from his statement on the meeting. “A discussion has begun on the subject of social security. The union put forward their platform, we put forward the work that emerged from a commission that will have to define the so-called 'burdensome' jobs. In the light of the assessments and opinions of the other ministries involved, the discussion will continue, I hope with a positive outcome".
No particular effort is needed to decrypt Orlando's words. First it is clear that there is still no government position, so much so that in the meeting the draft of a commission set up by Minister Catalfo was presented and the other ministers were called into question with a say starting from the owner of the MEF. However, the line that the minister would intend to follow, which is the same as that, can be guessed had peeped into the Pnrr, before the League had demanded and obtained its suppression. A few lines, but consistent with the start of discussions with the trade unions which took place on 27 July: "On the subject of pensions, the transitional phase of application of the so-called Quota 100 will end at the end of the year and will be replaced by measures aimed at categories with exhausting jobs".
How, then, can the intentions of the Minister (and of the government?) be interpreted when he presented a document in which the issue of disadvantaged work was addressed? The most logical answer – in the light of the deleted lines which today seem very clear in the light of the facts – would be that of strengthen the social bee (and consequently also the legislation for the so-called forty-year-olds/early): an institution introduced in 2017 to allow for early retirement in cases of actual need identified in some situations of personal or family difficulty and in some categories (from the initial 11 has passed to 15) attributable to disadvantaged work (a different concept from that of strenuous, which had never been contemplated in the social security literature and which always risks the enlargement if not the breakthrough of the perimeter, because "working tired").
Another hypothesis could be to predict lower pension requirements for categories deemed to be disadvantaged. However, there would be the overcoming of the criterion underlying Quota 100, i.e. a measure without conditioning other than those sanctioned as requirements. Therefore, in the face of this approach, for those who are unable to assert the objective conditions of difficulty or hardship, the Fornero reform would once again be applied as the main road of the pension system, despite the deep holes that have been dug in it last two years.
