The issue of productivity is very complex and the social partners, without waiting for the diligent admirers of the goddess of competence, have already been on the road for some time with many contradictions and many internal contrasts. I am referring, for example, to the chemists' contract which, from this point of view, constitutes a point of reference. Ways to increase labor productivity and not Total Factory Productivity as is often implied, generating great confusion, it can be obtained in three ways described by classical economists and never surpassed by any other mathematical and nomothetic economist.
The first way is the increase in hours worked. But this implies an increase in variable capital and therefore in the wage bill with a consequent fall in the rate of profit if there is not at the same time an increase in the solvency of the demand for the goods thus produced. The second way is the increase in the number of work units with an ever more significant increase in the wage bill and the danger of the fall in the rate of profit, if not more and more, the basis of the solvency of demand and therefore of the valorisation of the circulation of both goods and capital widens. The third way is the increase in investment cwith a consequent increase in the rate of profit against a fall in the wage bill due to a fall in employment.
Naturally these ways must confront each other with the historicity of the accumulation and circulation also of goods-people on the labor markets with the consequent possible limitations which can oppose this circulation i political monopolies created by workers and business associations thanks to their association and the dynamics of the contracts between the parties that derive from it. Well, because the link between productivity for investment and also for the flexibility of the relationship and of the work performance and therefore with an increase in the wage bill compensated by the reduction of the same which would derive from the lower employment due to an increase in investments is the rule it is necessary to restart the cycle of investments by revolutionizing the banking system and promoting cuts in investments also by public means to compensate for the absence of private hands.
This is the path that is establishing itself throughout the Anglo-Saxon world - and therefore in the more civilized world with common law and not with a Roman-Germanic legal regime and extended parental ideological subjection. Naturally to do this, the consent of the weakest potential monopolist, i.e. the workers' organizations, is needed. In Italy this is almost always impossible due to the ideological ostracism that the CGIL opposes to these models, to which the diligent academic commentators too often spare the reproaches that alas it deserves. Furthermore, it is specious and almost mocking to speak of labor productivity for investment when companies are burdened by a taxation due to fundamentalist austerity policies that will soon make it impossible to negotiate anything.
Finally, the use of national negotiation referred to is possible and desirable only in the sub-species federation of the category, especially in sectors strongly polarized between large companies and peristaltic corporate pulverization such as the food sector for example. It's still perhaps we need to put an end to the rampant hypocrisy of invoking a new universalistic welfare in the face of the shame of the Italian welfare founded on the head of the family and on the big company singing to the hype of the public debt which makes reform impossible.
Need negotiate in Europe the reform not of investments but of the ECB on the FED model to finance a new employment project and together a universalistic welfare on the Blailerian modelor that it thus makes possible the dreams of those who want the drunk wife and the cake full, i.e. the deflationary austerity that is leading businesses to death and public finances in order, as if the state were a company that can go bankrupt, while the state always escapes bankruptcy with a little inflation, a little deficit and above all a little free thought by economics professionals as a sad technique. But perhaps this is not possible in the narrow streets of neoclassical resorts.
*** THE LATEST FIRSTonline SPEAKS on productivity: Marcellus Messori (September 30), Benjamin Lapadula (1st October), Alexander Laterza (October 3)
