Certainly Mauro Moretti is not a shrewd communicator. With that improvident declaration against the Government's intention to put a ceiling on the public manager's salaries, he attracted the irony and insults of thousands of citizens who unleashed themselves on social networks against his "arrogance". Then politicians also intervened, including the Minister of Transport, who in practice said that the FS could do without him, and entrepreneurs such as Diego della Valle who with truculent language invited him to leave as soon as possible .
But, beyond the fuss, the problem raised by Moretti is real and cannot be tackled in a simplistic way by setting an equal ceiling for all the salaries of senior state officials. In the first place a distinction should be made between public officials of the State, Regions and Municipalities and the managers of companies operating on the market.
While for the former it is correct to set ceilings that are uniform and comparable with those of other European countries, for the latter the assessment of the "fair remuneration" is more complex and must take into account both the results achieved and the the need to secure the most capable managers, who would otherwise be driven towards the competition. In truth, a criterion for evaluating the results (on the basis of which the remuneration policy should also be established) should also be introduced for the directors general of the ministries and for the high levels of the bureaucracy. We need to abandon the farce of the current situation according to which all executives are valued at the highest and therefore all take the highest productivity bonus.
La result culture in short, it is what is really lacking in the Public Administration and in public companies. So the policy of salary caps is good for doing a bit of petty demagoguery, but it certainly doesn't solve the problem of the excessive salaries of many top public sector officials, nor the even more important problem of demanding greater efficiency in the management of assets public. In fact, the ceilings can easily be circumvented by obtaining additional remuneration from other entities or other private companies, while the need to provide better services at lower costs does not receive any impulse from uniform remunerations and unrelated to the results obtained.
In reality, the question of the high salaries of public managers (many of whom have reached that position for political merit and not for their professionalism) should be tackled in a totally different way. In the first place all those companies that have no operations should be canceled but they only serve to give salaries to former politicians or friends of politicians. Even 150 or 200 thousand euros a year (below the roof) are in fact too much for those who are just warming up their seats.
Secondly, it should abolish the aggregation between the salaries of various administrations (something attempted by Mario Monti but it is not known with what outcome), and between the pension and a public salary. Then it would be necessary set parameters to link remuneration to the results obtained both in terms of cost containment, and in terms of company development or customer satisfaction for the services offered.
Only in this way could Moretti's salary be correctly assessed, which in absolute figures appears high, but which perhaps on the basis of the results achieved could be considered adequate. A similar reasoning applies to the many public companies listed on the Stock Exchange where, for example, the reasoning of the mayor of Rome Marino about wanting to reduce the salaries of Acea's top management makes no sense, because he does not consider the good performance of the company in the last year . In fact, what can it mean to want to save 3 or 4 hundred thousand euros when a greater value created by the company for hundreds of millions of euros is put at risk?
Certainly the inefficiencies and losses of the immense public apparatus they are the real ball and chain of the Italian economy. But demagogic shortcuts are not needed to remedy this. A real reorganization and thinning out of the dense network of companies that are in the public sector is needed just to satisfy the thirst for power and profit of many national and local politicians.
If you want to ask then a solidarity contribution to high wages, both public and private, put a temporary surcharge on high salaries, but this can only be done after having closed or sold many of the useless public companies and after having established clear and transparent criteria for linking salaries to the results achieved. These are the real cuts that need to be made in public spending. Higher taxes, however articulated, can be imposed only after demonstrating that one is capable of closing the thousand rivulets through which the public sector wastes Italians' money.
