I read with great interest the article by Paolo Rebaudengo on FIRSTonline on the minimum wage. The author was a protagonist of industrial relations, having directed that sector at Fiat for many years. In this role he managed the transition to the new company contract and the exit from Confindustria. Not by chance - with a polite tone of retrospective polemic - Rebaudengo wanted to recall those events, noting that, eleven years after the exit of the Fiat group from Confindustria, the position of the contractual subjects (trade union confederations and Confindustria) still remains , on the occasion of the ratification of the inter-confederal agreement in September 2011, claimed their "exclusive" role in antithesis to the Law 148 of 2011 which had introduced article 8 which recognized the efficacy of the bargaining approved by the workers.
The rule was conceived by the then Minister of Labor Maurizio Sacconi, who, in the framework of the initiatives that had led to the controversial agreement in the Pomigliano d'Arco plant (not signed by Fiom), then extended to other plants, drastically intervened in the debate in progress in order to promote second-level (company or territorial) bargaining and the spaces within its competence.
While the social partners agreed on the fact that these spaces would be expressly indicated by the national bargaining agreement (CCNL), Sacconi with art. 8 expanded this faculty, providing that corporate or territorial collective agreements (proximity is the technical term) – provided that they are signed by the majority of the most representative Trade Union Organizations, or by their representatives in the company – could derogate from contractual or even legislative provisions, with the only exclusions of the Constitutional or Community ones. Thus also the Pomigliano agreement (approved by the majority of workers through a referendum on a date prior to the entry into force of the trade union agreement and therefore excluded from its effects) was secured.
The position of the trade unions was shared by Confindustria, which signed a protocol with the CGIL, CISL and UIL in which it undertook not to apply, through agreements at a decentralized level, that provision of a derogatory nature from national contracts and legal provisions. This determined the exit of Fiat from the viale dell'Astronomia association. I remember an American journalist asking me what that divorce meant: I replied that it could be compared to California's exit from the Union. But article 8 continued to bear the curse of Montezuma of the CGIL, except to be applied - if necessary - on the sly, perhaps without mentioning the law.
The line of industrial policy pursued by Sergio Marchionne would not have been possible without that radical transformation of the contractual schemes which then led Fiat/Fca to leave Confindustria and to have autonomous collective bargaining, outside the national contract for metalworkers, thus realizing the dual objective of an arrangement - together - of proximity, in the factories, and uniform on a national level.
Could the management of Fiat-Fca have done more in the innovation of industrial relations? Yes of course. But Marchionne was interested in arranging the bargaining structure in the Italian factories of an increasingly multinational group. The limit of Sergio Marchionne's breakthrough was right here: having thought of new industrial relations in the group in a global vision, including the factories located by us, and not to change the "Italian system" as a whole. We all know that other important production complexes have followed the example of FCA in terms of bargaining.
A sort of media embargo is in effect on those experiences: the same one that applied to the FCA plants after the successes of the restructuring. A personality like Marchionne (thanks to a collaborator like Paolo Rebaudengo) would have been able to promote a different structure of collective bargaining, extending the model with which he had brought the Italian plants back on the shields. But perhaps he had other thoughts, followed other priorities, had to carry out other objectives, in a global context hit by a great, accelerated and unpredictable transformation.
The minimum wage scales down collective bargaining in favor of decentralized one
Having said all this, Rebaudengo puts forward, on FIRSTonline, an articulated and sustainable proposal for the quantification of the minimum wage which, it is written in the article, can be easily defined by reference the values disbursed by the redundancy fund (maximum of 1222,51 per month), which would lead to an hourly value of just over 7 euros per hour, an amount that would not compromise the "negotiating skills" of the union and business organizations to define higher contractual values linked to the performance.
But the culmination of the author's reasoning is another, which the trade unions would do well to take note of, in the desperate drift that is leading them to run after any type of protection - be it legal or contractual - without taking into account the function the institutions of industrial relations are called to face, regardless of their form, according to a logic that cannot be a trivial summation or a sort of matryoshka that incorporates law and contract in the pursuit of the same role. One might say that even in the relationship between the minimum wage and the contract, the principle of "ne bis in idem" will end up being valid.
I do not intend to arbitrarily insert in Rebaudengo's text considerations that the former Fiat executive does not develop in a clear and complete way. But when he locates in the minimum salary a tool that can serve the reform of bargaining Rebaudengo cannot fail to recognize the start of a process that will lead to a downsizing of national collective bargaining in favor of the decentralized one. In the first place, due to the legal effects that the introduction of a legal minimum wage would determine, freeing the national contract from the role attributed to it by consolidated jurisprudence.
The national contract – argues Rebaudengo – should no longer satisfy the art. 36 of the Constitution: the worker has the right to a remuneration commensurate with the quantity and quality of his work and in any case sufficient to ensure a free and dignified existence for himself and his family. If the second part of the article is satisfied by the minimum wage as it is by the value of layoffs (no one has ever questioned the constitutionality of such amounts), the first part of the remuneration commensurate with the quantity and quality of his work must be satisfied by national or company or individual collective bargaining.
°°°°The author was the confederal secretary of the CGIL and national secretary of the Fiom
