The economic scenario in which we have found ourselves for years would require the unions to make a courageous renewal effort to give companies back the support for productivity recovery that can only be obtained with a different system of relations between the levels of collective wage bargaining.
In the search for a union unity to oppose Matteo Renzi, we are not faced with an organic synthesis of union policy, but with a summation of three union souls that are sometimes at odds with each other, ranging from the participatory philosophy of the Cisl to the neo-dirigisme of the Uil and the workerist and populist soul of the CGIL.
The centrality of the trade union claim remains the principle of the immutability of national collective bargaining as a regulating element of wage levels, not wanting to attribute to contractual wages only that function of "minimum guarantee wage" which would be desirable, nor recognizing a role, if not marginal, to company bargaining, an effective place of potential exchange of flexibility and productivity for the company.
The 1993 concerted bargaining agreement stipulated that the contractual wage would cover inflation only while the company wage would be linked to increases in productivity, quality and company profitability. A scheme that, in fact, held only for the 1994 season of contract renewals.
In the following years and until the last renewals, the wage increases of the national contracts have always been higher than the inflation because it was argued, disregarding the guidelines of the 1993 agreement, that they also had to pay the (purely theoretical) increases in overall productivity of the commodity sector, moreover in a country that continued to lose competitiveness.
For years people wanted to pretend not to understand that the axis of wage bargaining should have shifted more and more to the center of gravity of the company, which thanks to tax relief or preferential taxation would give higher increases to workers and lower costs to companies.
It seems that the union wants to ignore that by persevering in a policy of fixed contractual wages, detached from any reference to company realities, wages in Italy will continue to be among the lowest and labor costs among the highest in Europe, and in this way by losing not only employment (apart from the drugging effects of the Jobs Act on the labor market) but also income.
The wage mechanism proposed, for example, in the metalworkers' platform of claims for the renewal of the National Collective Labor Agreement, the negotiation of which will resume in September, would once again condemn all companies in the sector to an unlimited cost growth dynamic totally detached from the company's situation and founded on the assumption that, always and in any case, the company has wealth to distribute.
It is quite clear that the intention to reject at all costs the introduction in our country of the "legal minimum wage", present in the majority of European countries, or in any case of a "contractual guarantee wage", leads the union to re-propose a mechanism that even recalls the "independent variable wage", which Luciano Lama already considered a strategic error in 1978.
In the interview given to La Repubblica on January 24, 1978, Lama declared in fact: “We have realized that an economic system cannot support independent variables. Capitalists argue that profit is an independent variable. Workers and their union, almost in retaliation, have argued in recent years that wages are an independent variable. In simple words, a certain wage level and a certain level of employment were established and then it was asked that the other economic variables be fixed in such a way as to make those wage and employment levels possible. Well, we have to be intellectually honest: it was nonsense, because in an open economy the variables are all dependent on each other”.
When asked if there was a relationship between the wage level which was too high in relation to productivity and the decrease in employment, Lama replied: “It is exactly like this, the experience of recent years has confirmed it to us. Or, employment will not go down, but unemployment will increase, because the new young generation will not find an outlet”.
In order to recover the competitiveness and productivity of the industrial system which has been steadily declining for thirty years now, it would therefore be necessary to carry out a real revirement of industrial relations with the transition to new simpler and more effective contractual systems, and not to renew, for example , contrary to what is hoped by many, the collective bargaining agreement for metalworkers according to the traditional scheme, which in any case would record a leap backwards compared to the collective labor agreements of 2009 and 2012 signed only by Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil, having disappeared in the unitary platform with the Fiom-Cgil the timid references to the derogation of company agreements.
The introduction of a minimum wage by law or, as proposed by Federmeccanica, the contractual adoption of a guarantee wage for workers whose wages are not affected by individual or collective super-minims would therefore speed up the renewal process of the contractual systems, making it is formally possible to initiate decentralized collective bargaining, capable of being closer to the needs of companies and workers, company by company.
This does not mean deleting the regulatory parts of the national employment contract, starting from trade union rights, but the wage dynamics would be traced back, with the company bargaining, to the merit and motivation connected to the work performance, to the advantage of the company performance and the wages of the workers.
Obviously, the national labor contract continues to have its weight for those who do not negotiate, and therefore continues to protect, with the guaranteed salary, the purchasing power of all workers in the sector to which it applies, if they have no other sources of wage increases.
