The latest data came from the ILO, the International Labour Organization: From 2008 to 2024, Italian workers' paychecks have lost 8,7 percent of their purchasing power. Worse, or almost, than all the other G20 economies. We ended up at the bottom of the ranking. But the wage issue in Italy began to show negative signs much earlier, in the last decade of the twentieth century. From then on, the incomes of employees began to decline in real terms. An acceleration in the decline came with the recession caused by Covid-19 and then with the resumption of inflation in 2022.
The numbers tell us that from 1991 to 2023 real incomes fell by 3,4 percent against an average increase in OECD countries of 30 percent. It happened only in Italy, then. Why? Why have Italians' salaries been stagnant for thirty years?
Andrea Garnero, OECD economist, and Roberto Mania, journalist, long-time correspondent of Republic, they wrote a book, The wage question (published by Egea) to explain the reasons for this collapse, investigating the causes and also the many responsibilities. Because there is no simple answer to a question that has been open for decades and still remains unresolved. In the dialogue between the two authors Italy emerges with all its contradictions and dualisms. With its ineffective bureaucracy (including the tax authorities) weighed down by a concentration of rules that have been piled up illogically over time, and the limits of a production model (too many small businesses, too many low-quality services and too few capable managers) reluctant to update itself. There is a distracted and short-sighted politics but also a system of industrial relations curled up on itself and fearful of any novelty.
Of course, there are also excellences. There is a manufacturing (that of the fourth, or perhaps fifth, capitalism) of quality that allows Italy to remain the Europe's second largest industrial producer and among the main exporting countries in the world, but which still struggles to drag the rest of the country along with it. For all these reasons there is a wage issue in Italy.
“Our wage stagnation – write Garnero and Mania – has moved in parallel with the blockage of GDP dynamics and productivity, a unicum truly absolute among the OECD countries, the organization of the most developed countries”. GDP stagnant and productivity blocked. Difficult, with these premises, to raise wages.
In fact, they have followed the trend of the economy because they are not "an independent variable". And the absence of wage pressure has not favored investments in innovation and training at all. This also explains the increase in the employment rate despite stunted growth and, indeed, blocked productivity.
The thesis of the two authors is that to get out of this situation it is everyone's contribution is needed, making the wage issue a “common interest”, acting on all the keys: from bargaining to the experimentation of a legal minimum wage, from “unequal” taxation to training, from excessive fragmentation of work to the crisis of representativeness of unions and business associations, from the underground economy to the lack of investments, being clear that there is no “legislative way to development”. On the other hand, it is certain that today's wage earners, without a radical change in the trend, they will be the poor pensioners of tomorrow. A worrying scenario if we only consider that, according to some estimates, in 2050 13 percent of the population will be over 80. We do not have much time to avoid being overwhelmed by the "wage issue".
