Still little knowledge. Only 17,9% of Italian workers have precise knowledge of what corporate welfare is, 58,5% know it only in broad terms and 23,6% do not know what it is. Workers with lower levels of education have less knowledge of it (47% of those with at most a middle school diploma do not know what it is), those with low incomes (44,6%), single parents (40,3 %), employees with executive and manual tasks (36,7%), female workers (30,1%). Those who know corporate welfare best appreciate it the most: 74,4% of those who know it in detail are in favor of it compared to 43,3% of those who do not know it. This is why widespread communication on the content and strategic role of this tool is essential.
Welfare benefits are better than pay raises. Faced with the possibility of transforming rewards of salary into welfare benefits, 58,7% of workers say they are in favor, 23,5% are against and 17,8% have no opinion on the matter. The most favorable are managers and supervisors (73,6%), workers with young children up to 3 years old (68,2%), graduates (63,5%), workers with medium-high incomes ( 62,2%). Less favorable are factory workers, executive workers and those with low incomes. Among blue-collar workers (41,3%) and white-collar workers (36,5%) the shares of workers who prefer to have more money in their pay packet rather than welfare solutions are higher.
But it is not the answer to the backward "hunger" of income. Support for company welfare decreases as workers' incomes decrease. But corporate welfare cannot assume the function of a substitute for salary increases for those employed in the lowest salary brackets. From this point of view, we must consider the boom of working-class families in conditions of absolute poverty, which increased by 178% between 2008 and 2016, to become almost 600.000. Families which, if formed by a couple and 2 minor children, have up to 1.400 euros per month, while singles can count up to 680 euros per month. Corporate welfare is an indirect means of income integration, but it cannot and must not be a substitute for salary increases. The current legislation that gives tax rewards to corporate welfare is having the merit of making the sector grow, but in the medium term it risks the paradoxical effect of favoring workers with high incomes more and not those with lower incomes and with greater social needs . It should give support to those most in need, rather than being paid as a bonus in proportion to income, otherwise it simply reflects inequalities without alleviating them and ends up not helping the neediest workers more.
The most requested services. Among the company welfare services most desired by workers are those relating to healthcare (indicated by 53,8% of employed persons), those relating to supplementary pensions (33,3%), then meal vouchers and the company canteen (31,5, 23,9%), transport from home to work (for example, season tickets for public transport: 21,3%), shopping vouchers and agreements with shops (20,5%), nursery schools, holiday centres, reimbursements for children's school expenses (24,6%). Properly understood welfare services, from health care to social security, win over those aimed at supplementing income, while the presence of minor children in the family leads to a greater appreciation of childcare services and parenting services, in the belief that corporate welfare can fill the gaps in the public welfare system. XNUMX% of families with minor children would prefer to obtain welfare benefits: nursery schools, refunds for school fees, campuses and holiday centres.
Corporate welfare improves the climate in companies. 47,7% of workers are in favor of corporate welfare because they are convinced that it improves the climate in the company, 16,8% because it increases worker productivity. The positive effect on the corporate climate is the reason mainly referred to by workers who say they are in favour, but once again the consensus among managers and high-income workers is stronger than blue-collar workers and low-income workers.
