(Finance) – The parliamentary debate on the future of the minimum wage continues. A theme that FederTertiary calls for addressing it in a structured manner without ideological prejudices and overcoming the ancient contrast between the social partners. A reflection that is built starting from a context need that is expressed in an Italian productive fabric constituted for at least 99% from micro and small businesses which see employer and employee working in the same context, sharing problems and successes.
This fragmentation of the production system, together with a widespread trend that seems to want to reduce the role of intermediate bodies, essential for democracy, contributes directly to disintermediation and the crisis of representation especially if the problems of work and fair compensation are addressed from a completely anachronistic perspective.
“The presence of pockets of poor labor exists and is a clear problem in Italy – he explains Emanuela D’Aversa, head of industrial relations at FederTerziario – but we must also ask ourselves whether the de facto minimum wage, by attempting to resolve this critical issue, could not lead to problems that would in fact be more serious than the advantages we intend to introduce. In the foreground, there is above all the risk of an escape from collective agreements.”
At European level the Minimum Wage Enforcement Directive, approved on 14 September 2022, in fact it should be transposed by the Member States within two years. But at a national level, thanks to the widespread application of collective agreements which does not make the introduction of the minimum wage mandatory, it is precisely the latter that guarantee and protect the worker also in terms of fair remuneration through dialogue and discussion between the parties social, preventing what is happening in the community context, precisely in the states that introduced the measure, in which there is a growing tendency to leave national contracts to take the simpler path of legal wages.
“Collective agreements do not only guarantee remuneration – explains D’Aversa – but constantly adapt the regulatory instruments to the needs of the world of work, for example through continuous training which is a value for the workers, for the company but above all a value They provide services through bilateralism and supplementary healthcare services, stimulating forms of flexibility and participation that improve the corporate climate, productivity and the reconciliation of work and life times. Escape from the CCNL, therefore, would be serious damage to the entire Italian production system and in particular for the workers who we intend to protect with the minimum wage.”
The problem of pockets of poor labor – approximately 3 million workers are at risk of poverty, according to Censis data – is to be found not so much in the absence of the minimum wage nor in the proliferation of contracts. According to Cnelin the focus dedicated to the numbers of the national archive of the CCNL, in fact, there are 946 registered contracts but of these the “pirate” or presumed such contracts are only applied to 54,220 workerswith the obvious consequence that contracts signed by “representative” subjects are applied to the majority of poor workers.
“Poor work therefore does not depend on the proliferation of collective bargaining agreements – continues the head of industrial relations at FederTerziario -, even if there are certainly contracts that do not guarantee adequate wages, but rather on phenomena such as involuntary part-time work, especially among women with children , seasonal jobs which, for example in tourism, occupy only 143 days a year and which are linked to the phenomenon of para-subordinate or gray work which proliferates in a whole series of productive sectors”.
To overcome these obvious difficulties – continues the note – we need to have a common vision and shared that overcomes anachronistic ideological positions and that, starting from a concrete analysis of the peculiarities of the productive world, aims, among other things, to allocate adequate human and economic resources to the inspection bodies to combat elusive phenomena, to deseasonalize tourist flows and to invest in social infrastructures that allow women to enter the world of work and remain there, focusing on training paths that provide young people and those who for any reason are outside the labor market with the skills required by companies and, at the same time, make future workers increasingly aware of their rights and duties.