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vrijdag 27 december 2024

WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #34: Public wages out of control or below the cost of living? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]


In the public sector there are pay differences between the four sectors
even for identical tasks and professional profiles. ---- One of the
long-standing discussions concerns the relationship between contractual
pay and second-level pay which, according to the representative trade
unions, together would allow the recovery of purchasing power. ---- But
it remains undeniable that the table salaries and the contractual
vacation allowance, at the basis of the contracts, are calculated
downwards and some accessory items, delegated by the CCNL to
decentralized or second-level bargaining, are managed in an unequal
manner by dividing the workforce. There are various types of
administration/body or sector allowances provided for in the CCNL but
thinking that the salary differentials are out of control by increasing
personnel costs is a mere invention.

For example, many public employees increase their salaries by resorting
to overtime and in local authorities to some allowances or incentive
projects that, however, concern a small minority of the staff.
Calculating all the salary items, those of the national contract and
those regulated by second-level bargaining, does not help to grasp the
real purchasing power of public salaries but instead lends itself to
operations of containment of expenditure with salary reductions and
equalization operations from above that will then adjust the salaries as
a whole to the lowest levels.

For years Aran has been calling for attention to the second level of
bargaining but it is not clear with what coherence and criteria given
that the dynamics of the contracts have been artfully constructed to
divide the workforce with sector allowances aimed at avoiding any
advanced and overall claims of the workforce.

Governments and technicians are therefore advocating the equalization
cause not to avoid economic inequalities but to level down the salary
and contractual dynamics. Fairness and safeguarding purchasing power are
certainly not the guiding lights of Aran, it must be said with absolute
clarity considering how the contract renewals of the last few years have
been managed.

In the public sector, far from unitary logics have prevailed, also and
above all due to union indolence, second-level bargaining is in itself
divisive, structured as it is on performance and with a productivity
fund that allocates increasing economic resources to a minority of
personnel. The responsibility of the representative unions is
unquestionable: over the years they have reiterated divisive, corporate,
meritocratic logics by avoiding introducing the fourteenth month's
salary that is missing in the public sector, within a contractual system
in which not only purchasing power has been eroded but also bargaining
power with countless matters that are the subject of information only.

Public wages suffered a real collapse at the beginning of the century
with the 9-year freeze on bargaining, claiming that in these years the
salary actually grew clashes with the facts, that is, with the material
impossibility of increasing the same resources destined for general
productivity.

However, the idea that wages have grown over the years is widespread,
the contractual increases have been a third of real inflation.

Aran intervenes, with a firm hand, analyzing the contractual rounds
between 2016/18 and 2019/21 to demonstrate how a wage increase decided
at a national level of less than 3.50% (now we understand the cause of
the loss of purchasing power given the cost of living equal to more than
double this percentage) is instead compensated by second-level
bargaining out of control

In extreme synthesis, this intervention by Aran, on behalf of the
Government, sets itself some objectives such as a substantial
reorganization of the contractual dynamics in the PA judging some
sectors particularly rich compared to others with a view to compensating
the financing of progressions with a substantial impoverishment of the
Productivity Fund on which a good part of the accessory salary depends.

Another significant aspect of this strategic confusion is given by the
managerial salaries that contribute to the expenditure of PA personnel
but are governed by specific contracts with resources far superior to
those paid to the remaining personnel.

For at least 3 years it has been repeated that we need to make work in
the Public Administration attractive and in particular in local
authorities that lose an average of 10 thousand employees per year while
also being at the bottom of the list in terms of public salaries.

PA staffing has generally suffered a slow and inexorable contraction
over the last 25 years, some sectors are definitely suffering more than
others and it is no coincidence that they are precisely those where
wages are lower and workloads (for example healthcare) are greater.

Strategic confusion then reigns supreme and for this reason a
counter-narrative is essential:

Italian public salaries are among the lowest in Europe but at the same
time the salary differences between employees and managers remain
marked. Staffing is continuously eroding;

the loss of purchasing power is undeniable, bargaining power is reduced
to a minimum;

the contractual vacation allowance is a pittance to be subtracted from
contractual increases since it is a sort of advance compensated by
future increases. The institution of the contractual vacation has served
to reduce purchasing and bargaining power and to sign the CCNLs on
average with a 3-year delay with respect to their natural expiration;

the pay differences between the various sectors of the PA are the result
of years-old contractual dynamics built with continuous references to
the specificities of the sector or to the second level of bargaining. An
overall idea of the public service has been lost along the way and with
it also the principles of fairness and justice that should strengthen
the national contract without exceptions and continuous references to
second level bargaining;

every time we talk about Public Administration we come across a sort of
hypocritical judicialism tending to reduce some contractual institutions
present in certain sectors or to reduce economic resources by directly
linking them to the increase in productivity. The fact is that an
employee of local authorities, a researcher or an administrative worker,
an Italian health worker today receives even 400 euros less than a
colleague from another EU country;

allocating increasing resources to social security and supplementary
healthcare remains a serious mistake because it weakens universal
welfare, healthcare and public education;

if we look at the contractual dynamics of recent years, since the
pandemic onwards, public wages have increased by about 4 percentage
points less than private wages, from which further reflections on the
downward trend in public wages should arise.

CUB Pubblico Impiego Toscana

https://umanitanova.org/retribuzioni-pubbliche-fuori-controllo-o-al-di-sotto-del-costo-della-vita/
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