Wage increases directly on the minimum wage scales and a sharp reduction in fringe benefits. ---- Fringe benefits, corporate welfare, social security and healthcare funds, and bilateral organizations are all institutions that divide the labor movement, allowing employers to recoup, in addition to their profits, significant amounts of money through the deductibility of these sums, at the expense of the universal national healthcare system, public welfare, and social security. ----
C.V. ---- "Fringe benefits" are increasingly becoming one of the mainwage policy tools proposed by private employers in the various sectoral
contract renewals. These "institutions" consist of a set of additional
compensation, above the base salary, provided in the form of goods or
services. These range from traditional vouchers or meal vouchers, to the
use of company cars, to electronic devices such as smartphones or
laptops, to fuel vouchers, shopping vouchers, or services such as
accommodation, training courses, business trips, babysitting, and
affiliated gyms, to personal insurance and health policies, to
reimbursement of transportation or fuel expenses and even "gift cards."
One of the most significant recent cases in which employers are pursuing
this option is the renewal of the metalworkers' contract, which expired
in June last year and will see the resumption of meetings between the
social partners this September. The employers' organizations,
Federmeccanica and Assistal, have proposed a counter-platform to the
EUR280 wage increase jointly requested by the unions, Fiom. FIM and
UILM, proposing a minimum wage increase limited to the IPCA index, which
would be half the union's request, but fully willing to increase the
current EUR200 per year in fringe benefits to EUR700 over the next four
years. Specifically, these sums should be spent on nursery school,
babysitting, schoolbooks and scholarships, care for the elderly, and
public transportation for workers and dependent family members.
Essentially, less money in the paycheck, but more "corporate welfare."
This vision was well-motivated by the former President of
Federmeccanica, Federico Visentin, who in an interview with Corriere
della Sera last April candidly stated: "Earnings beyond
inflation-calculated via the IPCA NEI (due based on the guarantee
clause)-should not be allocated to minimum wages. Instead, they should
be allocated to other economic elements (fringe benefits) that cost
companies less." This operation would effectively result in employers
being able to deduct over one billion euros (700 euros per capita for
over 1,500,000 workers in the entire sector), which would be added to
company profits and simultaneously subtracted from the general taxation
that notoriously subsidizes public and universal welfare. From a tax
perspective, the cost of providing fringe benefits is deductible for the
employer, allowing for a savings in contributions. In the short term,
there are also advantages for the individual worker, who, within certain
limits established by law, also sees these sums exempt from tax as
income. Indeed, the regulatory framework for fringe benefits has been
amended several times in recent years. The 2025 Budget Law confirmed the
changes already introduced in 2024, while making some significant
changes to the non-taxability thresholds and expanding the range of
potential beneficiaries. In particular, the main tax exemption limits
envisaged for 2025 are as follows: a) EUR1,000 of annual "fringe
benefits" for all workers: up to this amount, all goods and services
granted to the employee do not contribute to the formation of taxable
income and are therefore not taxed for either the worker or the company;
b) EUR2,000 for employees with dependent children: this increased
threshold is intended for families, allowing a greater economic
advantage for those who must cover expenses for their children; c)
EUR5,000 for newly hired and out-of-town workers: the real novelty of
the 2025 budget is the introduction of an exceptional threshold,
applicable to employees who, hired or transferred in 2025, move their
residence more than 100 km to reach the municipality where their new
workplace is located. But all these immediate benefits, in addition to
reducing the overall tax burden, also serve to reduce our future
pensions because they are not added to social security contributions.
They determine substantial differences in the social conditions of the
class, fostering and determining elements of division and lack of
solidarity within the labor force.
"Humanity, united by a single language, was struck by the wrath of God,
who confused their languages, causing them to be dispersed and the
building of the tower stopped" (freely adapted from Genesis 11:19).
In fact, the increased introduction of "fringe benefits" takes to
extreme consequences that diversity of social conditions depending on
membership in different categories and the changing and temporary
balance of power in different work sectors, thus increasing the wage and
regulatory Babel of the labor movement, a traditional and extremely
powerful weapon, used by employers and governments, to wear down and
divide the solidarity of the working masses. Babel and uncertainty, that
is, uncertainty and unpredictability regarding the future social
conditions of the working masses, already set in motion by the decision,
starting in the second half of the 1990s, to transition to the so-called
second leg of social security: pensions. We do not intend to delve into
the age-old issue of the transition from the pay-as-you-go system, in
which pension contributions paid to INPS and revalued annually at the
inflation rate set by ISTAT were used to pay for ongoing pension
benefits, commensurate with final salaries, to the current contributory
capitalization system, in which a worker's retirement pension will be
paid from his or her individual contributions, accumulated over an
entire working life and revalued (perhaps) through investments made by
his or her pension fund. We only note that, like the "fringe benefits",
the negotiated pension funds which currently (one might say fortunately)
cover only a little more than 4 million workers (1) allow the employers
to deduct the sums paid out for each individual worker. The figure
confirmed for this year, the total of the sums paid by the individual
worker and his employer, is 5,164.57 euros. This change, which was also
convincingly implemented by the trade union leaders at the end of the
1990s, has certainly determined that our pensions (deferred wages), in
addition to being significantly reduced in their overall amount, never
reaching the 80% minimum foreseen under the old system, are
paradoxically used by our employers to finance themselves, as the
various pension funds invest these sums in that real "casino" of stocks
and the stock exchange, where the house always wins, but the house is
not the workers. But this is not the only paradox at work. The latest
data provided by Sole24ore, the employers' press organ, tells us that
the guaranteed investment lines, those which best allow pension funds to
guarantee the capital paid in upon reaching retirement, by investing in
bonds or government securities, compared to investments in shares
subject to greater volatility and therefore greater risk, the
comparison, over a 15-year period, therefore from 2010 to today, is
between a +20.1% of the pension funds compared to the +42.5% guaranteed
by the TFR. (2) The same reasoning and the same reflection applies to
the so-called second pillar regarding supplementary healthcare, which is
proving to be a significant and decisive element in further reducing
public healthcare. In a recent and detailed document in defense of
public health and against the hypothesis of differentiated autonomy "We
cannot remain silent. Civil society for public health" jointly drafted
by over 130 associations such as Social Promotion Associations (APS),
third sector organizations, non-commercial and non-profit associations
and trade unions, we can read: "The medium-term structural budget plan
2025-29, approved by the Council of Ministers on 27 September 2024,
rather than committing to strengthening the NHS, envisages the
strengthening of the second pillar through the development and
reorganization of the tools for supplementary health care".(3) These
institutions in fact reintroduce, like the old mutual societies, a close
connection between health care and employment status, producing a
diversity of treatments and services in favor of some specific
categories of workers; Those with greater bargaining power and
differentiated care pathways based on category and territory, excluding
large segments of the population, such as the unemployed, precarious
workers, retirees, and sometimes even family members of these funds.
Furthermore, the tax breaks supporting these funds, such as pension
funds and "corporate welfare" funds, result in lower overall income tax
revenue, but above all, lower contributions for workers participating in
the funds, who will be able to count on lower contributions when
calculating their pensions. Furthermore, these funds generate excess
insurance coverage, particularly for specific expense items, such as
specialist visits and diagnostic tests, and thus a multiplication of
services provided, with the consequent risk of increasing inappropriate
services and diagnoses, and thus also overall expenditure.
These "funds operate on the basis of a performance-based model, clearly
in conflict with the needs for service integration and individual care,
as well as on the basis of incentives to select the most profitable
services regardless of health priorities, which characterize private
healthcare provision. This situation produces a loss of well-being for
the community and an increase in healthcare costs, widely demonstrated
in countries with insurance-based healthcare systems such as the United
States."(4)
These clear, precise, and shared statements, although endorsed and
endorsed by important territorial union structures, such as the CGIL
Lombardia, or the SPI CGIL of Turin, have evidently not yet succeeded in
influencing the national management groups, especially the national
management groups of the individual categories, towards a necessary and
profitable self-criticism and a resolute U-turn, particularly towards
those Bilateral Bodies, which have grown and expanded, not by chance,
since the mid-1990s.
Bilateral bodies or street unions?
Bilateral bodies are contractually established organizations, funded by
company payments and deductions from workers' paychecks, in which
company and union representatives collaborate in carrying out functions
such as the administration of supplementary pension and healthcare
funds, income support measures, and national contract observatories.
We are very clear about the fierce reluctance (euphemistically speaking)
of certain particular trade union categories to reduce the weight and
function of these bodies, which have become the custodians of huge
financial masses and a source of additional individual income for a
trade union bureaucracy that is partly "failed" and stuck in this new
mercantile perspective. However, an organization that dedicates
ever-increasing time and resources to managing the spaces that have
opened up within the folds of a welfare system, increasingly marked by
underfunding by the state, thus guaranteeing market space to private
entrepreneurs, a union that not only provides legal and fiscal services,
but that aspires to manage increasing shares of wages, supplementary
social security and healthcare, and also supplementary social safety
nets, professional training, recreational activities, and even
commercial services for its members, is a union that, from being a class
organization, a resistance structure, tends to become part of a
"parastatal" system, simultaneously integrating itself into the
capitalist market. The idea of a "street union" that the CGIL has long
advocated in its official and congressional documents, whatever the
actual meaning and interpretation of this idea within the national
leadership, contrasts and conflicts with the practices and methods that
individual national trade union federations stubbornly pursue through
bilateral bodies. A further paradox, in this phase of revanchism of the
ruling classes, can be found in a recent and important intervention of
reflection by the national leadership group of the CGIL itself, in which
reflections and indications are made explicit of what would be necessary
and desirable today, and in which we literally read: "a return to the
original Chambers of Labour, those in which the unemployed, blue
overalls and black jackets, women who worked from home - the same as
many computer workers who supply data to the artificial intelligence
centres do today - teachers who wanted to teach those who needed it and
workers who wanted to learn came together to question the exploitation
of work and inequalities" (5) How far the current trade union reality in
the territories and at a national level is from what was hoped for is
evident to most. But even more clearly it is stated that "the lack of
reflection on the real reasons for that defeat" (we are talking about
the workers' defeat starting from the EUR in 1978 until the 90s
precisely) "has prevented for years reflection on which form of union
action was truly more adequate to represent the fragmented work of the
new exploitation" determining "an institutional bureaucratic drift of
the Italian union movement, which precipitates without a real discussion
on those issues, in the 90s" (6) Furthermore on the specific health
issue we can read: "In health, for example, we have all given in in
recent years to the ideology that saw the company as the organizational
model that would solve the problem of costs and bureaucracy. And we have
too calmly accepted that we were moving from Local Health Units to
Health Companies. To then discover that within the logic of the company,
behind the numbers, people were progressively disappearing, and that
prevention activities in the territory were weakened, to the point of
almost zeroing out prevention activities in the area. and in the workplace.
The Local Health Authorities (USL) were also born from the struggles for
health in the workplace, from the extraordinary alliance of workers'
councils with the intelligence of men like Maccacaro and of many young
doctors who decided to become occupational physicians, to perform a
social service, in the factory and in the community, to defend people's
health and well-being there.
Prevention has almost disappeared in the workplace.
And the people who go to factories and construction sites not only to
inspect responsibility for the misfortunes that occur, but to prevent
them, evaluating with the workers the causes that are at the origin of
those now daily misfortunes, have disappeared." (7)
How much these reflections, albeit belated, can be reconciled with the
philosophy of the Bilateral Bodies that offer individual health services
and how much these same Bodies are in line with the indications of that
street union which, albeit confusedly, as we have seen, should represent
a new and necessary horizontality of the Chambers of Labor, is not given
to know.
Only stark reflection and genuine self-criticism can allow the trade
union movement to recover. "Putting defeats aside, without carefully
examining their underlying causes, is never a good way to build
recovery."(8)
Notes:
(1) COVIP (Pension Fund Supervisory Commission) Report for 2024,
presented on June 23, 2025.
(2) Il Sole 24Ore. Comparison of Pension Fund Returns vs. Severance Pay:
Analysis over 10 and 15 Years - June 27, 2025
(3) Florence, February 22, 2025 "We Cannot Remain Silent. Civil Society
for Public Health" Saluteinternazionale.info
(4) Idem
(5)https://centroriformastato.it/democrazia-lavoro-e-sindacato-dopo-i-referendum/byAndreaRanieri
Francesco Sinopoli. Published June 20, 2025. This paper
was presented by Francesco Sinopoli, President of the Vittorio
Foundation, at the seminar organized by the Livorno Chamber of Labor on
July 28, 2025, entitled "Representation, Conflict, Participation: Which
Confederal Union?"
(6) Idem
(7) Idem
(8) Idem
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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