With this hope, the government and employers, assisted by the Compagnia
delle Opere, an Italian entrepreneurial association of Catholicinspiration, directly linked to the Communion and Liberation* movement
and by the CISL, are preparing for a further battle against the last
guarantees left to the movement of women workers and workers ---- The
meeting with the aforementioned title was held on Wednesday 20 March at
9 pm in Milan, organized by "Tempi", the reference magazine of Comunione
e Liberazione and Compagnia delle Opere (CdO), for the presentation and
debate on the bill for the regulation and promotion of worker
participation in the management of companies proposed by the CISL, with
the participation of Lorenzo Malagola, deputy of Fratelli d'Italia,
Andrea Dellabianca, national president of the CdO, Giorgio Vittadini,
president of the Foundation for Subsidiarity, as well as the fundamental
organizer of the summer event of the "Rimini Meeting", an annual event
of Communion and Liberation.
We have already addressed and stigmatized in our pages the initiative of
the CISL and the collection of signatures for the popular initiative
bill entitled "Participation in Work" (1) which culminated in November
last year with the deposit of almost 400 thousand in the Chamber
signatures, a proposal later endorsed by the current government majority
with a similar project signed by the group leaders of Fratelli d'Italia,
Forza Italia and Noi Moderati.
This bill essentially presupposes the full application of Article 46 of
the Constitution which formally establishes the right of workers to
collaborate in the management of companies and the introduction of
promotional and incentive mechanisms that convince companies to
voluntarily bet on the comparison with employees and their collaboration
for greater competitiveness of the company itself, offering them the
opportunity to express themselves on strategic and management choices,
to contribute to the improvement of products and processes and therefore
also to share the economic results, providing for participation economic
and financial by workers in companies.
An explicitly and openly inter-classist strategy, entirely internal and
subordinate to the mercantile and liberal economic system, which led us
to write: "as we can see, the retreat is substantial and is the result
of that blindness of the analysis of society which persists in not
recognize the inevitable contrast of interests between the classes:
bosses and working masses".(2)
An alleged blindness which in reality is a desire for revenge if not
actually revanchism of groups of economic and financial power, with all
its collateral governmental, trade union, cultural and ideological
apparatuses, towards a working class which periodically and above all
stubbornly reaffirms the its class interests inevitably opposed to the
employers and governments.
In the face of such an increasingly explicit attack on the demands for
emancipation of the workers' movement, and the vastness of the
ideological and cultural battle that the propertied classes constantly
brandish against our class, in the presumed progressive camp we still
stammer about "broad camps" with alternating events linked to the
delusions of power and leadership of characters ranging from Renzi to
Fratoianni, passing through Conte and Schlein and where the clarity and
evidence of the ongoing class conflict is constantly obscured if not
ideologically rejected, like the employer and government counterpart.
But what we want to take into consideration with these notes are some
aspects, which are salient and significant for us, of the working
condition, to which no alternative coalition or trade union
organisation, including the CGIL, gives concrete answers.
The hypothesis of a new contract for mechanics for 2024/2027 which the
category is discussing in recent days, although requesting a figure
which on the surface may finally seem significant, being 280 euros the
request for an increase in the three-year period, in reality comes after
two contracts, that of 2016/2019 and the one renewed in 2020 which will
expire in June of this year 2024 with scarce salary recoveries and which
despite the safeguard clause, which provides for the adjustment of the
amounts of the agreed increases, if the "IPCA net of imported energy"
produced higher increases, they were not capable of recovering real
inflation.
This mechanism has in fact determined relatively high increases in 2023
and perhaps in June 2024, due to the surge in inflation in 2022,
compared to completely inconsistent increases in previous years: 44.75
euros in 4 years, between 2017 and 2020.
But not only. The revision of the new classification scale, implemented
in the previous contract which abolished the levels by introducing the
new areas and the so-called "soft skills", i.e. the personal skills for
level passages, makes the passage of levels from air to level
increasingly discretionary. air and therefore increases in salary levels
are less certain, weakened considerably by the now trade union practice
of penalizing and freezing seniority increases.
But the most problematic aspect represents the request for a reduction
in hours which is once again lexically reconfirmed as a generic
objective, but never indicating a precise temporality and above all not
claiming an effective reduction in daily hours.
Any reduction in hours is in fact directly linked to the increase in
productivity and competitiveness as well as to a generic and progressive
request for experimentation which is associated with the classic use of
funds previously allocated in social safety nets.
In the paragraph of the contractual hypothesis under the heading
reduction of hours we read verbatim:
"The main objective is to guarantee employment by increasing
productivity and competitiveness thanks to technological investments in
products and processes, implementing forms of reduction in working hours
for the same salary.
We ask for a reduction in working hours that implements what is already
foreseen for shift work and which also applies in sectors/companies
involved in transition, reorganization or crisis processes and
significant professional retraining. We ask that a contractual testing
phase be started with the aim of progressively achieving a reduction in
working hours to 35 hours per week, without prejudice to existing
company agreements.
At the end of the testing phase, the parties undertake to evaluate,
modify, implement and extend the established hourly reduction in the
metalworking and installation sectors and/or industries. The Parties
undertake to involve the government to identify a suitable and effective
legislative instrument that favors the contractual reduction of working
hours also through the resources currently used in social safety nets,
also to encourage support for training" (3)
Furthermore, it seems unlikely if not impossible to claim an effective
reduction in working hours if effective control over overtime is not
recovered, those that company managements can impose without any
discussion with the RSUs themselves and which can reach up to 120 hours
in total, guiltily accepted in the old contract of 2016, the one in
which the current national secretary was at the helm of FIOM.
As well as the request to increase the monthly contribution paid by the
company by 4 euros per employee, aimed at developing supplementary and
mutualistic benefits provided by the Health Fund, and the increase in
the amount from 200 to 250 euros per year for supplementary welfare,
with the possible request for conversion of the Pdr (Performance Bonus)
into further supplementary welfare, testify that the position and
reflection on the attack on public health, formally opposed by the
organization itself, in particular by the SPI CGIL pensioners union,
undergoes a sort of dissociation schizophrenic when it is expressed in
the individual production realities of the category.
It should now be clear to most people that all these sums negotiated and
obtained for the various "benefits" as tax exempt sums, in addition to
being profitable for the employers, in fact determine less income for
public healthcare itself, restoring a mechanism similar to the old
mutuals, those preceding the 1978 reform of the national health system,
undermining its universality and inevitably leading the public health
system to its privatisation.
Similar reasoning applies to the bill presented by the M5Stelle on the
reduction of working time, presented on 15 March 2023 and arrived at the
Labor Commission in the Chamber whose first signatory is the leader Conte.
Also in this proposal the indication is to reduce working hours on an
"experimental basis" from 40 to 32 hours with equal pay, arriving at a
4-day working week, on the example of experiments already carried out or
in progress taking place in various European countries and in our own
country.
Experiments in this sense have in fact been carried out in Spain, Great
Britain and Belgium, and further experiments are taking place in France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland.
In the presentation of the proposed law it is recalled that currently
"some company contracts, in Italy and elsewhere, are already providing
for the possibility of dividing the work performance over just four days
a week:"(4) indicating that the burden of employers who wishing to
participate in this experiment "will be granted exemption from the
payment of social security and insurance contributions payable to them,
up to a maximum limit of 8,000 euros on an annual basis, without
prejudice to the rate at which pension benefits are calculated".
The same exemption "is also granted, also cumulatively with other
different benefits, to employers who make new hires related to the
reduction of working hours".
In this regard, the proposed law, by establishing "a maximum spending
limit of 250 million euros for each of the years 2024, 2025 and 2026",
instructs the National Institute of Social Security to monitor the trend
of spending, providing that ,"if it emerges, even prospectively, that
the aforementioned limit has been reached, the Institute will not take
further questions into consideration".(5)
The secretary of the Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, also agrees with
this experimentation of reducing working hours with equal pay, stating:
"We are making a very simple proposal: let's expand the New Skills Fund
- co-financed by the European Social Fund - also introducing the
experimentation of reducing working hours for the same salary. We are
betting on the model of collective bargaining between companies and
unions to encourage short weeks " "A fund that helps those who sign
contracts for the reduction of working hours through a contribution
exemption of 30 percent of social security contributions which expands
to 40 for demanding and demanding work performance".(6)
As can also be seen in these further proposals, an effective reduction
in daily working time with equal pay is not requested and declined, the
only real objective to free workers from the exploitation of their life
time and consequently obtain effective and greater job opportunities
both for the new generations and for women.
In the production companies that in Italy are already experimenting with
the 4-day working week such as the Intesa Sanpaolo Banking Institute,
the daily working hours have not decreased at all, but in concrete terms
we work an hour more on all four days, i.e. 9 hours instead than the
7.30 daily scheduled.
Furthermore, employees who want to take advantage of the short week can
"individually access these methods" but only if this is compatible "with
the company's technical, organizational and production needs". And
therefore, in fact, the worker must have every request for a short week
approved by his manager, leaving the latter with great discretion.
To date, in fact, approximately 17 thousand workers have forwarded the
request to work 4-day hours out of the approximately 100 thousand
employees of the Intesa Sanpaolo group and there is still no certain
data on how many actually work such hours. Just as in Luxottica, where
the reductions in hours are also voluntary, but have led to a reduction
in the days of vacation available throughout the year, exactly 5 days of
paid leave, or in the Lamborghini industry, a unique and excellence with
1900 workers.
All these economic and production realities are highly competitive in
oligopolistic markets such as Intesa Sanpaolo or Luxottica, which is in
fact the world's largest producer of frames for eyeglasses and
sunglasses, or niche and high-end economic and production sectors of the
automotive sector. " like Lamborghini, firmly controlled since 1988 by
its subsidiary Audi, a company part of the Volkswagen Group.
Therefore, continue not to set up a generalized battle for the reduction
of hours for equal pay, but link a future reduction of hours to a
company experimentation that is mostly evanescent and not possible in
the vast majority of production and industrial realities, in particular
in myriad of small and medium-sized industrial companies, furthermore
tying any discretionary reductions to further incentives and tax relief
for the employers, means excessively fragmenting the overall solidarity
fabric of the working class, already deeply worn out by the scarcity of
job offers and the innumerable and various existing regulatory and wage
conditions.
Better wage, regulatory and working hours conditions that can be
obtained in individual cases or individual production realities, if not
generalized, are inexorably destined to be reabsorbed according to the
different vicissitudes of the capitalist market.
Note:
(1) the CONSTRUCTION SITE "Between a draft and the original, in the end
you always choose the original" n°18 June 2023
(2) Idem
(3) hypothesis of a platform for the renewal of the national collective
labor agreement for the metalworking and plant installation industry | 1
July 2024/30 June 2027 | FIOM CGIL FIM CISL UIL UILM
(4) Parliamentary acts - 1 - Chamber of Deputies 19th legislature -
bills and reports - documents Chamber of Deputies "legislative proposal
initiated by deputies Conte, Carotenuto, Aiello, Barzotti, Tucci"
Experimental provisions concerning the reduction of working hours
through agreements defined within collective bargaining. Submitted March
15, 2023
(5) Idem
(6) Il Sole 24 Ore "Lavoro, Conte relaunches legislative proposal for
short weeks. From 40 to 32 hours with the same salary" by Andrea
Gagliardi 22 February 2024
* The Compagnia delle Opere (CDO) is an Italian entrepreneurial
association of Catholic inspiration, directly linked to the Communion
and Liberation movement. It is mainly present in Italy with 40 offices,
supported by 16 abroad and associates around 36,000 businesses, mostly
small and medium-sized companies, and around 1000 non-profit
organisations, including charitable works and cultural bodies.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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