Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made reforming the Italian labour market a priority for his government. Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi assess the argument that Italy’s trade unions are an obstacle to such reforms on the basis that they support only their core membership, rather than a broader agenda which includes ‘atypical’ workers such as agency staff. They argue that unions have taken on a much broader stance than they are typically credited with and that if Renzi is serious about reforming the country’s labour market it would be beneficial to work with unions rather than against them

Benassi, Chiara

Durazzi, Niccolo

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made reforming the Italian labour market a priority for his government. Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi assess the argument that Italy’s trade unions are an obstacle to reforms on the basis that they support only their core membership, rather than a broader agenda which includes ‘atypical’ workers such as agency staff. They argue that unions have taken on a much broader stance than they are typically credited with and that if Renzi is serious about reforming the country’s labour market it would be beneficial to work with unions rather than against them

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2017­6­1 Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour market | New European Trad…http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/netuf/2014/11/18/matteo­renzi­must­work­with­italian­trade­unions­rather­than­against­them­if­he­is­serious­about­reforming­italys­l… 1/3Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than againstthem if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour marketItalian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made reforming the Italian labour market a priority for hisgovernment. Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi assess the argument that Italy’s trade unionsare an obstacle to reforms on the basis that they support only their core membership, rather thana broader agenda which includes ‘atypical’ workers such as agency staff. They argue that unionshave  taken on a much broader  stance  than  they are  typically  credited with  and  that  if Renzi  isserious  about  reforming  the  country’s  labour market  it  would  be  beneficial  to  work  with  unionsrather than against them.It  is safe to say that in Italy the main centre­left party – including all the previous versions of themost recently branded Democratic Party (PD) – and its historical ally among the unions, the ItalianGeneral Confederation of Labour (CGIL), have never been more distant. The climax was reachedon the weekend of 25­26 October. On that weekend, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi held his annual‘Leopolda’  event  in  Florence  (named  after  the  former  train  station  where  it  takes  place)  whichbrought  together  government  representatives,  members  of  the  PD,  members  of  civil  society,entrepreneurs  and  employers  to  present  and  discuss,  among  others,  the  reforms  which  aresupposed to revitalise the stagnating Italian labour market.The  unemployment  rate  in  Italy  is  currently  over  12  per  cent,  and  rising  to  nearly  45  per  centamong young  Italians. The most controversial provision  in Renzi’s  ‘Jobs Act’  is  the  reduction ofemployment  protection  for  permanent  workers.  In  exchange,  Renzi  promised  to  introduce  asystem of unemployment benefits of 1,000 euros per month, which covers the unemployed for upto two years depending on the length of their previous employment. Still, young people who do notmanage to enter the labour market are not included in the system.On  the same weekend, on 25 October, one million people –  led by  the  leaders of CGIL and  itsmetal working  federation  (FIOM),  and  including  representatives  of  the minority wing  of  PD  andother left parties – took to the streets of Rome to protest against the government’s economic andlabour market policy. The unions in Rome presented themselves as a solution to a labour marketwhich has become increasingly fragmented and exclusionary toward young generations. From thestage, CGIL  leader Susanna Camusso spoke about extending  the  rights  to precarious workers,while wearing a red T­shirt reading “I am Marta”.Who  is Marta? She  is  the hypothetical  precarious worker  that Renzi  accused  the unions of  notcaring about during one of his public speeches. Renzi’s narrative of  the disastrous conditions ofthe Italian  labour market  is  that  Italian unions are responsible  for  the segmented and stagnatingsituation because they are only concerned with protecting their members and unable to move ontowards a ‘new’ and ‘modern’ model of organisation of labour and industrial relations. At Leopolda,Renzi  presented  himself  as  the  initiator  of  change,  ready  to  challenge  the  strong,  old  power  ofCGIL.  At  the  same  time,  CGIL  and  FIOM  in  Rome  accused  the  government  of  pursuingemployers’  interests  exclusively,  allowing  for  a  further  reduction  of  labour  regulations  whilekeeping unions out of the bargaining arena.Is  Renzi’s  conception  of  Italian  trade  unions  accurate?  Are  they  in  fact  conservative  actorsconcerned  primarily  with  the  representation  of  their  core  workforce,  as  claimed  by  thegovernment? We draw here on a few cases, which show that unions have systematically tried tobargain provisions in support of atypical workers when they had the chance to.When unions (manage to) bargain for atypical workers2017­6­1 Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour market | New European Trad…http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/netuf/2014/11/18/matteo­renzi­must­work­with­italian­trade­unions­rather­than­against­them­if­he­is­serious­about­reforming­italys­l… 2/3The three Italian union confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL set up unions for atypical workers atthe  end  of  the  1990s  (Nidil,  Felsa  and  CPO,  respectively)  in  an  attempt  to  better  representtemporary workers. These unions represent both agency workers and the different kinds of self­employed and project­based contracts (co.co.pro), which make up the jungle of contractual formsin the Italian labour market.Self­employed and project­based workers are not easy to bargain for because their remunerationis based on the delivery of a project (so widely interpreted that even waiters and teachers mightwork on a ‘project’) and as such are not subject to collective agreements. At the moment, unionsmainly  help  these workers  to  turn  their  contracts  into  permanent  ones by  supporting  their  legalcases in court.Unions  sometimes  even  managed  to  bargain  collectively  on  the  ‘stabilisation’  of  project­basedworkers.  For  instance,  in  2007  unions  bargained  over  the  stabilisation  of  thousands  of  project­based call­centre workers – however, in order to do that, the ‘helping hand’ of the state providedthis  opportunity  as  Cesare  Damiano,  the  then  Minister  of  Labour  in  a  centre­left  government,issued a directive forcing employers to bargain with the unions on the permanent hiring of theseworkers.But the main evidence that Italian unions do not discriminate against atypical workers is providedby the wide­reaching agreements for temporary agency workers (TAWs), which fall by law underthe union bargaining domain. The atypical workers’ unions signed the first collective agreement foragency  workers  in  1998  (renewed  twice  since  then).  The  agreements  reiterate  that  temporaryagency workers’ salaries should not be  lower  than  the salary of permanent workers, a conditionthat was already set by law.In addition  to equality  in  terms of salary,  the collective agreement also stipulated parity betweentemporary  agency workers  and  permanent  employees  on  a  number  of  other aspects,  includingworking hours,  job classifications, overtime and night­time work, holidays and  leave.  In addition,the collective agreement stated  that after 42 (also non­consecutive) months of employment at auser  company,  temporary  agency  workers  must  be  offered  a  permanent  position  by  the  usercompany.  Sectoral  colletive  agreements  (such  as  the  metalworkers’  one  signed  by  Renzi’snemesis  FIOM)  set  even  shorter  timeframes  for  temporary  agency  workers  to  be  offered  apermanent position.Furthermore,with crucial input from social partners, a bilateral institution jointly managed by unionsand  employers  was  created  with  the  objective  to  provide  basic,  continuous,  on­the­job,  andprofessional  training  to  temporary  agency  workers.  The  number  of  TAWs  trained  through  theinstitution grew from around 75,000 to over 225,000 between 2001 and 2007 and it is interestingto note that the share of TAWs covered by training programmes in Italy is substantially higher thanin the other European countries for which data is available (as shown in the Table below), makingItaly an example of good practice.  Trainingprogrammes provided to temporary agency workers in five EU countries in 2008Source: CIETT2017­6­1 Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour market | New European Trad…http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/netuf/2014/11/18/matteo­renzi­must­work­with­italian­trade­unions­rather­than­against­them­if­he­is­serious­about­reforming­italys­l… 3/3November 18th, 2014 | Eurozone Crisis, Labour Markets, Trade Unions | 0 CommentsUnions  played  a  minor  role  on  the  issue  of  income  protection  for  agency  workers.Access  toincome support is granted upon a worker having performed a certain amount of working days, witha  very  high  threshold  that makes  the use of  this  instrument  rarely  accessible  to  any  temporaryagency worker. Several studies confirm  the  ineffectiveness of  this provision  for agency workers,which is identified as the weakest component of the framework of welfare.The limited success in securing a suitable system for income support can be largely seen as theinability  of  the  unions  to  fully  understand  the  emergence  and  characterisation  of  atypical  work.However, unions have  recently  taken on board  ‘broader citizenship  instances’,  including supportfor  types  of  guaranteed minimum  income  –  whose  current  absence  is  indeed  a major  form  ofdualisation  between  permanent  and  atypical  workers  in  Italy.  However,  contractual  welfare  canonly  integrate  but  not  substitute  the  role  of  public  welfare,  which  is  still  limited  or  absent  forworkers with  discontinuous  employment  histories  and  for  young  people who  do  not manage  toenter the labour market. That would be a good first step to undertake and Renzi can be sure thatunions would not oppose it.Is Renzi wrong about Italian unions?Even  though  Italian  unions  reached  awareness  of  crucial  themes  connected with  atypical  work(e.g.  income  protection)  relatively  late  in  their  history,  the  claim  that  Italian  unions  have  beenexclusively  interested in the protection of their core constituencies does not match the evidence.As we might have expected from a general confederation of labour situated – in Richard Hyman’swords  –  between  class  and  society,  Italian  unions  have  strived  to  represent  all  workers,  tocounteract  labour market dualisation,  to unify  labour  (e.g.  through  the stabilisation of co.co.prosand the equality of pay for temporary agency workers) and to bargain also on the behalf of atypicalworkers since the very introduction of such forms of work.The  problem  of  (especially  young)  outsiders  in  the  Italian  labour  market  is  a  crucial  one,  andunions might not have always been up to the task. But Renzi – before moving accusations againstthe unions – should first blame and put remedy to past government policies that increased labourmarket  segmentation  by  multiplying  the  types  of  contractual  relationships  and  that  allowedemployers’  opportunistic  strategies  to  use  a  cheaper  flexible  workforce  instead  of  permanentcontracts.  It  is good  that making  the  Italian  labour market  fairer and more equal seems  to be apriority  for  Renzi’s  government.  However,  the  lesson  from  past  experiences  is  that  successfulreforms need full involvement of the unions rather than their marginalisation. Chiara Benassi is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societiesin Cologne. She has worked on atypical work and union strategies across sectors with aparticular focus on Germany and Italy.Niccolo  Durazzi  is  an  MPhil/PhD  candidate  at  the  LSE  Department  of  Social  Policy  andDeputy Director of LSE Consulting at LSE Enterprise. He has worked on several projectson various social policy areas for national governments and European institutions.

Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour market

Matteo Renzi, Credit: © European Union 2014 – European Parliament (CC-BY-SA-ND-NC-3.0)17/11/2014Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather thanagainst them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labourmarketblogs.lse.ac.uk /europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-trade-unions-rather-than-against-them-if-he-is-serious-about-reforming-italys-labour-market/Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made reforming the Italian labour market a priority for hisgovernment. Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi assess the argument that Italy’s trade unionsare an obstacle to such reforms on the basis that they support only their core membership, ratherthan a broader agenda which includes ‘atypical’ workers such as agency staff. They argue thatunions have taken on a much broader stance than they are typically credited with and that if Renziis serious about reforming the country’s labour market it would be beneficial to work with unionsrather than against them.It is safe to say that in Italy the main centre-left party – including all the previous versions of themost recently branded Democratic Party (PD) – and its historical ally among the unions, the ItalianGeneral Confederation of Labour (CGIL), have never been more distant. The climax was reachedon the weekend of 25-26 October. On that weekend, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi held his annual‘Leopolda’ event in Florence (named after the former train station where it takes place) whichbrought together government representatives, members of the PD, members of civil society,entrepreneurs and employers to present and discuss, among others, the reforms which aresupposed to revitalise the stagnating Italian labour market.The unemployment rate in Italy is currently over 12 percent, and rising to nearly 45 per cent among youngItalians. The most controversial provision in Renzi’s‘Jobs Act’ is the reduction of employment protection forpermanent workers. In exchange, Renzi promised tointroduce a system of unemployment benefits of 1,000euros per month, which covers the unemployed for upto two years depending on the length of their previousemployment. Still, young people who do not manage toenter the labour market are not included in the system.On the same weekend, on 25 October, one millionpeople – led by the leaders of CGIL and its metalworking federation (FIOM), and includingrepresentatives of the minority wing of PD and other leftparties – took to the streets of Rome to protest againstthe government’s economic and labour market policy.The unions in Rome presented themselves as asolution to a labour market which has becomeincreasingly fragmented and exclusionary toward younggenerations. From the stage, CGIL leader Susanna Camusso spoke about extending the rights to precariousworkers, while wearing a red T-shirt reading “I am Marta”.Who is Marta? She is the hypothetical precarious worker that Renzi accused the unions of not caring about duringone of his public speeches. Renzi’s narrative of the disastrous conditions of the Italian labour market is that Italian1/5unions are responsible for the segmented and stagnating situation because they are only concerned with protectingtheir members and unable to move on towards a ‘new’ and ‘modern’ model of organisation of labour and industrialrelations. At Leopolda, Renzi presented himself as the initiator of change, ready to challenge the strong, old powerof CGIL. At the same time, CGIL and FIOM in Rome accused the government of pursuing employers’ interestsexclusively, allowing for a further reduction of labour regulations while keeping unions out of the bargaining arena.Is Renzi’s conception of Italian trade unions accurate? Are they in fact conservative actors concerned primarily withthe representation of their core workforce, as claimed by the government? We draw here on a few cases, whichshow that unions have systematically tried to bargain provisions in support of atypical workers when they had thechance to.When unions (manage to) bargain for atypical workersThe three Italian union confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL set up unions for atypical workers at the end of the 1990s(Nidil, Felsa and CPO, respectively) in an attempt to better represent temporary workers. These unions representboth agency workers and the different kinds of self-employed and project-based contracts (co.co.pro), which makeup the jungle of contractual forms in the Italian labour market.Self-employed and project-based workers are not easy to bargain for because their remuneration is based on thedelivery of a project (so widely interpreted that even waiters and teachers might work on a ‘project’) and as such arenot subject to collective agreements. At the moment, unions mainly help these workers to turn their contracts intopermanent ones by supporting their legal cases in court.Unions sometimes even managed to bargain collectively on the ‘stabilisation’ of project-based workers. For instance,in 2007 unions bargained over the stabilisation of thousands of project-based call-centre workers – however, inorder to do that, the ‘helping hand’ of the state provided this opportunity as Cesare Damiano, the then Minister ofLabour in a centre-left government, issued a directive forcing employers to bargain with the unions on thepermanent hiring of these workers.But the main evidence that Italian unions do not discriminate against atypical workers is provided by the wide-reaching agreements for temporary agency workers (TAWs), which fall by law under the union bargaining domain.The atypical workers’ unions signed the first collective agreement for agency workers in 1998 (renewed twice sincethen). The agreements reiterate that temporary agency workers’ salaries should not be lower than the salary ofpermanent workers, a condition that was already set by law.In addition to equality in terms of salary, the collective agreement also stipulated parity between temporary agencyworkers and permanent employees on a number of other aspects, including working hours, job classifications,overtime and night-time work, holidays and leave. In addition, the collective agreement stated that after 42 (alsonon-consecutive) months of employment at a user company, temporary agency workers must be offered apermanent position by the user company. Sectoral colletive agreements (such as the metalworkers’ one signed byRenzi’s nemesis FIOM) set even shorter timeframes for temporary agency workers to be offered a permanentposition.Furthermore,with crucial input from social partners, a bilateral institution jointly managed by unions and employerswas created with the objective to provide basic, continuous, on-the-job, and professional training to temporaryagency workers. The number of TAWs trained through the institution grew from around 75,000 to over 225,000between 2001 and 2007 and it is interesting to note that the share of TAWs covered by training programmes in Italyis substantially higher than in the other European countries for which data is available (as shown in the Tablebelow), making Italy an example of good practice.Table: Training programmes provided to temporary agency workers in five EU countries in 20082/5Source: CIETTUnions played a minor role on the issue of income protection for agency workers.Access to income support isgranted upon a worker having performed a certain amount of working days, with a very high threshold that makesthe use of this instrument rarely accessible to any temporary agency worker. Several studies confirm theineffectiveness of this provision for agency workers, which is identified as the weakest component of the frameworkof welfare.The limited success in securing a suitable system for income support can be largely seen as the inability of theunions to fully understand the emergence and characterisation of atypical work. However, unions have recentlytaken on board ‘broader citizenship instances’, including support for types of guaranteed minimum income – whosecurrent absence is indeed a major form of dualisation between permanent and atypical workers in Italy. However,contractual welfare can only integrate but not substitute the role of public welfare, which is still limited or absent forworkers with discontinuous employment histories and for young people who do not manage to enter the labourmarket. That would be a good first step to undertake and Renzi can be sure that unions would not oppose it.Is Renzi wrong about Italian unions?Even though Italian unions reached awareness of crucial themes connected with atypical work (e.g. incomeprotection) relatively late in their history, the claim that Italian unions have been exclusively interested in theprotection of their core constituencies does not match the evidence. As we might have expected from a generalconfederation of labour situated – in Richard Hyman’s words – between class and society, Italian unions havestrived to represent all workers, to counteract labour market dualisation, to unify labour (e.g. through the stabilisationof co.co.pros and the equality of pay for temporary agency workers) and to bargain also on the behalf of atypicalworkers since the very introduction of such forms of work.The problem of (especially young) outsiders in the Italian labour market is a crucial one, and unions might not havealways been up to the task. But Renzi – before moving accusations against the unions – should first blame and putremedy to past government policies that increased labour market segmentation by multiplying the types ofcontractual relationships and that allowed employers’ opportunistic strategies to use a cheaper flexible workforceinstead of permanent contracts. It is good that making the Italian labour market fairer and more equal seems to be apriority for Renzi’s government. However, the lesson from past experiences is that successful reforms need fullinvolvement of the unions rather than their marginalisation.A response to Alessandro Giovannini and Ilaria MaselliIn a separate EUROPP article, Alessandro Giovannini and Ilaria Maselli have disputed the argumentpresented in this piece. The authors provide a response below.Giovannini and Maselli make two central claims that are meant to prove us wrong. Firstly, they claim that unions –3/5by opposing governments’ attempts to lower employment protection legislation (EPL) – are being harmful to labourmarket outsiders. Secondly, they claim that unions are unable to think beyond the current labour market frameworkand more specifically that they are unable to conceive a universal system of welfare that includes also labour marketoutsiders. Facts and figure come however in our support to show that these claims do not build on solid grounds ofevidence.Concerning the debate around EPL, since the famous OECD Jobs Study in 1994, it became widely popular thatlowering employment protection is the recipe to increase competitiveness and boosting employment. Let alone that,a few years later, the OECD themselves admitted that there is no actual causal relationship between the EPL andemployment, David Howell and others show in a compelling and comprehensive way that the link between the twois at best weak. Therefore, presenting the attempt of the recent labour market reform to lower EPL as a progress anda victory for the workforce as a whole is perhaps a bit naïve and, at the very least, questionable (for an interestingeconomic analysis of why this is the case, we recommend reading Capussela and Intini on this blog).More eloquently than we could, in a recent contribution to this blog, Bob Hancké described the structural reforms ofthe type that Renzi is so keen about as ‘euphemism for cutting wages and making labour markets more flexible’ that‘have never been shown to work outside economics textbooks’. Furthermore, lower EPL inevitably means weakerworkers’ power because employees who are more at risk of dismissal are less likely to be mobilized. In fact, onecould speculate that the Jobs Act has among its aims precisely that of de-incentivizing workers’ mobilization as itincludes a provision according to which dismissed workers get a higher financial compensation if they decide not tobring employers to court for unfair dismissal.Moving on to the second claim, Giovannini and Maselli argue that the unions cannot think of a universal system ofwelfare. Here, we simply encourage them to look more closely at what unions have been actually proposing sinceboth the CGIL and the ‘hyper-conservative’ FIOM seem indeed to stand for the universalization of welfare provisionsthat Giovannini and Maselli talk about. The CGIL has presented in 2003 a proposal for a law that would extendbenefits to all workers. In subsequent years, they also produced a feasibility study outlining how the resourcesneeded to extend the welfare provisions could be found.. Along the same lines, the final act of the most recent FIOMgeneral assembly states, among other things, that income protection should be extended to all typologies of firmsand to all typologies of work and that a guaranteed minimum income financed out of general taxation should beintroduced as a universal benefit conditional upon the availability of the benefit claimant to take part in active labourmarket programmes. Tying benefits to participation in labour market programmes: it doesn’t sound thatconservative, does it? Furthermore, they also suggested the introduction of a single contract (a tutele crescenti) anda reduction of the atypical forms of contract, an issue that the Jobs Act is not so clear about at the moment.All in all, the further evidence that we provide here confirms that Giovannini and Maselli’s article suffers from thesame flaws as Renzi’s discourse: a simplified narrative built on shaky evidence and stylised dichotomies (e.g. oldvs. young; permanent workers vs. atypical workers) that may be useful for short-term electoral purposes, but that donot – again – match the evidence.– Response from Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi on 9 December  2014 Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/11dlkqj _________________________________4/5About the authorsChiara Benassi – Max Planck InstituteChiara Benassi is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies inCologne. She has worked on atypical work and union strategies across sectors with a particularfocus on Germany and Italy.Niccolo Durazzi – LSENiccolo Durazzi is an MPhil/PhD candidate at the LSE Department of Social Policy and DeputyDirector of LSE Consulting at LSE Enterprise. He has worked on several projects on various socialpolicy areas for national governments and European institutions.5/5

Benassi, C.

Durazzi, N.

MPG.PuRe

Matteo Renzi Must Work with Italian Trade Unions rather than against Them If He Is Serious about Reforming Italy’s Labour Market

Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour marketItalian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has made reforming the Italian labour market a priority for his government. Chiara Benassi and Niccolo Durazzi assess the argument that Italy’s trade unions are an obstacle to such reforms on the basis that they support only their core membership, rather than a broader agenda which includes ‘atypical’ workers such as agency staff. They argue that unions have taken on a much broader stance than they are typically credited with and that if Renzi is serious about reforming the country’s labour market it would be beneficial to work with unions rather than against them.It is safe to say that in Italy the main centre-left party – including all the previous versions of the most recently branded Democratic Party (PD) – and its historical ally among the unions, the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), have never been more distant. The climax was reached on the weekend of 25-26 October. On that weekend, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi held his annual ‘Leopolda’ event in Florence (named after the former train station where it takes place) which brought together government representatives, members of the PD, members of civil society, entrepreneurs and employers to present and discuss, among others, the reforms which are supposed to revitalise the stagnating Italian labour market.Page 1 of 6EUROPP – Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them...18.11.2014http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-tra...Matteo Renzi, Credit: © European Union 2014 – European Parliament (CC-BY-SA-ND-NC-3.0)The unemployment rate in Italy is currently over 12 per cent, and rising to nearly 45 per cent among young Italians. The most controversial provision in Renzi’s ‘Jobs Act’ is the reduction of employment protection for permanent workers. In exchange, Renzi promised to introduce a system of unemployment benefits of 1,000 euros per month, which covers the unemployed for up to two years depending on the length of their previous employment. Still, young people who do not manage to enter the labour market are not included in the system.On the same weekend, on 25 October, one million people – led by the leaders of CGIL and its metal working federation (FIOM), and including representatives of the minority wing of PD and other left parties – took to the streets of Rome to protest against the government’s economic and labour market policy. The unions in Rome presented themselves as a solution to a labour market which has become increasingly fragmented and exclusionary toward young generations. From the stage, CGIL leader Susanna Camusso spoke about extending the rights to precarious workers, while wearing a red T-shirt reading “I am Marta”.Who is Marta? She is the hypothetical precarious worker that Renzi accused the unions of not caring about during one of his public speeches. Renzi’s narrative of the disastrous conditions of the Italian labour market is that Italian unions are responsible for the segmented and stagnating situation because they are only concerned with protecting their members and unable to move on towards a ‘new’ and ‘modern’ model of organisation of labour and industrial relations. At Page 2 of 6EUROPP – Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them...18.11.2014http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-tra...Leopolda, Renzi presented himself as the initiator of change, ready to challenge the strong, old power of CGIL. At the same time, CGIL and FIOM in Rome accused the government of pursuing employers’ interests exclusively, allowing for a further reduction of labour regulations while keeping unions out of the bargaining arena.Is Renzi’s conception of Italian trade unions accurate? Are they in fact conservative actors concerned primarily with the representation of their core workforce, as claimed by the government? We draw here on a few cases, which show that unions have systematically tried to bargain provisions in support of atypical workers when they had the chance to.When unions (manage to) bargain for atypical workersThe three Italian union confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL set up unions for atypical workers at the end of the 1990s (Nidil, Felsa and CPO, respectively) in an attempt to better represent temporary workers. These unions represent both agency workers and the different kinds of self-employed and project-based contracts (co.co.pro), which make up the jungle of contractual forms in the Italian labour market.Self-employed and project-based workers are not easy to bargain for because their remuneration is based on the delivery of a project (so widely interpreted that even waiters and teachers might work on a ‘project’) and as such are not subject to collective agreements. At the moment, unions mainly help these workers to turn their contracts into permanent ones by supporting their legal cases in court.Unions sometimes even managed to bargain collectively on the ‘stabilisation’ of project-based workers. For instance, in 2007 unions bargained over the stabilisation of thousands of project-based call-centre workers – however, in order to do that, the ‘helping hand’ of the state provided this opportunity as Cesare Damiano, the then Minister of Labour in a centre-left government, issued a directive forcing employers to bargain with the unions on the permanent hiring of these workers.But the main evidence that Italian unions do not discriminate against atypical workers is provided by the wide-reaching agreements for temporary agency workers (TAWs), which fall by law under the union bargaining domain. The atypical workers’ unions signed the first collective agreement for agency workers in 1998 (renewed twice since Page 3 of 6EUROPP – Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them...18.11.2014http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-tra...then). The agreements reiterate that temporary agency workers’ salaries should not be lower than the salary of permanent workers, a condition that was already set by law.In addition to equality in terms of salary, the collective agreement also stipulated parity between temporary agency workers and permanent employees on a number of other aspects, including working hours, job classifications, overtime and night-time work, holidays and leave. In addition, the collective agreement stated that after 42 (also non-consecutive) months of employment at a user company, temporary agency workers must be offered a permanent position by the user company. Sectoral colletive agreements (such as the metalworkers’ one signed by Renzi’s nemesis FIOM) set even shorter timeframes for temporary agency workers to be offered a permanent position.Furthermore,with crucial input from social partners, a bilateral institution jointly managed by unions and employers was created with the objective to provide basic, continuous, on-the-job, and professional training to temporary agency workers. The number of TAWs trained through the institution grew from around 75,000 to over 225,000 between 2001 and 2007 and it is interesting to note that the share of TAWs covered by training programmes in Italy is substantially higher than in the other European countries for which data is available (as shown in the Table below), making Italy an example of good practice.Table: Training programmes provided to temporary agency workers in five EU countries in 2008Source: CIETTUnions played a minor role on the issue of income protection for agency workers.Access to income support is granted upon a worker having performed a certain amount of working days, with a very high threshold that makes the use of this instrument rarely accessible to any temporary agency worker. Several studies confirm the ineffectiveness of this Page 4 of 6EUROPP – Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them...18.11.2014http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-tra...provision for agency workers, which is identified as the weakest component of the framework of welfare.The limited success in securing a suitable system for income support can be largely seen as the inability of the unions to fully understand the emergence and characterisation of atypical work. However, unions have recently taken on board ‘broader citizenship instances’, including support for types of guaranteed minimum income – whose current absence is indeed a major form of dualisation between permanent and atypical workers in Italy. However, contractual welfare can only integrate but not substitute the role of public welfare, which is still limited or absent for workers with discontinuous employment histories and for young people who do not manage to enter the labour market. That would be a good first step to undertake and Renzi can be sure that unions would not oppose it.Is Renzi wrong about Italian unions?Even though Italian unions reached awareness of crucial themes connected with atypical work (e.g. income protection) relatively late in their history, the claim that Italian unions have been exclusively interested in the protection of their core constituencies does not match the evidence. As we might have expected from a general confederation of labour situated – in Richard Hyman’s words – between class and society, Italian unions have strived to represent all workers, to counteract labour market dualisation, to unify labour (e.g. through the stabilisation of co.co.pros and the equality of pay for temporary agency workers) and to bargain also on the behalf of atypical workers since the very introduction of such forms of work.The problem of (especially young) outsiders in the Italian labour market is a crucial one, and unions might not have always been up to the task. But Renzi – before moving accusations against the unions – should first blame and put remedy to past government policies that increased labour market segmentation by multiplying the types of contractual relationships and that allowed employers’ opportunistic strategies to use a cheaper flexible workforce instead of permanent contracts. It is good that making the Italian labour market fairer and more equal seems to be a priority for Renzi’s government. However, the lesson from past experiences is that successful reforms need full involvement of the unions rather than their marginalisation.Page 5 of 6EUROPP – Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them...18.11.2014http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-tra...Please read our comments policy before commenting.Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/11dlkqj_________________________________About the authorsChiara Benassi – Max Planck InstituteChiara Benassi is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She has worked on atypical work and union strategies across sectors with a particular focus on Germany and Italy.Niccolo Durazzi – LSENiccolo Durazzi is an MPhil/PhD candidate at the LSE Department of Social Policy and Deputy Director of LSE Consulting at LSE Enterprise. He has worked on several projects on various social policy areas for national governments and European institutions.Page 6 of 6EUROPP – Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them...18.11.2014http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/17/matteo-renzi-must-work-with-italian-tra...

Matteo Renzi must work with Italian trade unions rather than against them if he is serious about reforming Italy’s labour market

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