How the government will move after the release of the layoffs

23 April 20213 years ago babelfish

The reform of social safety nets after the release of layoffs. Giuliano Cazzola's analysis

Draghi has broken the spell of health closures, assuming the responsibility of a “ reasoned risk '', has started a process of reopening starting – fingers crossed – from Monday 26 April (the day significantly following the Liberation Day) .

The exit path from the '' mossy atria and falling holes '' will take place gradually and still too much caution, with apparently unreasonable measures. But mediation was still necessary not only between political forces and the virologists' caravanserai, but also towards a population that continues to be lost and worried about the unstoppable wave of contagion and its unpredictability.

Although absurdities such as the maintenance of the curfew at 10pm until July 31st weigh on the reopening (it is hoped that this limit will be exceeded in the next monitoring), the reversal seems decided and traced, also because – as Mario Draghi himself acknowledged – the best contribution to the recovery are the reopening, while, on the contrary, the supports do not serve to guarantee the stability of the productive fabric.

But there is another spell to get rid of: the blocking of layoffs. A signal of discontinuity must also arrive from the government for a nuclear device that we have been handling for over a year without being able to defuse it: the blocking of individual dismissals for objective (economic) reasons and collective redundancies.

For now, the general blockade has been extended until the end of June; then a differentiation should open in the sense that the companies that are still recipients of the cig from covid-19, pursuant to the Sostegni decree, are expected to have a further extension from 1 July to 31 October 2021.

The unions have already got their hands on: at first asking for an alignment until October; then upon completion of the current year. It would already be a sign of novelty that the government respected the deadlines this time, but it will not be easy, because the unions will stick to their '' Bertoldo tree '': the failure to reform the social safety nets that Minister Andrea Orlando continues to do '' brood on the sidelines ''.

At the very least, however, the government should stop the inertia of the trade union organizations that avoid engaging in reform projects suitable to face the new challenges (“ nothing will be the same again '' for them is just a gargle), to stall with the two crutches of the go-gò block and of the cig in derogation.

Mario Draghi must go and track down the social partners, taking them at their word in their (routine) request for a new social pact. If in 1993 the triangular agreement with the Ciampi government had the objective of rationalizing collective bargaining to the strategic objective of bringing inflation within the Maastricht parameters, today a new social pact should have two major issues at its center: a) the relaunch of productivity and the relative recovery of the delays accumulated in the framework of new technological processes and through local bargaining; b) the decisive launch of active policies capable not only of managing redundancies and retraining labor in mobility towards other productive sectors, but also of managing in mismatch between supply and demand of labor.

The reform of social safety nets must favor these processes. The following measures – which take into account some proposals by Marco Leonardi now director of the Palazzo Chigi Dipe – move along a right line.

Naspi: foresee the 2-month extension of the hose for those who finish it in the months of January-March with the argument that recruitments are still slowed down. It could be useful to ease the entry requirements into naspi in 2021 for young people many of whom have lost expired term contracts
Expansion contract: for those who are 5 years after retirement, all companies with more than 250 employees can pay 3 years of severance pay and the State adds 2 years of Naspi; it could be the only generalized “company slide” to avoid the dismissal of older workers and encourage turnover. During the course of 2021 the problem of the end of quota100 must also be addressed (in this regard, some reasonable hypotheses of exit can be estimated, but the more the company slides (and the solidarity funds) work, the less there is need to reassure people after the end of quota 100). It would be appropriate to also use the social Ape which could cover the interested audience at the end of quota 100.
Active policies: the return of the relocation allowance is already foreseen in the budget law (for now a bankruptcy): a worker in cig for cessation of activity or after 4 months of Naspi goes to the center of the job that profiles him depending on the its employability. The variable allowance pays for training and eventually pays a share to the public or private operator who finds a new job (after 6 months from hiring)
Recovery fund (it does not finance passive but only active policies): 3.5 billion is envisaged for active policies (essentially for the relocation allowance as explained above) and 3 billion for the training of employed and unemployed. There are two difficulties: the ministry-Anpal relations (which is exclusively responsible for active labor policies); the state-regions relationship (which have exclusive jurisdiction over training). Establishing a national system with defined standards of care and training services for the unemployed (and which can be reported for use by the Recovery Fund) is not at all easy, but it is the way forward.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/governo-dopo-lo-sblocco-dei-licenziamenti/ on Fri, 23 Apr 2021 05:42:40 +0000.