I’ll explain the differences and the oddities about the renewal of the metalworkers’ contract
The platform of the metalworkers unions was developed in a socio-economic context overwhelmed by the events that have ousted from history a claims book characterized by heavy wage demands at the national level. Giuliano Cazzola's analysis
The national metalworkers strike for the 2020-2022 contract renewal has raised many doubts. The parties have not yet reached an agreement after nine months of negotiations, albeit interrupted by the substantial paralysis of activities caused by the lockdown in the first half of the year.
The objections concerned above all the abstention from work in a context as serious as the current one, in which we must deal with the closures already arranged in key regions for the manufacturing industry classified as a red zone and with those that can be decided within a few weeks.
Beyond this action, which has taken on a substantially demonstrative character and which has ended up in a shadow of the health problems that have re-emerged with an unexpected arrogance, the merit aspects of such an important dispute deserve some reflection.
The platform of the metalworking unions was developed in a socio-economic context that belongs to a past, albeit a recent one, which has been overwhelmed by the events that have taken place in the meantime and which have ousted from history a claim book characterized by heavy wage demands at the national level.
Already when the platform was presented it was evident that it provided for an approach that was inconsistent with the solemn understandings contained in the 2018 Pact of the Factory, in which the same role that this level played by the 1993 Protocol was reserved for national category bargaining. then: to ensure uniform and minimum regulatory and economic treatments that guaranteed the defense of the purchasing power of wages.
The platform now under discussion from the beginning expressed a line of breaking of the contractual structure, confirmed only a few months earlier (on March 9, 2018, when the new framework agreement was signed). In fact, the request for a wage increase of 8% stood out, which should have compensated for the scarce diffusion of company bargaining, especially in small businesses, but which in fact gave back a primary role to national category bargaining.
The platform was not at all reticent in this regard: "We reconfirm – it was written – the model resulting from the National Collective Labor Agreement of November 26, 2016 which produced the reconfirmation of the two levels of bargaining and numerous contractual innovations for workers, but the feasibility of this model , introduced on an experimental basis, has had an effectiveness far below expectations in the spread of decentralized bargaining and with it the ability to distribute profits and productivity ”.
Counterorder, comrades. In this way, we returned to remunerate a productivity that – at the level of the category – is a pure invention, only because it was not possible to negotiate it in the heart of the processes where it is produced. This approach explicitly constituted a turnaround compared to the very innovative one of the contents of the previous renewal (2017-2019). In the contract stipulated at the time (November 2016) , the prevailing amount of resources (with the exception of those destined for necessarily national and category welfare initiatives, such as supplementary pension and health insurance) was distributed at company level.
The national contract retained a role of protection of the purchasing power of wages, but it would have exercised these functions ex post, or once an effective differential with the trend of wages had emerged. The subjective right to training then entered collective bargaining, with the aim of enabling human capital to rapidly evolve its knowledge according to the progress of the various sectors of the economy through the requalification, reconversion and enrichment of knowledge.
At a time like the present, it makes no sense to return to the ancient conception of the national contract as an opportunity for wage advancement – well beyond inflation – for an entire category, when – where possible – proximity bargaining should be practiced for accompany the production recovery of companies that strive to survive and continue to be competitive, through investments in new technologies and a different organization of work, production cycles and products.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/contratto-metalmeccanici-rinnovo/ on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 07:50:12 +0000.