I’ll explain the real news of the Essilor-Luxottica agreement
What does the trade union agreement in Essilor-Luxottica provide and what was the action of the chemists' federations? Giuliano Cazzola's analysis
An innovative agreement was signed in recent days by Essilor-Luxottica, the national and local trade union organizations and the RSUs of Filctem Cgil, Femca Cisl and Uiltec Uil. The new supplementary company contract valid for the three-year period 2024-2026 – which concerns approximately 15 thousand employees – introduces for the first time in the group's Italian factories a highly innovative organization model of working times and management of production/work flexibility. Luckily there are still trade federations such as those of chemists and which – rather than following the parapolitical blunders of their confederations along main roads that lead nowhere – have not forgotten the profession of the union.
Unfortunately, the mania for simplifying problems by cataloging them with fashion labels has included this agreement among the experiences of the 34 hour week (for the same salary?). And it is a shame because it is not appropriate to have a reductio ad unum of real experiments with new time models that take into account – in the mutual interest of businesses and workers – the need for flexibility imposed by the health crisis that gave rise to The start (this was also seen with the great resignation) towards a concept of work that does not sacrifice other important aspects of life.
The cases both in different countries and in collective bargaining are very different. In some situations (in Belgium, for example) the 34-hour week is the result of a redistribution of the time in force over four days (longer day in exchange for shorter week). In other cases, permanence and performance in the company are combined with a few days of smart working. In other contracts, companies and unions have jumped the gun at reducing hours for the same salary. But there is still no general indication.
The 34 hours do not carry with them that evocative value that, in other phases of the history of the workers' movement, the demand for 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week had between the 19th and 20th centuries ("if 8 hours seems too little to you, try to work”) and, after the hot autumn of 1969, the 40 hours, a time which however remained confined to negotiations for a long time while only finding ratification in the law in 2003.
For a long time the unions have demanded the 36 hour week for shift workers with patchy results. In the last decade of the last century the world of production felt the thrill of the 35 hours as a new general rule. The input came from France, at the time of the socialist presidency of Lionel Jospin, from two laws in 1998 and 2000, to definitively enter into force two years later. As regards the effects of this measure – modified by Emmanuel Macron during his first mandate – on the economy as a whole, a divisive debate has been ongoing for years regarding both the creation of jobs and increases in the cost of work and its consequences on employment.
In practice, the drastic reduction in hours where it was applied ended up transforming hours worked beyond 35 per week into overtime, but not actually reducing hours.
Here, in those same years, the "French disease" of working hours led to the fall of the first Prodi government at the hands of the PRC led by Fausto Bertinotti. Coming to the present day, if we look at the experiences carried out – on the 4-day working week – in other countries (in Iceland and the UK and more recently in Spain, Scotland, New Zealand and Portugal) – which have experimented with the 4-day working week – we realize that – despite the howls of satisfaction – we are faced with niche cases (with a limited number of interested workers), destined to remain such for a long time while the attempt is underway (which could even fail as has happened up to now) to find a strategy that can reconcile work and employment with the technological transformations underway and that are announced and with the crisis of the labor market in terms of supply. Precisely because large collective subjects have not yet realized how to deal with the effects of the introduction of new technologies, they attach themselves to all the possible solutions that appear on the horizon, risking mistaking cough syrups for life-saving drugs.
In Italy, companies that have already experimented with shortening the working week are reporting positive results and even some very large companies are launching experiments. Among the latter we find, for example, Intesa Sanpaolo which since January has proposed a new model of work organization on a voluntary basis, with the possibility of working 4 days a week, instead of 5, but increasing the daily hours to 9 (the Belgian ritual) .
Essilor-Luxottica (company led by the CEO, Francesco Milleri, in the photo) introduces different and more sophisticated methods. Workers who from next year choose to adhere to the new time model with "short weeks" will be able to carve out 20 days a year for themselves and their personal needs, mostly on Fridays, largely covered by the company and gradually residual from individual institutions, without impact on remuneration. The innovation, which will initially be introduced on an experimental basis in some departments and production areas, is part of a dynamic company context and offers a further solution for designing the contours of one's working hours according to personal needs.
If it were not for the fact that this organizational innovation should allow the permanent stabilization of over 1,500 workers within the Italian production perimeter (which reminds us of concreteness and reality), we could conclude that the supplementary contract rather than intervening on the The timetable raises the problem of improving the well-being of workers through the further implementation of company welfare.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/vi-spiego-le-vere-novita-dellaccordo-in-essilor-luxottica/ on Sun, 03 Dec 2023 08:34:39 +0000.