Is Confcommercio in crisis?
What is happening to Confcommercio. The in-depth study by Mario Sassi, author of the Blog-Notes on work
The crisis of the parties and the need for their affirmation on a new basis places in the background the same crisis that the role of the country's social and economic representation is going through. Some far more than others are marching resolutely towards irrelevance. In commerce and services, the situation is there for all to see. However, the management of the pandemic has only highlighted an already existing trend.
This is so in Europe and in the places that matter where the real lobbies play a decisive role both directly and transversely, leaving to traditional representation only the consummation of old rites and liturgies that have little impact on the real life of their respective members. In crisis, in addition to the evanescence of the results achieved, increasingly dictated by politics and less and less by the associative initiative, is also the relationship between the center and the peripheries. The latter are increasingly in trouble with their respective associates struggling with daily survival problems, therefore far from an ineffective way of being.
In commerce and services, more than anywhere else, the inability to change old organizational trajectories, now dated and thus to question their traditional associative boundaries eroded by a profoundly changed socio-economic context well before the pandemic, has limited oneself to unveiling the obvious and to invoke "tables and confrontations" more to reassure the respective bases than to interpret a new vision of the role.
Hardly anyone understood in time that an era has ended. And that the inadequacy in "understanding the new and guiding the change" is fatal. Obviously not all of them react the same way. Where entrepreneurs participate and count in internal decisions, there has been some reaction. The protest led to some results and to correct the course. Always little, of course, because the impact of the pandemic is helping to reshape activities, priorities, business organizations and business prospects. Where, however, the self-referential bureaucracies, such as in Confcommercio, have not gone beyond the request for refreshments, the war against smart working or the defense of the status quo, see bathing establishments and pharmacies. Rearguard battles aimed at regrouping old equilibriums animated by the hope that, after the night, it would be possible to return to the previous situation.
On the contrary, the pandemic represented what the safety car represents in motor racing. It clears up previous weights and interlocutions and puts everyone on the same level. Show limits rather than potential. Only those who have something to give or to say emerge. And if this affects more or less all organizations across the board, some differences have been noted. Among the most effective confederations in looking beyond the assigned perimeter, I would certainly place Confimprese followed by Confesercenti. The first thanks to its historic President Mario Resca and his concrete activism alternates protests and proposals with seriousness.
The second found impetus with the appointment of the president Patrizia de Luise, who joined the Steering Council set up at Palazzo Chigi directly wanted by Mario Draghi to "guide, strengthen and make efficient the programmatic activity in the field of economic policy coordination". All this demonstrates that, in this phase, ideas and proposals are worth more than weight on paper.
At the level of individual federations, the role of AIRES, the Italian association of specialized household appliance retailers belonging to Confcommercio, should be emphasized, which does not fail to make its voice heard in defense of the category in a timely and effective way like Fipe, Federalberghi and Conftrasporto. . To point out that, to the Blablatic ineffectiveness of the Confcommercio summit by now disappeared from the radar, various federations and as many local associations have concretely made up for its role.
In modern distribution Federdistribuzione could have had a freeway available. Unfortunately, the election of Alberto Frausin to the Presidency, with his coming from outside the sector, is determining the need for his apprenticeship in the category much longer than what we could have expected. The last example is on the pads and on the masks in the GDO. Not only all in random order and under broom from pharmacies. Now there is also the risk of being outclassed by newsstands.
I am beginning to think that the eternal competition between the single brands has consciously given birth to a weak solution on the associative level. Otherwise it would not explain the impasse on all the open games that matter. At the media level it is now taken for granted to hear that "the Government has received Confindustria and the other associations" relegating Confcommercio, which claims to be the largest confederation in Europe, to its ancillary role in the political debate and in the management not so much of the pandemic as of the aftermath .
And so while Amazon, demonstrating vision and strategy, promises to marry all the associations in the square, the other large and small companies and part of the sector press, wonder about the hidden reasons that would have led Conad to choose Confcommercio, discarding Federdistribuzione and not a how to restart common strategies that represent the real challenge of the entire national trade and its relationship with the respective supply chains.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/confcommercio-e-in-crisi/ on Sun, 06 Feb 2022 07:10:34 +0000.