What will happen to the contract in large distribution
This is why the national collective bargaining agreement for large-scale distribution runs the risk of not renewing itself very soon. Mario Sassi's article
There are two unwritten rules in trade union negotiations at different levels that the respective negotiators should always remember. Never go into situations with no way out is the first rule. The second is that the negotiation itself must be overall cheaper than the simple imposition of one's will and strategy (in the short or long term). Otherwise there is no need to negotiate.
In large-scale distribution, there are some obvious obstacles to the national negotiations that should be opened on the Confcommercio front. The first concerns the union's acceptance in the previous renewal of Federdistribuzione's request to have its own dumped national contract, thus undermining the negotiating representativeness of the confederation. That contract, now expired, has determined an element of inequality between competing companies on the same market that is difficult (although not impossible) to overcome. And Federdistribuzione has not committed at all to greater availability on future renewals. A classic situation with no way out.
The other element, by no means secondary, is represented by both the path and the queues of the acquisition of the Auchan Retail stores by Conad. A part of the trade union thought it possible to escape the negotiation as a reaction to the intransigence of the Consortium committed to designing and completing the passage of the French company's points of sale to distribute and integrate them into its 5 main Cooperatives and to the various commercial partners involved by antitrust intervention.
An equal and opposite intransigence deployed, however, not supported either by favorable power relations or by a far-sighted strategy. So much so as to make clear the uselessness of the negotiation for the Consortium under the conditions required. And this self-exclusion has brought with it two inevitable negative effects. It made the interlocution of the entire trade union irrelevant in the process of reorganization and relaunch of Conad, the main company in the sector also of those who, like Fisascat CISL, have tried in every way to govern its main effects and repercussions. At the same time, this story weighs, needless to hide it, on the renewal of the CCNL. First of all, the one managed by Confcommercio to which Conad has recently joined and, in turn, all the other expired CCNLs that inevitably remain pending.
The reason is very simple. Having certified the irrelevance of the trade union in the main dispute of the sector and the unwillingness to rebuild that table, Conad has no interest either in pushing Confcommercio to national negotiations by charging costs at this moment or in disengaging politically (if ever it had ever intended to do so). ) from a substantial convergence with the entire employer front of the large-scale retail trade which, these days, has no desire to face certain costs in exchange for vague or even inconsistent counterparts. On the contrary. He has an interest in keeping the point steady. The two events are obviously connected. And Confcommercio does not have, at this moment, the internal authority necessary to face, by forcing the situation, a negotiation in the name and on behalf of the entire service sector covered by strong concerns determined by the context.
The terrain of confrontation rejected by one part of the trade union in the company dispute, both in terms of method and merit, is the other side of the refusal to share in the new CCNL the flexibility and the necessary and indispensable tools for companies in the coming years.
Fortunately, Carrefour found a solution on 2022 in the company headquarters, also favored by the international scenario with the reappearance of the shadow of Auchan on the future of the French group. Coop and PAM, on the other hand, are stuck at the stake precisely because the CCNL or the CIA, where they still exist, are shaken rather than tools to be updated as constraints that cannot be ignored by creating a correspondence with the two rules described at the beginning. They confirm a dead end situation and make a positive national negotiation uncertain on this basis.
If the next renewal does not fall back on a transitional "German" solution (Una Tantum that intervenes to cover inflation if it should get out of hand, leaving the rest unchanged) it must necessarily recover its true "exchange" function by renewing the instrumentation in the name of involvement, sharing of results and productivity. So the overall cost is not an independent variable.
This CCNL built in a past, characterized by the irrelevance of discount stores, the global network and in contexts of continuous growth, penalizes precisely those formats most exposed to the crisis and reorganisations. It pushes to outsourcing rather than protecting the workers involved and to expel those who cost more by promoting less stable forms of employment. It adds costs to who should contain them and favors some formats or activities over others. It is the dog that bites its own tail. This is the central point from which any renewal negotiation should start. How to make the CCNL useful for today's workers (not yesterday's) and businesses. How to make it a collectible and concrete tool. Otherwise its chalking for the benefit of pirate bargaining is bound to grow.
But is there this will in trade associations and in the trade union? In business associations they limit themselves to throwing the ball in the stands by scheduling useless commissions or conferences in which we talk about something else. They don't have any concrete pressure from the companies so they stick to the stake. But even in the trade union press releases of open disputes there is a sort of hedgehog closure as in PAM and Coop Alleanza 3.0. There is a huge underestimation of the organizational problems, of the risks on the horizon and of the attempts by the company to find possible alternative solutions to the dismissal procedures. The next 4/5 years will shape the future of the sector. Precisely the years covered by the renewal of the CCNL.
And the recent Mediobanca ranking tells us what can credibly happen. Provided that the consequences of the war in Ukraine and the related inflationary effects do not seriously worsen the reference framework. The first interesting fact is that the concentration process in our country continues. The top five retailers account for 57.5%. It was 52.8% in 2019. We are still far behind France, Great Britain and Germany but we have overtaken Spain.
Hypermarkets continue and will continue to suffer and discounters to grow. E-commerce, even with a jump of + 60% in 2021, could reach 3% of the market. Irreversible process but nothing exceptional. However, the sector's margins are down on all formats. This is the real point. Abroad, although in decline, they still travel twice as many as our companies. The concentration effect weighs heavily. It must be considered that the recovery in inflation will push the promotional pressure and competition between retailers and suppliers everywhere. Therefore, the turnover will sacrifice margins and exalt costs.
And it is precisely in this scenario that the negotiating space must find its balance and its new raison d'être. When mutual intransigences are not put aside, only the "law of the pendulum" remains. Yesterday he favored the union, today the companies. Thus, however, nothing good is built.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/che-cosa-succedera-al-contratto-nella-grande-distribuzione/ on Sun, 03 Apr 2022 05:26:51 +0000.