Why the minimum wage is wrong
What is wrong with the minimum wage by law. The speech by Marco Pepe, national councilor of Unimpresa
A company, in the case of the minimum wage, has already expressed itself about 1 year ago at the Presidential Committee of 27/6/2021 on the occasion of the EU Directive Proposal COM (2020) 682, reiterating its opposition and underlining how in Italy , the determination of wages is left to collective bargaining and, it is reiterated, the Italian model of trade union relations is characterized by a high level of organizational pluralism for each production sector, both from the side of workers and from that of employers, covering more than 70% of the contractual coverage.
Therefore, some passages from the acts of the Presidential Committee are reported.
At present, the minimum wage exists in all Member States: in 21 countries there are legal minimum wages (the amount of this minimum value varies significantly, from 312 euros per month in Bulgaria to 2,142 euros per month in Luxembourg), while in 6 Member States (Denmark, Italy, Cyprus, Austria, Finland and Sweden) minimum wage protection is provided exclusively by collective agreements.
The differences in the determination of the minimum wage within the countries of the European Union are therefore clearly evident, both at the overall economic and social level (cost of living, productivity, competitiveness and development), and at the labor law level, both in relation to to the components of remuneration as regards working hours and, starting from this situation, the identification of a single monetary value, effective, efficient and congruous throughout Europe, appears almost utopian.
In fact, given that the monthly wage average of the European states is equal to about € 924, if the European minimum wage were calculated on the basis of this average, it would never find the possibility of approval, as it would determine for many countries an unsustainable increase in the cost of work and thus the rise in the level of unemployment, the increase in irregular work and the loss of competitiveness.
Otherwise, if the threshold were set at a decidedly lower level, the economically less developed states would retain some room for maneuver to reach the established level, but with the risk of a downward bargaining for workers in richer countries than in other countries. that they are less rich.
It is precisely those countries with high collective bargaining coverage that have a lower percentage of low-wage workers, lower wage inequality and higher minimum wages.
In the case of a company, in the total of the current 27 national collective labor agreements, there are minimum wage levels in just 4 of them.
In the Italian legal system, as mentioned above, the discipline of quantitative aspects and of the systems and criteria for calculating remuneration is entrusted to collective bargaining which, integrated by individual autonomy, however bound by the constitutional principles of proportionality and sufficiency, and operating in an improvement key, constitutes its largely pre-eminent source, fulfilling the task of guaranteeing, especially for professionally less skilled workers, a minimum level of satisfactory and decent wages.
In this regard, it is worth noting that INPS declares that the national collective labor agreements present in its archive for private sector employees have an extremely high level of coverage: in fact, they cover a total of 1.5 million employers. (99 per cent of the companies present in Italy) and 14.7 million workers (equal to 97.6 per cent of the workforce employed in the private sector).
Moreover, the jurisprudential interpretation of art. 36 of the Constitution has ended up recognizing the economic treatments established by collective agreements (so-called minimum tables), although lacking in erga omnes binding nature, the nature of "constitutional" remuneration, so much so that in Italy the need for the minimum wage was, as happens in many other European legal systems, guaranteed by law.
Well, in the difficult search for a fair minimum wage value, it is important to remember that setting a rate that is too high could discourage the demand for work and / or represent an incentive for irregular work, while too low would end up not guaranteeing living conditions. dignitaries to which the institute is aimed.
While establishing a more congruous value, the introduction of the legal minimum wage raises, in any case, many doubts as to its real usefulness.
As already mentioned, in the context of an economy in constant technological and organizational transformation, in a labor market increasingly less anchored to traditional and standardized schemes and increasingly aimed, albeit in the common form of subordination, towards greater hourly flexibility and agility of methods with which the work performance is made, as well as increasingly oriented towards remunerating the professionalism of workers rather than the qualifications defined by collective agreements through performance bonuses also converted into goods and services of social utility included in corporate welfare, it follows that the measurement of the overall salary is certainly very complicated. Moreover, in the countries that have already introduced the legal minimum wage, the issue of underpaid workers and the spread of illegal practices are, unfortunately, still present and yet the increase in technological controls on salary data up to the application of practices such as the name and shaming with which companies that do not respect the minimum legal wages are publicly denounced.
Ultimately: at whatever level it was set, a minimum wage in Italy would have a particular impact on small and very small businesses in the South; with consequences that are not difficult to imagine: reduction of manpower or, alternatively, further recourse to the “hidden”.
All the more reason, in a country like Italy, where degenerative phenomena persist to which it seems impossible to be able to curb – the highest rates, among the EU countries, of tax evasion, social security contributions and undeclared work – the possible determination a too high legal wage would run the concrete risk of determining, exclusively, further recourse to undeclared and / or gray work; without, however, producing benefits for those thousands of workers with "pirate" contracts or even without any apparent contractual guarantee.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/perche-e-sbagliato-il-salario-minimo/ on Thu, 09 Jun 2022 07:27:00 +0000.