Italy: Industrial Relations in the Health Care Sector

Two main challenges can be identified in the health care sector: providing universal, good quality services in hospital and community care and expanding long-term care services, within the context of cost-containment policies. Collective bargaining provided a partial response to these challenges respectively allowing greater “managerialisation” and promoting better working conditions and professionalization in the residential and home care sector, in order to make it more attractive for workers. However, innovations were limited and hindered, in the first case, by the diffidence of unions and politicians and, in the second case, by the weakness of the third sector unions.