Italian Industrial Relations : Toward a Strongly Decentralized Collective Bargaining ?

The article investigates reasons and forms of the ongoing process of collective bargaining decentralization in Italy. The declared ambition of the most recent law reform (so called “Jobs Act”), adopted in 2015 by the current Renzi Government, is that to support company-based collective agreement in a framework of “organized” decentralization. In fact the Jobs Act provides that only company-based collective agreements signed “by the comparatively most representative trade unions at national level” may deviate from or supplement the law or the national collective agreements, in particular for the regulation and conditions of use of atypical contracts and flexible forms of the standard open-ended contract. However the reform risks to fail this objective because the Italian system continues to lack a legal discipline to select the bargaining actors on the workers’ and employers’ side both at national and company level. Since the right to bargain collectively is based only on the constitutionally recognized trade union freedom, any representative subject, however small and formed for the occasion, can bargain and sign agreements on behalf of its members, provided that the employer is willing to negotiate. In 2014 the most representative workers' and employers' associations have tried to solve the problem by themselves by signing an interconfederal agreement that states precise criteria to measure the real representativeness of each trade union; nevertheless this agreement has only a contractual efficacy and therefore it is not binding for trade unions and employers have not signed or accepted it. To the extent that the major trade unions and employers’ associations aspire to form an organized system of collective bargaining, also their efforts are at risk of being thwarted by the competition of collective bargaining agreements signed for the same sectors by different organizations, although less representative at national level. In the absence of a law on the representativeness for the purpose of collective bargaining, no association or coalition can claim a monopoly on collective bargaining of any level, even the company one. So in this context ever more companies are tempted to follow the FIAT-FCA path: to not join employers' association, to not apply any national collective agreements and to sign only a company-based collective agreement with scarcely representative trade unions. According to the conclusions of the Author, in Italy it is time for a legal regulation of the actually “disorganized” industrial relation system, if a well functioning “organized” bargaining decentralization is really desired by Government and by the most representative social partners.