At the end of May 2007, the collective agreement for Italy’s public sector was finally renewed, following extensive ‘two-phase’ negotiations between the trade unions and government. Along with securing new provisions for pay increases for the country’s 3.5 million public sector employees, the negotiations have raised issues likely to affect future collective agreements in other sectors.
Between 28 and 29 May 2007, trade union confederations and the government signed a document renewing the collective agreement for the public sector. The agreement, which had expired in 2005, will cover about 3.5 million public sector workers.
In the Italian public sector, collective bargaining is regulated by a particular system of rules. The first stage of bargaining involves the publication of an Economic and Financial Planning Document (Documento di Programmazione Economica e Finanziaria, DPEF) and of the subsequent Budget Law, which allocates the funds required to cover sectoral agreements or their renewal, even before the national agreement and branch agreements are stipulated.
In drawing up the DPEF, the new centre-left government had in fact already anticipated an average wage increase amounting to about €100. Moreover, in January 2007, the social partners and government signed a memorandum on the reorganisation of the public administration (Memorandum d’intesa su lavoro pubblico e riorganizzazione delle amministrazioni pubbliche (in Italian, 82Kb PDF)) (IT0702039I).
However, a definitive renewal of the public sector collective agreement was blocked when the Minister of the Economy, Tomaso Padoa Schioppa, raised concerns that insufficient resources were available to cover the increases envisaged. As a result, the trade unions announced their plans to hold a general strike on 1 June and on 4 June in schools. A meeting was due to be held on 18 May but was postponed until 28 May – the date when the agreement was finally signed and when the strike was called off. In the meantime, government ministers agreed to allocate a sum of around €600 million to cover the difference between the €93–€95 increase recently proposed by the government and the €101 increase requested by the trade unions.
The new public sector agreement comprises two main parts. The first part was signed by the government and the general secretaries of the three main trade union confederations, namely Guglielmo Epifani of the General Confederation of Italian Workers (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, Cgil), Raffaele Bonanni of the Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori, Cisl) and Luigi Angeletti of the Union of Italian Workers (Unione Italiana del Lavoro, Uil). This part of the agreement relates to pay elements and initially provides for a monthly increase of €101, retroactively from February 2007. The latter amount corresponds to the monthly increase for ministry workers, which is the baseline used for calculating the increases for other public sector categories. This figure is then divided according to the different job grades of employees and to the particular sector in which they work. For example, local government employees will receive an average monthly increase of €93, while health workers will be entitled to an increase of around €104, and teachers to a monthly rise of about €106.
The second part of the agreement was signed by the general secretaries of the public sector federations affiliated to the main trade union confederations, namely Carlo Podda of the Civil Service Union (Funzione Pubblica, Fp-Cgil), Rino Tarelli of the Federation of Public and Service Workers (Federazione lavoratori pubblici e dei servizi, Fps-Cisl) and Salvatore Bosco of the Public Administration Workers’ Union (Unione Italiana del Lavoro: Pubblica Amministrazione, Uil-Pa). This part of the accord concerned normative aspects and the introduction of a triennial, rather than biennial, agreement. The text states that, by December 2007, the parties shall undertake to conclude an agreement on ‘the experimental introduction of the triennial duration of renewals of public sector agreements, as regards both the pay part and normative part, for the three-year period 2008–2010’.
The Minister for Reform and Innovation in the Public Administration (Ministro per le riforme e le innovazioni nella pubblica amministrazione), Luigi Nicolais, underlined the symbolic importance of the triennial aspect of the agreement, referring to it as an ‘experimentation in the public sector … set to change the collective bargaining system’. Italy’s Prime Minister Romano Prodi emphasised the continuity with the past and the innovation brought about by the agreement.
Meanwhile, the trade unions expressed their satisfaction with the new collective agreement, in particular with the ‘attainment of the objective’, as Mr Epifani of Cgil described it. However, their comments regarding changes to the duration of the agreement were more restrained. Mr Epifani has described the change as ‘a one-off’, while Mr Bonanni of Cisl argued that any revision of the bargaining system established by the 1993 agreement can only be undertaken ‘jointly’.
The reactions of the National Coordinator of the Unitary Rank-and-File Confederation (Confederazione Unitaria di Base, Cub), Pierpaolo Leonardi, and the National Secretary of the Workers’ Union (Sindacato dei lavoratori, SdL) were different. They both emphasised that the triennial aspect of the agreement had been an objective of the former Berlusconi government, highlighting that it was rather ironic that such a change had been introduced by a centre-left government, which is traditionally closer to trade unions and workers. According to the General Workers’ Union (Unione Generale del Lavoro, Ugl), this change calls into question the entire system of national-level collective bargaining.
It appears that the most striking feature of the renewed public sector agreement is the change in its duration from a biennial to a triennial agreement.
This change is attributed to an attempt ‘to align the scheduling of negotiations with the annual DPEF and to enable verification of progress in improving the efficiency of services and in increasing productivity’, as stated in the second text of the agreement. However, in effect, such a change constitutes an innovation for national-level collective bargaining, which is bound to provoke debate among the parties at national level and in all sectors.
Livio Muratore, Ires Lombardia