In July 2006, a draft proposal was agreed on the renewal of the supplementary agreement for the Ferrero Group, which had expired on 30 June 2006. The deal reached between the company and three trade unions covers the four Ferrero plants in Italy, employing around 6,000 workers, who subsequently had to approve the draft agreement. The most innovative part of the supplementary company agreement concerns measures to facilitate reconciliation between working hours and family responsibilities.
A proposal of renewal of the company collective agreement was signed on 26 July 2006 by the international chocolate and confectionery manufacturer Ferrero and the food sector trade unions affiliated to the three main trade union confederations, namely: the Italian Federation of Agroindustrial Workers (Federazione Lavoratori Agro Industria, Flai-Cgil), the Agroindustrial, Food and Environment Federation (Federazione Agricola Alimentare Ambientale Industriale, Fai-Cisl) and the Italian Union of Agroindustrial Workers (Unione Italiana Lavoratori Agroalimentari, Uila-Uil).
Content of agreement
In relation to its corporate strategy, Ferrero Italia will continue to be the core of the group as regards business decisions, product research and innovation, while the group will also continue its expansion abroad. This international expansion was underlined by the recent opening of a plant in Canada and transfer of part of production to its plant already operating in Poland. Concerning industrial relations, the company intends to continue to engage in participative industrial relations with the trade unions. According to the agreement signatories, this model has provided the basis for an advanced system of relations in which the unions autonomously perform their negotiating role in representing and protecting workers.
The agreement extends the working conditions at the main Ferrero plant, located at Alba near Cuneo in the Piedmont region in the north of Italy, to the company’s other three Italian production units in terms of aspects not previously standardised. In particular, the allowance for night work is fixed at an additional 40% on top of the base hourly wage at all the group’s plants.
Flexible working arrangements
The most innovative part of the agreement is the flexibility in respect of the employment contract and working time. The declared aim of the parties is to help workers reconcile their private lives with working time, in particular those with greater family responsibilities. More specifically, the agreement introduces the following measures.
- Horizontal part-time work arrangements are possible, meaning shorter working days. The agreement does not extend to ‘vertical’ part-time work – in other words full-time working days and a subsequent period of days or weeks off – as this pattern is not considered as facilitating day-to-day reconciliation of working hours and personal life. Access to the horizontal part-time contract is restricted to: employed parents on an open-ended contract returning from periods of compulsory (for mothers) or voluntary (for fathers) parental leave; and to workers, again on open-ended contracts, with serious health problems or caring for cohabiting dependent family members. Parents may switch to horizontal part-time work on the basis of a daily schedule of four to six hours until the end of the calendar year in which the child reaches its third birthday. Thereafter, the employee returns to full-time work, although she or he may reach agreement with the company on continuation of a reduced work schedule of no less than six hours’ work per day. Alternatively, the employee may return to full-time work at any time upon agreement with the company.
- Working mothers are given extended exemption from night shifts for a period of six months after their child’s third birthday; the law currently exempts working mothers from night shifts until the child’s third birthday.
- A day of training is reserved for workers (mothers and fathers) returning to work after parental leave, and for workers absent for at least six consecutive months, in order to ease their work re-entry.
In addition, the agreement grants some other specific measures in respect of leave, including one day of paid leave for fathers on the occasion of their child’s birth, and in relation to reduced working time, such as a six-hour reduction of annual working time.
Target-related bonuses
The agreement confirms the company’s system of performance-related pay, which is determined by an economic factor and a managerial factor – the latter being tied to quality, wastage and freshness indicators – accounting respectively for 30% and 70% of the wage. On a trial basis, the quality indicator now includes a new health and safety parameter.
The annual increment, which in the previous four-year period amounted to a total of €5,325, has been increased to €6,150 over the next four years, in the following instalments: €1,450 in the first year, €1,500 in the second year, €1,550 in the third year and €1,650 in the fourth year. Workers on a fixed-term contract are entitled to the company bonus after the second month of employment.
Other provisions
- The company will provide for insurance against death due to any cause, both in the workplace and outside, for all employees on open-ended contracts. The policy pays the worker’s legitimate heirs an allowance to the value of three years’ wages.
- ‘Time banks’ or working time accounts are to be set up on a trial basis at the company’s various plants. The workforce may avail of the time banks on a voluntary basis and the workers are responsible for the scheme’s operation. Using a time bank, staff can work extra hours and then save that additional time to exchange it when desired to enhance their work-life balance. Alternatively, workers may distribute saved time between each other as an act of solidarity if another worker needs to take time off.
- Free paediatric care is offered for employees with children aged from birth to 14 years, in addition to the services provided by the national health service.
- Employees on open-ended contracts with serious health problems are entitled to a second advance on the end-of-service allowance (trattamento di fine rapporto, TFR), provided that four years have elapsed since the first advance.
Reaction to proposed agreement
The company management has not issued any statement, but the signatory unions have expressed their approval of the agreement. According to the National Secretary of Uila-Uil, Pasquale Papiccio: ‘This is absolutely the best agreement ever reached with the company, and probably in the food industry as a whole, because it contains numerous and significant social protection measures not to be found, all together, in any other collective agreement.’ Antonio Lapadula, General Secretary of Fai-Cisl Basilicata – the southern region in which one of the four Ferrero plants is located – stated:
Innovative measures like the time bank, free paediatric care, and reversible part-time work have potential to enhance the quality of workers’ lives inside and outside the company. Our hope is that this positive model of industrial relations will not remain isolated and exceptional but will become common practice, thus opening the way for an increasingly widespread culture of corporate social responsibility.
Commentary
The company agreements signed to date have been characterised by the introduction of flexible contracts and working time arrangements, in particular for specific groups of employees such as working mothers and workers suffering from serious personal or family health problems. For these two categories of workers, the previous supplementary agreement, signed in October 2002, provided that open-ended full-time contracts could be converted into job-sharing arrangements for a period of one year (IT0212103N). The latest agreement, when approved, will introduce broader opportunities to combine work and family responsibilities.
As the agreement was still at the stage of a draft proposal, it had to be submitted for approval by the Ferrero Group’s 6,000 employees working at its four Italian plants located in Alba, in Pozzuolo Martesana near Milan in the Lombardy region to the north, in Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi near Avellino in the Campania region to the south, and in Balvano near Potenza in Basilicata. It was likely that the workers would approve the deal.
Livio Muratore, Ires Lombardia