Fairness goes through employment

Furthermore, the high flexibility achieved by Italy thanks to reforms carried out in almost 20 years, as Governor Ignazio Visco recently explained, made it easier to absorb unemployment (that is below the European average) but it induced less efficient businesses not to make investments in research and technology. Today Italy has at least 49 types of work contracts that, long-run, created a dispersion-effect and an instability-effect. Not by chance internships, regulation after regulation, are the main way to access employment and to rationalize hyper-flexibility.

Also because of the anomalies on the labor market, certainly not just because of this, Italy's productivity has been declining for over a decade: Italy 10 years ago had a positive advantage over other European economies; today it is under by 13 points compared with the Eurozone average. This piece of data, which in turn is a gauge of the general scarcity of competitiveness of the Country, clearly implicates the intertwining between the impossibility, the difficulty and the lack of desire to carry out investments and the irrational and non effective use of the labor.

Sometimes weak productivity is also due to the non optimal size of the businesses: SMEs remain such for different reasons, but not least the constraint of the 15 employees beyond which there is the fear for article 18 of the Workers' Statute that calls for reinstatement and compensation (maybe even after many years) of dismissals deemed illegitimate. It produces few concrete effects (there are a few tens of thousands of cases that tied to article 18) but it has always pushed businesses to give up growing or to split in more than one unit, always with less than 15 employees.

This is not a simple problem of rights and safeguards, but a limit to development that needs to be faced, without taboos and without ideologies. And, more importantly, within an overall review of the labor market, of the social shock absorbers that allows to reduce the misunderstandings and the neurosis tied to the discussion, or better the war, on article 18; an article that, let's not forget, its inventor Gino Giugni considered outdated. And it seems useful to reason on a recent piece of data that Censis published: in 2010 out of 100 dismissals, 38 involved workers who were less than 35 years old and 30 involved workers between 35 and 44 years of age.

The rewriting of the labor rules will have to be Phase 2 of the Monti Government: an inevitable phase to give a full sense of fairness announced by the prime minister. Especially if associated to the development programs, infrastructure and market liberalization. The same swiftness and determination of Phase 1 will be needed.

The pension reform, once running at full speed, will bring in around twenty billion; so far the bonus to hire workers (15,200 euros of Irap tax breaks for hiring women and young people) and the deductibility of Irap on labor costs is worth 6 billion. Simply doing the math shows there is much work to be done. Tragic data of two million disheartened young people, who do not want to study, who do not want to find a job, who do not want a future tells the rest of the story. There is no trace of that "stay hungry, stay foolish" that Steve Jobs so effectively indicated as the life style to affirm a generation.

Fairness now means facing the merit of dualism between the very precarious and the very protected workers; the dualism between North and South; the dualism between who benefits from social shock absorbers (as perfectible as they may be) and who does not have any; and the gender dualism that sees 50% of women (even highly-educated) out of the labor market.

One cannot fight the Darwinism of markets with the Darwinism of social interests. Also a new phase of consultation should not lose sight of this: we are negotiating the future, everyone's future. Not conflicts between small selfishness, therefore, but a generous contest towards the construction of shared hope, for Italy and for Europe. Hope is not something for naïve people condemned to future desperation; it is a real weapon for modern patriots.
(traduzione di Yael Schrage)

©RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA