The bankers are preparing to face the negotiations for the renewal of the national collective labor agreement, which expired at the end of December. The balance of the past and the premises of the future were intertwined on the first day of the congress of Fisac CGIL which will have to choose the new general secretary. In the analysis of the socio-economic context, “awareness of a complex context” is needed, where there are various factors that all have heavy repercussions, from war to inflation, says Ilaria Dalla Riva, who heads the Trade Union and Labor Affairs Committee of the Abi and is CAO and head of people and culture Italy of UniCredit. «The banks are no strangers to this context – underlines Dalla Riva – and therefore what to put in place? The great heritage of our relationships that we have been able to build, maintain and nurture». It is on these foundations that «we must base the contractual path above all in a complex world that requires new answers», continues Dalla Riva. The history of the bank contract is very significant for its ability to innovate and define unique instruments. Just think of the redundancy fund, which is so innovative, the employment fund and everything we did during the pandemic with solutions that weren’t written at all. We start from this great mutual ability to arrive at a sustainable contract from different instances on the economic front and not to be able to think not only of today but of other tomorrows for our companies and workers», affirms Dalla Riva.
Not everything that has been done, however, has a brilliant balance sheet, in the interpretation given by the outgoing general secretary of Fisac, Nino Baseotto. The commercial pressures in the bank, for example, «are a “malpractice” that the agreement between the ABI and the unions of 2017 failed to eradicate – says the trade unionist -. The experience of recent years, thanks to the increasingly marked commercial evolution of banking activity, has led to exaggerated and unacceptable forms of pressure. The commitment and counteractions put in place by the entire union, starting from what was defined in the agreement, unfortunately did not produce appreciable results, in the face of an attitude of the companies and groups which often fluctuated between ignoring the phenomenon, its theoretical stigmatization and rare and bland concrete interventions». If there is something that should be recognized in the agreement signed with Abi in 2017, for Baseotto, it is the fact “of having brought the issue of commercial policies, normally of exclusive business relevance, back to the industrial relations agenda”.
The real issue of the contract, however, will be the purchasing power of wages. «Inflation, now stably in the double-digit range, combined with the weight of high energy prices, requires a solution capable of defending the real purchasing power of salaries and the issue of how to remunerate the average profitability of the sector must be tackled, thus also confirming the unifying role of a contract capable of increasing the salaries of all and all employees», says the leader of the CGIL banking sector who, in his report, cited two critical issues that the sector cannot escape. One is the one that defines the desertification of the branches, “which is rendering a terrible service to the country and its characteristics”, the other is that of the occupation, on which “we will no longer accept the logic of exoduses greater than the entrances. «The trend towards a continuous reduction of employees in the banking sector must be stopped – says Baseotto -. We scraped the bottom of the barrel. Enough. Concretely, this means that it will no longer be possible for us to allow exodus with the solidarity fund in the logic of two leaving and one entering or who should enter. The normality from now on will have to be that of one to one and, in some cases, we will have to agree on plans that determine a net increase in employees ».