MILANO – The Council of Ministers that will launch the Recovery plan will be held this week and a document worth 221.5 billion euros will be on the table.
The timing and data to approve the PNRR that Italy wants to send to Brussels by the deadline of 30 April were announced by the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, at the top of CGIL, CISL and UIL. A meeting that lasted just over an hour in the late morning, ended with the commitment to update itself on the contents after May 1st.
Draghi did not distribute a draft of the document, but confirmed that the size of the Recovery plan will be 221.5 billion euros, of which 69 are non-repayable. “The great works – say the union leaders – will be 57. The commissioners a little less, because some commissioners will supervise more works”. The overall figure is therefore in line with that (223 billion) that was already contained in the version of the Pnrr of the Conte bis government, in January, with a deviation from the 209 billion that Italy is entitled to from EU funds: at the time it was justified with the leverage of some expenses and the willingness to present projects in abundance, in order to have ‘substitutes’ in case of single refusals by Brussels.
Recovery Plan, when the funds arrive: the steps towards the first disbursements
by Flavio Bini
“Draghi talked to us about the need for collective mobilization on the implementation of the plan and that the government is available to talk permanently with the social partners and national and local political forces”, said the CISL secretary general. Luigi Sbarra coming out of the meeting. “We asked to accompany the implementation phase with a social pact that brings together the government, employers’ associations and trade unions. The priority is to relaunch investments and avoid new layoffs”.
On the subject of work, the leader of the CGIL, Maurizio Landini, he explained: “The goal of the plan and the government’s measures must be to create jobs. These investments need to be aimed at creating an extraordinary plan for employment that has at its center young people, women and Twelve o’clock”.
Also the president of Confindustria Carlo Bonomi he lists the industrialists’ priorities to Prime Minister Draghi: “Liquidity, capitalization, refreshments and work”. “To avoid hazards” on the deficit, expected to drop by 8 points in 2022-24, for Bonomi it is necessary “to foresee interventions for solid and lasting growth”. The employment numbers, on the other hand, “outline an absolute emergency”, with almost 1 million fewer employees in the year of the pandemic.
Here are the Confindustria proposals to relaunch employment: reduce the threshold for access to the expansion contract (early and subsidized exits) bringing it to 50 employees from the current 250, linking this measure to bonuses for hiring young people and women and contextually removing the reasons provided for in the Dignity decree on fixed-term contracts. And again: reform of social safety nets and active labor policies. Finally, Bonomi asks Draghi to “involve the social partners” in the implementation of the NRR, the Recovery Plan, through “a national monitoring network made up of public and private entities”.
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