Lhe Covid-19 crisis acted in Veneto as an accelerator of welfare, in particular of corporate welfare. It happens in an area where in recent years welfare has already occupied an important place in the supplementary bargaining between company, inter-company and local agreements: according to the OCSEL data (the Observatory on Second Level Bargaining) of the CISL, 38% of the supplementary agreements signed in the period 2017-18 they introduced welfare measures, with a notable growth over the previous two years (23%). “Welfare has established itself as the second most present subject in second-level bargaining, after wages and before matters of great importance such as hours, the management of restructuring and crises, trade union rights and the organization of work »Underlines Tiziano Barone, director of Veneto Lavoro, in the introduction to the last“ Quaderno ”dedicated to this topic. Now, the health emergency opens up an important strategic role for corporate welfare; there is no doubt that the Covid emergency and the social crisis push companies to question themselves on the priorities for intervention and to redefine their organization to respond to emerging needs, seeking, at the same time, to adopt a community-based, generative and co-responsible mode of intervention “.
Not only that: territorial welfare can represent “an opportunity for development and support of the reference territory and the activities that characterize it, contributing to the growth of the local economy through collaboration with other companies with corporate welfare experience and also helping those smaller realities with particular difficulties in the market, identifying solutions and services that can involve the community in which the companies of the network operate ».
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In essence, the crisis produced by the health emergency “is an opportunity for companies to learn to recognize the value of the environment and the well-being of workers – underlines Barone -, concretely assuming social responsibility. Corporate welfare can therefore help orient the recovery on new foundations. It is a question of guaranteeing a more advanced level of security and a wider distribution of well-being, of training resources, as well as of combating exclusions and re-aggregating communities ». Corporate welfare is looked at not only for its ability to integrate services, but for its ability to innovate, or to respond to new emerging needs, and for the proximity of businesses to families and the territory: “Therefore, in the future The function of corporate welfare cannot only be that of the mere supply of goods and services, but must assume a social function and a connotation extended to the territory of belonging ».
The Veneto Welfare service was established by the Region on 18 July 2017 with the aim of strengthening the integrated welfare system in the territory with promotion and monitoring actions. As an Operating Unit in Veneto Lavoro, Veneto Welfare has so far carried out a process of accreditation of the forms of territorial welfare which, with various legal roles, operate in Veneto. The resulting mapping is a first survey both of the territorial supplementary social security and health funds, of bilateral source, and of the forms of territorial welfare which is the historical sedimentation of solidarity born in multiple forms with a common subsidiary denominator: Foundations of banking origin and Community foundations populate a regional territory enriching it with important social actions, which are not resolved in financial interventions, but structure networks and share tools that are strategic for nourishing social cohesion. The survey is also extended to the national pension funds which have a significant presence among Veneto workers.