Bonus on thirteenth wages for low-income workers, relief for companies that hire, especially in the South, tax relief on production bonuses: the measures that the government would have thought of to give support to workers are taking shape, almost on the eve of their celebration. They will all end up on the table of the Council of Ministers scheduled for Tuesday, together with the awaited reform of the cohesion funds which promises to improve the absorption of European resources, a very rough terrain for Italy which is in the last places in Europe for actual spending .
The new interventions will first be illustrated to the trade unions, who were unexpectedly summoned to Palazzo Chigi on Monday to listen to the news from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in a re-edition of last year’s “1 May decree”, the provision which replaced the citizen’s income with that of inclusion, unleashing the anger of the unions. Once the meeting and the Council of Ministers are not quite close to May 1st, the irritation of the unions remains due to the lack of real negotiations on the measures that concern the workers way of definition, but some fixed points can already be made.
The Deputy Minister for Economy, Maurizio Leo, on the sidelines of the FdI programmatic conference in breaking latest news, assures that in the Council of Ministers on 30 April he will be able to bring the legislative decree on Irpef, implementing the fiscal delegation, which was expected already last week and then is slipped. The most visible – and expensive – innovation contained in the legislative decree is the bonus on thirteenth wages: in the last draft it was defined as “an allowance” of up to 100 euros for employees with an income of up to 28 thousand euros, with a spouse and at least one child (even if born out of recognized, adoptive or foster marriage) dependent.
Precisely “due to the limitation of available resources”, the measure, explained the explanatory report, is limited to 2024, pending the structural introduction of a replacement tax regime on thirteenths for employees. «We are working on it, so let’s check for a moment if the financial compatibility is there. I am always cautious about resources so we must ensure that a measure that can certainly benefit families has the necessary financial coverage”, explained Leo.
The other expected provision is the Cohesion Decree, which rewrites the rules for the over 40 billion in European funds that are assigned to Italy by the EU every seven years. And which Italy struggles to spend – it is second to last in Europe – due to bureaucratic obstacles and poor coordination between administrations.
Problems that, with the rigid timetable of the Pnrr, the government has already had to face and resolve. For this reason the idea is to apply the same management rules of the Pnrr to the structural funds as well: from sanctions to entities that do not respect project deadlines to centralized coordination at Palazzo Chigi. Passing through a rationalization of the allocation of resources. The objective of the reform is to “intervene structurally on some limits and deficits” of our country’s cohesion policies, said the Minister for European Affairs, the South, Cohesion Policies and the Pnrr, Raffaele Fitto, on the sidelines of the conference of FdI.
We therefore put in place “a governance model capable of making the use of these resources effective and efficient”. The Cohesion decree then contains a part that concerns work. This is where the measures referred to by the Minister of Labor herself, Marina Calderone, will be implemented: support for hiring companies, active policies and training.