Dear Secretary,
As a simple member of the PD, I take the liberty of submitting to you some of my reflections in support of the not easy work that you are already doing to revive and, in many ways, reinvent the identity of the Party. Perhaps some ideas can come out of my life experience, which spanned 22 years (1962-1984) as a union leader of the UILM, the FLM (United Federation of Metalworkers) and the UIL Confederation. Subsequently, from 1984 to 1994, the voters of the southern peninsular constituency sent me to Brussels/Strasbourg as a European Deputy under the banner of the PSI. In 1994 I ran for the Chamber of Deputies on the Progressives list representing Rinascita Socialista.
In the 1996 elections I was not re-elected.
In the last months of 1997 I dedicated myself to consultancy activities for the creation and start-up of one of the first seven Temporary Work Supply Companies registered in the national register established at the Ministry of Labour, after the approval of the Treu package, of which to law 196/97.
Once the assignment was completed, I was contacted by various newly established companies in the sector to take on the role of CEO; I choose Antex SpA based in Milan. Subsequently, after a few months, with the change in the corporate structure and the adoption of the company name Quanta SpA, I was appointed Executive Vice President, a position I held from 1998 to 2018.
In these twenty years I have also held management positions in the Associations representing the Agencies, first in CONFINTERIM and subsequently in ASOLAVORO, mainly dealing with trade union relations.
I presume I have some qualifications to intervene in the debate, which is far from well-argued, which occupies a large part of the national media, whether traditional or digital, on a daily basis.
In the meantime, it would be desirable for the PD to open up a cognitive and proactive study on labor issues, clarifying once and for all that in the history of the Italian and European left they represent the key to its raison d’être. It follows that a serious left can do anything except assume welfarism as its strategic objective; which means that it can do anything except support solutions, such as citizen’s income, which, due to the way it is structured, spends public resources to support those who, even though they can do so, do not worry about working or learning and, if anything, use undeclared work to supplement the subsidy, thus taking away millions of Euros dutifully earmarked for those who are physically or mentally prevented from working.
The other singular proposal of a minimum wage by law does not seem reliable to me, a case already tested with vouchers in Italy and with minijobs in Germany, which would inevitably be competitive with the negotiated salary scales and, therefore, would result in a lowering of of the national wage bill, with negative effects on the general living conditions of medium and low income earners and on the revenues of INPS and INAIL with the related repercussions on the pension system and on support for the many victims of accidents at work.
Lastly, we hear and read more and more frequently that permanent hiring should be totally tax-free (a very different solution from easing the tax wedge for the benefit of employees), and great admiration is shown towards the socialist Sanchez’s reform in Spain; It’s a shame that in the country where fixed-term contracts have been abolished – an untrue assumption – the dismissal criteria remain rather loose, in exchange for very little generous compensation, while, as for undeclared work, it is treated like dust under the carpets.
I believe, dear Secretary, that on your part there is full awareness that the chambers of power have distorted the project developed at the Lingotto in 2007, that saving value should not be attributed to the daily back and forth of controversies with those who today have the responsibility of the country’s government, to concentrate every material and immaterial resource on the construction of a wide-ranging project that updates the values of the left, which retain their non-negotiability as never before, but must be declined in the relationship with technological, organizational and economic mutations that dominate us and with the challenges that the nascent new world political order imposes on us.
The central problem to be addressed is that of the relationship between people and work, in particular employee work.
Like it or not, the approval with lifelong employment no longer exists, assuming and not granted that it ever existed, at least in salaried employment, with the exception of the priesthood and, not for long, for public jobs. Consequently, we must learn to build a new paradigm, which is based on a real work register, like the old draft, which follows people from the time of entry into school, passing through all its levels: lower, higher, university or professional qualification, up to the first job placement, including apprenticeship. The employment relationship must, ultimately, become part of a whole, which can develop in different ways and places, for long or short periods, always interspersed with qualification and requalification phases, obviously supported by a new welfare model ; in summary, we could say that the objectives to be pursued are: giving stability to work, flexibility to employment, continuity to training.
The political-cultural inspiration of the German Mitbestimmung must be taken into account and studied
There are good practices along this line in our country and we find them, despite their limitations, in the construction fund and even in the system of regulation/protection of seasonal work, such as agriculture, even if there are no we will never have to tire of reporting and prosecuting abuses, as demonstrated by the story of the deputy with the boots, as sinister as anyone else, who said he defended migrants, but above all he looked after his family’s interests. Also singular is the fact that neither he nor the Minister from Varese elected senator in 2019 in Calabria (the first a vigorous defender, the other a persecutor of migrants) have never said a word to demand the application of the Martina law n. 199 of 29/X/2016, which provides for heavy fines for the exploiters of labor (the gangmasters, the false cooperatives of the Centre-North, but also and above all the land owners) up to and including the confiscation of assets.
The most consolidated and certifiable good practice is found in much more advanced forms in the system of work administered through agencies, in which, without costs for the public budget, it has been possible to create a new welfare model of a negotiated mutualistic type, which includes small loans without real guarantees, supplementary health protection, book purchases, contribution to travel expenses, etc., combined with a constant training strategy and the systemic growth of permanent hiring by the Agencies themselves.
It should be added that the trade union agreement between Assolavoro and Nidil/Cgil-Felsa/Cisl-Uiltemp-Uil has given rise to the only experiences of active reception of political asylum seekers, which have allowed several hundred people to acquire a good level of training and to be employed in shipbuilding, moving within a few years and without interruption from a temporary employment relationship to a permanent one. For these experiences some APLs (Employment Agencies) have been recognized by the UNHCR.
The synergy between selection, entry into the work circuit, assisted interruption and dedicated to qualification/requalification is achieved with the comparison between the subjects who own it, employers and workers, requires a recurring negotiation commitment, in the awareness that the relationship between both can only be transparent and, in some passages, even conflictual.
The practice of this line, referring to our time, in which an algorithm can influence radical organizational changes, the living conditions of workers of all levels, relationships with related companies, the establishment of new holdings , on the localization of corporate headquarters in tax havens, requires the construction of a system of presence of the workforce/mind in decision-making processes, which goes beyond the information rights, achieved in the CCNL renewed in the early 70s of the last century, to give life to a real co-management system.
The political-cultural inspiration of the German Mitbestimmung must be taken into account and studied, on the one hand, to do justice to the ostracism suffered in Italy, as an expression of socialist reformism, and on the other, to overcome the limits manifested in practice and deal with the need to not allow entrepreneurial anarchy in the management and organizational fields.
In this process of revitalization of the values of work it is necessary to combine the parameter of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a not exactly neutral measurement of economic trends, with the LEAs (Essential Levels of Assistance), an invention entrusted to the creativity of Minister Calderoli to justify differentiated regionalism, but rather the universal system of the SPI (Social Progress Index) produced by the studies of economists and sociologists of excellent value, such as Amartha Sen, Michael Porter, Douglas North, Joseph Stiglitz. The social progress index was also drawn up and published by the European Union and places Italy in 22nd place; Wouldn’t it be appropriate for it to also be drawn up for the Italian regions and provinces?
Dear Secretary, I have stolen some precious time from you, but I did it because I trust that your age and your gender, as well as the family genes that you carry within you (my thoughts go to Sen. Agostino Viviani, who I had the honor to know in your distant youth), lead you to open a collective debate that addresses, among others, the problems that I have taken the liberty of submitting to you in circles, sections, foundations, and on all the communication channels that are available, to arrive at a national convention lasting several days, where young men and women who believe in political commitment as an instrument of democracy, freedom and well-being can express themselves and where those who already hold political roles dutifully listen, renouncing propaganda displays.
It would be nice to have a response to this letter, but I won’t be upset if there isn’t one. In any case, what matters is that the new PD is less and less the center of power of the insiders and more and more the place for the reconstruction of a strong and participatory thought in our time of decreasing expectations and recurring attempts to return to past.
I send you socialist greetings, using a formula that was once common among political militants who recognized themselves in that adjective.