Productivity and firm size. Taboo to face for growth

The one proposed by Dario Di Vico in last Friday’s Foglio is a correct and appreciable analysis. Fortunately there is no apocalypse on the doorstep of the Italian economy. Istat data confirmed the trend towards growth in employment and, in particular, stable employment. Estimates that find equal correspondence in those relating to the trend of the national economy. It is clear that the two data support each other: a good general economic trend is crucial in the growth of jobs and also in re-establishing the confidence on the part of entrepreneurs necessary to engage with new permanent hires. Similarly, more stable job opportunities encourage spending, consumption and even some possible investments, such as the house, currently held back by the growth in mortgage rates.

The CISL has never been alarmist about fixed-term contracts. However, there is the need to distinguish the good flexibility protected, negotiated, well paid, from the real precariousness, also recently denounced by the governor Visco. In our idea the possibility that non-permanent jobs, suitably supervised so that they are not abused, could be one of the forms of entry into the world of work has always been very present. As well as the idea that work should economically commit companies in an inversely proportional way to the duration. The shorter the experience, the more it must cost the company. And part of this extra cost should feed a pension fund for young people. But it is also true that if in 2021, i.e. the year after the pandemic, in a context in which betting on the future was nothing short of a gamble, there hadn’t been the possibility of short-term hiring, we would hardly have witnessed the excellent rebound of following years. In the uncertainty of those moments, it would have been difficult for an entrepreneur to choose to commit himself indefinitely rather than cautiously stand by and watch.

This trend, which today is giving further encouraging signs, must however be supported with investments and reforms which give a stable impulse to development and to the quantitative and qualitative growth of employment. However, our economy is not yet out of the swamps of an atavistic backwardness. Despite the positive signs of recent years, the GDP figures are still below those of 2008, having never fully recovered the losses due to the crises that have since then, starting with the financial crisis of those years, battered us: the debt crisis , pandemic and, lately, war and gas. The signs of recession coming from Germany, if on the one hand reduce the gap on the other hand, should make us worry. Not only because the Germans have always been our best customers, but also because this situation derives from common situations, starting with the high energy price and followed by the rise in interest rates which discourages investments.

The point is that Italy, in order not to be found unprepared in the face of other storms, should equip itself to reduce its structural weaknesses, starting with the size of its businesses which continue to be excessively microscopic, while there are too few medium-sized enterprises, those in which the quality of work and wages are higher, together with productivity. Together with data on GDP and employment it would be useful to analyze those on productivity to understand whether the employment trend is supporting the growth of added value in a more or less than proportional way. What is certain is that an investment in new universal protections, in the quality of work, in lifelong learning, appears more difficult in a context dominated by micro-enterprises with fewer than 10 employees, in which the growth of skills, research and innovation are frustrated by limited size and available resources.

Also for this reason, the CISL believes that participation can give important answers not only to the workers but also to the country. First of all as a tool for co-determination of company organization and strategies. But there’s more. Participation is also and perhaps above all a tool for sharing an evolutionary process of our industrial system which could start from a greater diffusion of second-level bargaining to be supported in quality and quantity and from a better use of bilateral instruments. We are facing an economic and social scenario that is still insecure and potentially unstable, which as the only certainty gives us the need to question our past dogmas, to design the architecture of new social and industrial relationships based on the concept of co-responsibility. In all of this, perhaps, we shouldn’t shy away from a reflection on the need to update, indeed to anticipate, the skills necessary to become designers of the future, not only for workers but also for the country’s ruling class.

Luigi Barra he is general secretary of the CISL.