To increase salaries it is necessary to give more freedom to individuals, the CISL tells us

Dear Cerasa, I intervene in your editorial entitled “The lies on Italian wages” to represent the point of view of the CISL on what you wrote and amply documented. I feel compelled to reply to your arguments starting from a mere observation: Italian wages are low because the entire wage system is low. Artificially raised minimum wages, without solving the structural problem afflicting wage growth at all levels of the parametric scales, would only serve to narrow the range between minimums and maximums, which instead would need to be widened, increasing the value of careers, professionalism, experience. Insisting only on minimum wages, without understanding that the compression of the expansive dynamics that wages must have over the life of a worker only leads to a worsening of the quality of work and of the medium-long term prospects of the workers themselves, would condemn our country to live off jobs with low added value and to see the best professionals emigrate, as unfortunately already happens. But Italian work needs everything, except to be deprived of the best professionals.

To the numbers that you propose, I would therefore like to add others: those recently presented by Inapp on the quality of work and those slightly older than an analysis by Assolombarda, still very current, on productivity. The two analyzes reveal how the medium-sized enterprises of this country (from 50 to 249 employees) are the most vital, the most innovative, those where the quality of work is higher, often even excellent, and where productivity is equally striking compared to companies in the corresponding dimensional sector of Germany, France and Spain. And they also reveal to us how productivity collapses, even in comparison with the countries mentioned, in the dimensional sector of micro-enterprises, together with the quality of work. It is a pity that micro-enterprises, under the motto of “small is beautiful”, are 95% of the total, a proportion that is unmatched among the countries with which we should compete.

So, to your reflections, which I share, I add that if Italian wages are not growing it is because our country’s economy has not grown adequately in recent decades. Fifteen years spent trying, without having yet succeeded, to return to the GDP values ​​of 2008, twenty-five years with average productivity growth rates of 0.4% do not conflict with legal minimum wages, which would lack room for negotiation causing deleterious effects, nor with improvised measures, which can serve to buffer emergencies, but do not constitute a structural solution with respect to wages that are overall too low. If we want adequate wages at all levels of the parametric scales, if we do not want to let our best talent escape and if we want to maintain our role in the main industrial economies, beyond the lifeboats in which we are often forced, we must put a ship capable of correcting the course of an industrial policy without strategy, refractory to exploiting our ability to excel and create value, a new approach also in the medium-long term vision of public and private investments, of innovative trade union relations.

The popular law proposal implemented by the Cisl, which yesterday was filed with the Cassation, for the implementation of art. 46 of our Constitution, has precisely this objective and starts from the idea that growth, economic and social development, sustainability cannot do without the active, articulated, constant, responsible collaboration of all the players in the economy and society , starting from the workers but also from the citizens-savers. If it is true, as you demonstrate in your article, that the lack of wage growth affects all work and not just poor work and if it is also true that it coincides with the lack of development of productivity and the quality of Italian work, then I I hope to find you our ally in the attempt to build a more participatory and democratic economy, more attentive to sustainability, transparency, legality and together with the productivity and stability of the development of our territory and of the national community. We must stop demanding easy solutions to complex problems and the Cisl thinks it is time to work to take that step forward towards a truly complete economic democracy that our constituents starting from Giulio Pastore had predicted as necessary for the creation of an efficient model and right of social market economy.

Luigi Barra he is general secretary of the Cisl.