Italy: groundbreaking company agreements bank on consensus

Flexibility and top social respect.  The chemical industry is still the leader in terms of long “collaborative” industrial relations.  Federchimica leader Giorgio Squinzi (performing his sixth term), who is also Mapei’s CEO, told the newspaper that his sector is “light years away from the auto industry,” with the first exceptions to the CCN obtained in 1998 “with all unions’ consent.”  Saving jobs was often the driving force behind agreements on unprecedented increased flexibility such as, in commerce, agreements on working time in the Upim and Coin supermarkets, where flexibility was granted in exchange for the increase of variable pay anchored in the result-based bonus, negotiated and awarded each year, which also helped reduce precarious labor and increase recruitment.  In the same spirit, in the industry, Pirelli signed a union agreement for the development of its new industrial pole in Settimo Torinese, which employs most of the group’s 3,700 Italian employees.  It provides for €150 million of investments into state-of-the-art technology in exchange for equal treatment between the employees of the two unified establishments; the factory is open for 342 days; holiday and resting time have been amended; and Mobilità has been enforced for 250 surplus jobs.