A-Infos (en) Italy, FdCA, IL CANTIERE #37 - For a real defense of the wage and social conditions of workers, it's time to shift gears - Cristiano Valente (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Wage increases directly on the minimum wage scales and a sharp reduction 
in fringe benefits. ---- Fringe benefits, corporate welfare, social 
security and healthcare funds, and bilateral organizations are all 
institutions that divide the labor movement, allowing employers to 
recoup, in addition to their profits, significant amounts of money 
through the deductibility of these sums, at the expense of the universal 
national healthcare system, public welfare, and social security. ---- 
C.V. ---- "Fringe benefits" are increasingly becoming one of the main 
wage policy tools proposed by private employers in the various sectoral 
contract renewals. These "institutions" consist of a set of additional 
compensation, above the base salary, provided in the form of goods or 
services. These range from traditional vouchers or meal vouchers, to the 
use of company cars, to electronic devices such as smartphones or 
laptops, to fuel vouchers, shopping vouchers, or services such as 
accommodation, training courses, business trips, babysitting, and 
affiliated gyms, to personal insurance and health policies, to 
reimbursement of transportation or fuel expenses and even "gift cards." 
One of the most significant recent cases in which employers are pursuing 
this option is the renewal of the metalworkers' contract, which expired 
in June last year and will see the resumption of meetings between the 
social partners this September. The employers' organizations, 
Federmeccanica and Assistal, have proposed a counter-platform to the 
EUR280 wage increase jointly requested by the unions, Fiom. FIM and 
UILM, proposing a minimum wage increase limited to the IPCA index, which 
would be half the union's request, but fully willing to increase the 
current EUR200 per year in fringe benefits to EUR700 over the next four 
years. Specifically, these sums should be spent on nursery school, 
babysitting, schoolbooks and scholarships, care for the elderly, and 
public transportation for workers and dependent family members. 
Essentially, less money in the paycheck, but more "corporate welfare." 
This vision was well-motivated by the former President of 
Federmeccanica, Federico Visentin, who in an interview with Corriere 
della Sera last April candidly stated: "Earnings beyond 
inflation-calculated via the IPCA NEI (due based on the guarantee 
clause)-should not be allocated to minimum wages. Instead, they should 
be allocated to other economic elements (fringe benefits) that cost 
companies less." This operation would effectively result in employers 
being able to deduct over one billion euros (700 euros per capita for 
over 1,500,000 workers in the entire sector), which would be added to 
company profits and simultaneously subtracted from the general taxation 
that notoriously subsidizes public and universal welfare. From a tax 
perspective, the cost of providing fringe benefits is deductible for the 
employer, allowing for a savings in contributions. In the short term, 
there are also advantages for the individual worker, who, within certain 
limits established by law, also sees these sums exempt from tax as 
income. Indeed, the regulatory framework for fringe benefits has been 
amended several times in recent years. The 2025 Budget Law confirmed the 
changes already introduced in 2024, while making some significant 
changes to the non-taxability thresholds and expanding the range of 
potential beneficiaries. In particular, the main tax exemption limits 
envisaged for 2025 are as follows: a) EUR1,000 of annual "fringe 
benefits" for all workers: up to this amount, all goods and services 
granted to the employee do not contribute to the formation of taxable 
income and are therefore not taxed for either the worker or the company; 
b) EUR2,000 for employees with dependent children: this increased 
threshold is intended for families, allowing a greater economic 
advantage for those who must cover expenses for their children; c) 
EUR5,000 for newly hired and out-of-town workers: the real novelty of 
the 2025 budget is the introduction of an exceptional threshold, 
applicable to employees who, hired or transferred in 2025, move their 
residence more than 100 km to reach the municipality where their new 
workplace is located. But all these immediate benefits, in addition to 
reducing the overall tax burden, also serve to reduce our future 
pensions because they are not added to social security contributions. 
They determine substantial differences in the social conditions of the 
class, fostering and determining elements of division and lack of 
solidarity within the labor force.

"Humanity, united by a single language, was struck by the wrath of God, 
who confused their languages, causing them to be dispersed and the 
building of the tower stopped" (freely adapted from Genesis 11:19).
In fact, the increased introduction of "fringe benefits" takes to 
extreme consequences that diversity of social conditions depending on 
membership in different categories and the changing and temporary 
balance of power in different work sectors, thus increasing the wage and 
regulatory Babel of the labor movement, a traditional and extremely 
powerful weapon, used by employers and governments, to wear down and 
divide the solidarity of the working masses. Babel and uncertainty, that 
is, uncertainty and unpredictability regarding the future social 
conditions of the working masses, already set in motion by the decision, 
starting in the second half of the 1990s, to transition to the so-called 
second leg of social security: pensions. We do not intend to delve into 
the age-old issue of the transition from the pay-as-you-go system, in 
which pension contributions paid to INPS and revalued annually at the 
inflation rate set by ISTAT were used to pay for ongoing pension 
benefits, commensurate with final salaries, to the current contributory 
capitalization system, in which a worker's retirement pension will be 
paid from his or her individual contributions, accumulated over an 
entire working life and revalued (perhaps) through investments made by 
his or her pension fund. We only note that, like the "fringe benefits", 
the negotiated pension funds which currently (one might say fortunately) 
cover only a little more than 4 million workers (1) allow the employers 
to deduct the sums paid out for each individual worker. The figure 
confirmed for this year, the total of the sums paid by the individual 
worker and his employer, is 5,164.57 euros. This change, which was also 
convincingly implemented by the trade union leaders at the end of the 
1990s, has certainly determined that our pensions (deferred wages), in 
addition to being significantly reduced in their overall amount, never 
reaching the 80% minimum foreseen under the old system, are 
paradoxically used by our employers to finance themselves, as the 
various pension funds invest these sums in that real "casino" of stocks 
and the stock exchange, where the house always wins, but the house is 
not the workers. But this is not the only paradox at work. The latest 
data provided by Sole24ore, the employers' press organ, tells us that 
the guaranteed investment lines, those which best allow pension funds to 
guarantee the capital paid in upon reaching retirement, by investing in 
bonds or government securities, compared to investments in shares 
subject to greater volatility and therefore greater risk, the 
comparison, over a 15-year period, therefore from 2010 to today, is 
between a +20.1% of the pension funds compared to the +42.5% guaranteed 
by the TFR. (2) The same reasoning and the same reflection applies to 
the so-called second pillar regarding supplementary healthcare, which is 
proving to be a significant and decisive element in further reducing 
public healthcare. In a recent and detailed document in defense of 
public health and against the hypothesis of differentiated autonomy "We 
cannot remain silent. Civil society for public health" jointly drafted 
by over 130 associations such as Social Promotion Associations (APS), 
third sector organizations, non-commercial and non-profit associations 
and trade unions, we can read: "The medium-term structural budget plan 
2025-29, approved by the Council of Ministers on 27 September 2024, 
rather than committing to strengthening the NHS, envisages the 
strengthening of the second pillar through the development and 
reorganization of the tools for supplementary health care".(3) These 
institutions in fact reintroduce, like the old mutual societies, a close 
connection between health care and employment status, producing a 
diversity of treatments and services in favor of some specific 
categories of workers; Those with greater bargaining power and 
differentiated care pathways based on category and territory, excluding 
large segments of the population, such as the unemployed, precarious 
workers, retirees, and sometimes even family members of these funds. 
Furthermore, the tax breaks supporting these funds, such as pension 
funds and "corporate welfare" funds, result in lower overall income tax 
revenue, but above all, lower contributions for workers participating in 
the funds, who will be able to count on lower contributions when 
calculating their pensions. Furthermore, these funds generate excess 
insurance coverage, particularly for specific expense items, such as 
specialist visits and diagnostic tests, and thus a multiplication of 
services provided, with the consequent risk of increasing inappropriate 
services and diagnoses, and thus also overall expenditure.
These "funds operate on the basis of a performance-based model, clearly 
in conflict with the needs for service integration and individual care, 
as well as on the basis of incentives to select the most profitable 
services regardless of health priorities, which characterize private 
healthcare provision. This situation produces a loss of well-being for 
the community and an increase in healthcare costs, widely demonstrated 
in countries with insurance-based healthcare systems such as the United 
States."(4)
These clear, precise, and shared statements, although endorsed and 
endorsed by important territorial union structures, such as the CGIL 
Lombardia, or the SPI CGIL of Turin, have evidently not yet succeeded in 
influencing the national management groups, especially the national 
management groups of the individual categories, towards a necessary and 
profitable self-criticism and a resolute U-turn, particularly towards 
those Bilateral Bodies, which have grown and expanded, not by chance, 
since the mid-1990s.
Bilateral bodies or street unions?

Bilateral bodies are contractually established organizations, funded by 
company payments and deductions from workers' paychecks, in which 
company and union representatives collaborate in carrying out functions 
such as the administration of supplementary pension and healthcare 
funds, income support measures, and national contract observatories.
We are very clear about the fierce reluctance (euphemistically speaking) 
of certain particular trade union categories to reduce the weight and 
function of these bodies, which have become the custodians of huge 
financial masses and a source of additional individual income for a 
trade union bureaucracy that is partly "failed" and stuck in this new 
mercantile perspective. However, an organization that dedicates 
ever-increasing time and resources to managing the spaces that have 
opened up within the folds of a welfare system, increasingly marked by 
underfunding by the state, thus guaranteeing market space to private 
entrepreneurs, a union that not only provides legal and fiscal services, 
but that aspires to manage increasing shares of wages, supplementary 
social security and healthcare, and also supplementary social safety 
nets, professional training, recreational activities, and even 
commercial services for its members, is a union that, from being a class 
organization, a resistance structure, tends to become part of a 
"parastatal" system, simultaneously integrating itself into the 
capitalist market. The idea of a "street union" that the CGIL has long 
advocated in its official and congressional documents, whatever the 
actual meaning and interpretation of this idea within the national 
leadership, contrasts and conflicts with the practices and methods that 
individual national trade union federations stubbornly pursue through 
bilateral bodies. A further paradox, in this phase of revanchism of the 
ruling classes, can be found in a recent and important intervention of 
reflection by the national leadership group of the CGIL itself, in which 
reflections and indications are made explicit of what would be necessary 
and desirable today, and in which we literally read: "a return to the 
original Chambers of Labour, those in which the unemployed, blue 
overalls and black jackets, women who worked from home - the same as 
many computer workers who supply data to the artificial intelligence 
centres do today - teachers who wanted to teach those who needed it and 
workers who wanted to learn came together to question the exploitation 
of work and inequalities" (5) How far the current trade union reality in 
the territories and at a national level is from what was hoped for is 
evident to most. But even more clearly it is stated that "the lack of 
reflection on the real reasons for that defeat" (we are talking about 
the workers' defeat starting from the EUR in 1978 until the 90s 
precisely) "has prevented for years reflection on which form of union 
action was truly more adequate to represent the fragmented work of the 
new exploitation" determining "an institutional bureaucratic drift of 
the Italian union movement, which precipitates without a real discussion 
on those issues, in the 90s" (6) Furthermore on the specific health 
issue we can read: "In health, for example, we have all given in in 
recent years to the ideology that saw the company as the organizational 
model that would solve the problem of costs and bureaucracy. And we have 
too calmly accepted that we were moving from Local Health Units to 
Health Companies. To then discover that within the logic of the company, 
behind the numbers, people were progressively disappearing, and that 
prevention activities in the territory were weakened, to the point of 
almost zeroing out prevention activities in the area. and in the workplace.
The Local Health Authorities (USL) were also born from the struggles for 
health in the workplace, from the extraordinary alliance of workers' 
councils with the intelligence of men like Maccacaro and of many young 
doctors who decided to become occupational physicians, to perform a 
social service, in the factory and in the community, to defend people's 
health and well-being there.
Prevention has almost disappeared in the workplace.
And the people who go to factories and construction sites not only to 
inspect responsibility for the misfortunes that occur, but to prevent 
them, evaluating with the workers the causes that are at the origin of 
those now daily misfortunes, have disappeared." (7)
How much these reflections, albeit belated, can be reconciled with the 
philosophy of the Bilateral Bodies that offer individual health services 
and how much these same Bodies are in line with the indications of that 
street union which, albeit confusedly, as we have seen, should represent 
a new and necessary horizontality of the Chambers of Labor, is not given 
to know.
Only stark reflection and genuine self-criticism can allow the trade 
union movement to recover. "Putting defeats aside, without carefully 
examining their underlying causes, is never a good way to build 
recovery."(8)

Notes:
(1) COVIP (Pension Fund Supervisory Commission) Report for 2024, 
presented on June 23, 2025.
(2) Il Sole 24Ore. Comparison of Pension Fund Returns vs. Severance Pay: 
Analysis over 10 and 15 Years - June 27, 2025
(3) Florence, February 22, 2025 "We Cannot Remain Silent. Civil Society 
for Public Health"     Saluteinternazionale.info
(4) Idem
(5)https://centroriformastato.it/democrazia-lavoro-e-sindacato-dopo-i-referendum/byAndreaRanieri 
               Francesco Sinopoli. Published June 20, 2025. This paper 
was presented by Francesco Sinopoli, President of the Vittorio 
Foundation, at the seminar organized by the Livorno Chamber of Labor on 
July 28, 2025, entitled "Representation, Conflict, Participation: Which 
Confederal Union?"
(6) Idem
(7) Idem
(8) Idem

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