Italian collective bargaining at a turning point. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 139/2017

Leonardi, Salvo and Ambra, Maria Concetta and Ciarini, Andrea (2017) Italian collective bargaining at a turning point. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 139/2017. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

In the past eight years the Italian system of industrial relations has been undergoing a prolonged transitional phase (Carrieri and Treu 2013; Barbera and Perulli 2014; Leonardi and Sanna 2015; Guarriello 2014; Gottardi 2016). The numerous events that have occurred have changed some of its traits within a relatively short period. The various causes are both exogenous and endogenous, economic as well as institutional. The main exogenous factors are globalisation, the financial crisis and the economic downturn, as well as interventions by international institutions in national policy-making. This scenario is to some extent shared with other countries and is currently exerting pressure on different models of industrial relations (Katz and Darbishire 2000) towards neoliberal convergence (Streeck 2009; Baccaro and Howell 2011). Under growing pressure from so-called ‘New European Economic Governance’ (NEEG), many national lawmakers – and especially in the Southern European countries (Rocha 2014; J. Cruces et al. 2015; Leonardi 2016) – have stepped up deep labour law reforms, with the purpose of reducing the traditional prioritisation of multi-employer bargaining and the favourability principle, allowing company-level agreements to derogate in pejus from higher bargaining levels or even labour legislation (Marginson 2014; Van Gyes and Schulten 2015; Bordogna and Pedersini 2015; Cella 2016).

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