Abolish the Jobs Act? It won’t do much good. It’s about, he says ad HuffPost Francesco Seghezzi – president of Adapt, the study center founded by Marco Biagi -, of a reform that has already been partly dismantled between reforms and rulings of the Consulta. “In ten years, the world of work has changed profoundly”. In recent years, voluntary resignations have dominated the market, and not so much layoffs. This is why reducing the scope for dismissals by companies – as the CGIL would like by presenting four referendum requests in this sense – is nothing more than “an iconic political operation”, far from reality: “Today – is the reasoning of the expert – for companies the main fear is not the worker who stays on the job, but the one who leaves”.
This explains why in recent months employment has reached record levels and, in particular, permanent contracts are growing: only in the last quarter of 2023, this is the data that emerges by consulting the dedicated information system of the Ministry of Labor and Social policies, there has been an increase of as many as one hundred thousand permanent contracts compared to the same period in 2022. Numbers which, experts and research institutes, describe a now structural dynamic: in Italy there are hundreds of vacant jobs – as we have written often – for which employers are unable to find workers with the necessary skills. This is therefore why companies hold on to those they already have, securing them with stable contracts. “A big problem of the labor market is that there is a lack of adequate active policies – explains Seghezzi – and this is a problem that was not solved by the Jobs Act, it was not solved by the introduction of Citizenship Income and it has not been addressed by the recent elimination of the latter”. The real reform would be one capable of training workers to allow a more effective match between job supply and demand.
In this photograph of the labor market given to us by Istat and experts such as Maurizio Del Conte, comes the signature collection launched last month by Maurizio Landini’s CGIL, and in recent days also supported by the secretary of the Democratic Party, Elly Schlein. A referendum initiative which, in essence, among the four questions for which the collection of signatures was started, proposes the abolition of the famous ‘increasing protection contract’ introduced by the Jobs Act wanted in 2015 by Matteo Renzi’s government. A rule which, put simply, provides for the possibility for companies not to have to reinstate an employee fired without just cause into the workplace: instead of reinstatement, compensation has been introduced with a duration and scope that varies on a case-by-case basis.
At the time, barricades were set up, especially by the CGIL, against the PD’s labor reform, with the fear that this would cause a boom in layoffs, all in favor of the companies. The Istat numbers, however, say otherwise. If in 2014 in Italy there were 647,000 people leaving work, three years later, at the end of the Renzians’ period of government, the number of people leaving stabilized at 579,000. And going more specifically, the dominant trend in the job market of the current decade was already noticeable at the time: if 48% of the 647 thousand layoffs in 2014 were voluntary resignations, three years later these rose to 53%. Conversely, before Renzi’s arrival at Palazzo Chigi, the layoffs decided by companies were 42%. With his resignation, following the defeat in the constitutional referendum, the dismissals stood at just 36% of the total.
A completely different matter, obviously, about forms of precariousness, old and new, which the Jobs Act has not resolved at all. But these numbers clearly say that the abolition of Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute did not lead to a boom in dismissals as the unions complained at the time and as they do, presenting four anti-Jobs Act referendum questions, still today: “That of the CGIL is an iconic-political initiative” claims the president of Adapt, Seghezzi. The Conte government’s Dignity decree and a series of rulings from the Constitutional Court have already partially reduced the scope of the Jobs Act, making it more difficult for companies to fire people. “The return of Article 18? With a constantly growing resignation rate, it is a battle that has little impact. Without considering that its abolition was not retroactive, i.e. it does not apply to all employment relationships created before the 2015 reform”. The CGIL, concludes the expert, moved in this direction only for political purposes: “To dictate the agenda on work to the forces of the centre-left”, and in fact Schlein and Giuseppe Conte of the M5s immediately followed suit.
