Lucia Alfieri, president of CiForma, the association for the coordination of training institutions, speaks on the training financing system in the Sicily Region. “Despite the attempt – he explains – by the previous councilor Roberto La Galla to restart training in Sicily, according to a ‘one-stop’ meritocratic model which recognized economic resources only to bodies capable of using them correctly, we are witnessing a painful step backwards inspired to logics that are outdated and certainly not suitable for creating a quality training offer, to which is added the almost total absence of controls to thoroughly verify the correctness of the action of many training institutions receiving substantial public resources”.
“For some time – declares Alfieri – we have denounced the application of pirated contracts by many training institutions, including some of those which until now have held the oligopoly of the training offer in Sicily; the application of these contracts lowers the cost of labor, resulting in the loss, by training institutions, of high-level professionals capable of providing quality training. As if that were not enough, the indiscriminate reduction in labor costs produces an extremely negative impact on the treasury coffers, as it allows an unacceptable profit margin to training institutions which report a labor cost of unsupported fact.”
“Please remember – continues the president of CiForma – that the UCS is calculated taking into account the costs indicated by the leader contracts. Where these contracts are not applied, but ‘pirate’ ones are applied, the institutions receive an amount approximately 30% higher than the costs actually incurred for staff and teachers”.
“The unjustified silence and inertia of the regional government with respect to the alerts repeatedly launched by the Ciforma federation and other trade federations have produced the feared effects: the widespread and uncontrolled application of pirated contracts by entities receiving huge public resources, the exploitation of workers and the extremely poor quality of the training offer” denounces Alfieri.
“We ask once again – he warns – for a decisive intervention to control and monitor the requirements that the accreditation legislation imposes on training institutions, first of all the correct application of the national collective labor agreement for the non-pirate sector. Only a rating system of training institutions based on various parameters, including the quality of the training programs offered, the effectiveness in the job placement of participants, administrative transparency and compliance with the collective agreement applied, could constitute a valid tool to guarantee the correct use of public resources and a concrete improvement in the overall quality of education and professional training, encouraging institutions to continuously improve their training offer and demonstrate a commitment to excellence”.
“We hope for the launch of a serious monitoring and control system of training institutions which also involves the Labor Inspectorate, so that the system of violation and abuse of the rules perpetrated up to now is finally stemmed, and training in Sicily can definitively free itself from the shame that afflicts it and truly become a driving force for growth and employment development” concludes the president of CiForma, Lucia Alfieri.
