Union responses to precarious workers: Italy and Spain compared

Italy

Labour market protection in Italy is not higher than in many other European countries (Burroni and Carrieri, 2013), but since the 1980s, the labour market has been made more flexible, with the introduction of work-and-training-contracts followed by a weakening of the strict rules on fixed-term contracts. New forms of self-employment, sub-contracting and false self-employment became more accessible for firms willing to compete on labour costs. However, the big change was made in 1997 by the centre-left government with the Treu Law, which aimed to increase employment by introducing agency work, liberalizing the job placement market and extending other forms of atypical work. The Berlusconi government in 2001 proceeded further with its White Paper (Libro Bianco) on the labour market, which was followed by the 2002 ‘Pact for Italy’ signed by Confindustria, the main employers’ organization, and two of the three main union confederations – but not the largest, CGIL. The Biagi Law of 2003 implemented many of the elements of the Pact, creating several new forms of atypical contracts. After this legislation, there have been more than 40 different types of employment relationships counted (Ballarino, 2005), of which only one (contratto di inserimento or access-to-work-contract) was abolished by the 2012 reform (Rymkevich, 2013).

Labour market deregulation went in parallel with the creation of less protected jobs, fostering labour market segmentation, more markedly in the 2000s (OECD, 2002). Overall, the result has been the creation of a form of precariousness tied to short job tenure, little or no social protection and the lack of basic rights such as sick-leave, maternity leave and paid vacations (Barbieri, 2011).

Although Italy is more or less in line with the EU average as regards the use of part-time and fixed-term work, it is remarkably above the EU average in the use of dependent and independent self-employment as well as informal and undeclared jobs (Altieri, 2009). Leonardi (2009) reports that self-employed workers represent 17 percent of national employment, and most of these comprise the so-called collaboratori coordinati e continuativi (co.co.co, or coordinated and continuous assistants), a semi-subordinate worker, legally autonomous but economically dependent. Together with ‘undeclared employees’, self-employment represents a peculiarly Italian way to flexibility and precariousness since unlike other atypical work they fall outside labour law protections. They include freelance coordinated workers, occasional freelance coordinated workers, occasional autonomous workers and project workers.

Although temporary agency workers have the same formal rights (particularly pay rates) as employees of the user firm, they have weaker income security for the periods of unemployment. This is one of the biggest problems faced by Italian atypical workers in general. Since the mid-2000s, several reforms were introduced to strengthen the duration and quantity of unemployment benefits, and the unions were actively engaged in their negotiation. However, the social security system remained largely unchanged, that is, tailored to the needs and characteristics of standard workers.

The lack of a fair and inclusive system of social protection in case of unemployment increases the precariousness felt by Italian atypical workers (Accornero, 2006). In addition, temporary workers are likely to receive lower wages than workers with standard contracts, independently of their level of qualification or seniority (IRES, 2010). In addition, expenditure on labour market policies, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), is lower in Italy than in many European countries (including Spain). Although efforts have been made to extend social security guarantees to atypical employees, non-standard employment is still disadvantaged in comparison with standard employment. According to Berton et al. (2009), for example, around 90 percent of standard employment carries entitlement to unemployment benefits, but only 40 percent of temporary contracts and 30 percent of agency work. Similarly, welfare rights, particularly pensions, maternity and sick pay, are ‘weakly attainable’ (Kay et al., 2012). This may explain the pressing need for Italian trade unions to defend atypical workers by negotiating different reforms from the beginning of the 1990s, aimed at increasing the funds for social shock absorbers and extending these to workers previously excluded (fixed-term workers, apprentices and agency workers).

Spain

The current democratic regime in Spain was born at the height of the oil crises of the 1970s. The international competitiveness of Spanish companies was low, while Spain aspired to join the European Common Market. Confronted with unemployment as a major economic and political challenge, employment creation was a priority for the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) when it won the 1982 general elections, but the new government viewed labour market deregulation as the primary way of achieving this goal. Employers’ interests focused on reducing dismissal costs, regarding these as an obstacle for employment creation. Conversely, the two main trade union confederations (CCOO and UGT) wanted to preserve the rights they had fought for at the end of Francoist dictatorship at the beginning of the democratic regime.

Not surprisingly, the brunt of the bargaining process between government, employers and unions was borne by those still to enter into the labour market (Fernández Macías, 2003). In 1984, the first labour market reform was agreed by PSOE, the employers’ association (CEOE) and the UGT, although it was rejected by the CCOO. The reform allowed an almost indiscriminate use of a new contrato temporal de fomento del empleo (CTFE, employment-promotion fixed-term contract), leaving severance payments for permanent contracts almost untouched. Temporary employment subsequently grew at a steep pace, leading to a reform in 1994, which virtually eliminated the CTFE.

The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s brought about a dramatic process of labour market segmentation. Labour market entrants in the next upward economic cycle were mostly hired with temporary contracts, which covered 73 percent of the new contracts in 1985–1993 (Conde-Ruiz et al., 2010). None of the reforms eliminated the problem of unemployment, and temporary employment proved to be a trap rather than a stepping stone towards permanent employment (García Polavieja, 2005).

It was not until 1997 that a new labour market reform explicitly addressed the problem generated by the growth of temporary employment. In return for gaining some ground lost in the decentralization of collective bargaining in the previous reform, the unions accepted less stringent rules on dismissal for a new type of permanent contract with lower severance payments (Molina, 2007). The reform also established stricter conditions for the use of temporary employment.

Although the 1997 reform was intended to reduce the rate of temporary employment, little was achieved. There was indeed a decrease in the use of temporary contracts by the private sector, but this was largely offset by an increase in the public sector, triggered in part by fiscal consolidation pursued by the Spanish government after the Maastricht Treaty (Dolado et al., 2002). Hence, the proportion of temporary contracts in the private sector fell from 41 to 26 percent between 1995 and 2009, but in the public sector there was an increase from 16 to 24 percent in the same period.

Italy

Despite the initial attempts of the Prodi government in 2007 to implement measures to improve unemployment benefit for young people, particularly entrapped in forms of precarious work, the very poor income when they are not working is still a key problem for Italian precarious workers, along with their inferior rights and labour conditions. This is a central factor in understanding how the Italian unions have responded to the challenge of precarious work, which is the protection of atypical workers through the creation of specific structures for the representation of those workers. According to the president of the CGIL federation for atypical workers, NIdiL (Nuove Identità di Lavoro), established in 1998,

after the 1997 Treu reform, Italian unions have strategically chosen to represent workers by creating non-standard dedicated federations inside the confederations … this is in line with the Italian tradition of confederalismo … The aim is to promote the rights of atypical workers. We wanted to confer ‘dignity’ on atypical workers while setting up structures able to overcome the growing labour market segmentation based on the persistence of different social provisions between atypical and typical workers. (Interview, October 2014)

Also in 1998, CISL set up an association called Alai (Associazione Lavoratori Atipici e Interinali) since 2009 assigned the status of a federation, FeLSA (Federazione Lavoratori Somministrati Autonomi ed Atipici). In the same year, UIL created CPO (Comitati per l’Occupazione), from 2010 called Tem.p^@.

The process that led to the creation of these structures started in the mid-1990s, when self-organized associations and networks were set up by groups of freelancers, such as the association Collaboratori e Consulenti Associati (Ballarino, 2005). For example, the creation of NIdiL was not just a top-down decision by CGIL; it was also supported by the self-organized precarious workers (Choi and Mattoni, 2010).

The organizational solution of separate structures for atypical workers is innovative since the common basis of representation in Italian unions has always been the sector or occupation. It is also quite different from the traditionally locally based offices or specialized work groups created by the unions to improve the organization and representation of women and immigrants (Cella, 2012). The new federations for atypical workers aim explicitly to increase the protection afforded to self-employed or semi-autonomous work (co.co.co.) and temporary workers through collective bargaining and shop-floor representation. NIdiL, for example, describes itself as a union that gives voice and representation to atypical workers without social protection. It claims to pursue two main goals: raising awareness of the issue of precarious work and the problems and realities of precarious workers, and improving working conditions for precarious workers through re-regulation and organizing at multiple levels in industrial sectors, in society and at the workplace.

Although the atypical federations represent a small proportion of the total precarious workforce, overall it looks more impressive than parallel efforts in other countries in Europe (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013). Membership in NIdiL increased from 16,800 in 2003 to 67,000 in 2012 and in FeLSA from 21,500 in 2003 to 44,300 in 2011. Tem.p@ does not publish membership data, but we were told that the figure was 20,100 in 2009 and 22,200 in 2010.

The new federations show clear differences as far as general strategy towards atypical work is concerned. For example, FeLSA and Temp.p^@ tend to embrace an individual ‘servicing’ model to target atypical workers with different contractual situations and needs. By contrast, NIdiL stresses a labour law reform which would restrict the number of contractual options available to companies and strongly opposes the use of certain contracts, such as staff-leasing. Political bargaining is also a strategy directed at reducing the economic incentive to use atypical contracts, by increasing the contributions required to use them and hence discourage ‘contractual dumping’ by companies. An example of these differences is the attitude towards ‘bogus’ autonomous workers who in fact depend on a single company and are not covered by collective agreements. Italian atypical union federations tend to work at a decentralized level to regularize these situations, both through collective bargaining and by reporting illegal cases.

The new federations represent atypical workers in the political arena through national and company-level bargaining, political and legal action, campaigning and collective mobilization in order to harmonize the employment and social conditions (including wages) of typical and atypical workers and also to negotiate agreements (particularly within companies) to transform non-standard contracts into standard ones (Ballarino, 2005). In 2009, CGIL created a Youth Policies Department to raise awareness about youth policies at both national and regional levels, including all the different sectoral federations. In 2009, it launched a campaign, in conjunction with NIdiL, with the slogan Giovani non più disposti a tutto (young people no longer available for everything). As the president of the department explained,

the campaign aimed at underlining that young people should not accept the current humiliating conditions to access the labour market, and the precarious jobs that are offered to them, and which do not allow them to build their own present and future. (Interview, October 2014)

The campaign was addressed to CGIL itself and to union representatives and delegates at all levels, in order to increase awareness inside the confederation but also to the general public. This is why several actions followed the launch of the campaign, which dominated the media, virtual networks and blogs. An example was the national assembly in July 2010 under the slogan Santa Impazienza! Lavoro e Diritti Ora! (Saint Impatience: Work and Rights Now!), followed national demonstrations in Rome in November 2010 and April 2011. This followed the San Precario movement launched in 2004, named after the ‘patron saint’ of temporary workers (Hyman, 2015).

Federations for atypical workers each develop their work within the framework of their individual confederations. This may raise concerns that these structures could become forms of segregation, and thereby further marginalization, for those workers inside the union (Murgia and Selmi, 2012). Yet as the president of NIdiL explained to us in an interview, the existence of federations for atypical workers allows the unions to coordinate their action with the sectoral federations, and thereby to promote a more general and encompassing agenda that gives space to the needs of atypical workers. On the other hand, although NIdiL follows the main political guidelines of the confederation to which it belongs to, it maintains its bargaining autonomy, which potentially strengthens the capacity of the federation to protect atypical workers through collective negotiation. In this respect, the president of NIdiL reported that by November 2014 they had already negotiated 15 company-level agreements under the contrattazione aziendale inclusiva (inclusive company-level bargaining) procedure, which reflects a union policy. The aim is to overcome workforce segmentation and the marginalization of the atypical workers by extending bargaining coverage and fostering transitions from atypical towards typical contracts.

In addition, the atypical workers’ federations have offered various services, particularly by disseminating of information on social protection, employment rights and the legal framework. For example, in 2008, a Sportello Orientamento al Lavoro Unificato (NIdiL-SOL, an integrated office for the job orientation of precarious young people) was created within the CGIL Camera del Lavoro in Milan to strengthen the organizational ties of the unions with the territorial level while helping precarious workers searching for ‘good quality jobs’. Unions intend to use these structures as a means to increase awareness of the ‘legal’ national labour market framework among precarious workers, thus acting as providers of education and learning activities to young workers.

For a long time, some sectoral federations felt threatened by the functioning and the existence of these new structures (Leonardi, 2010). In the case of CISL, Alai was not a federation until 2009, when its delegates acquired voting rights. Even now, all atypical federations complain of resistance of other (sectoral) federations to allowing their delegates approach workers or bargain with employers. The fundamental conflict is representational. As a representative from Alai explained, sectoral federations in Italy consider that there is no basic conflict of interest between typical and atypical workers and that the representation and defence of atypical workers should naturally be their task: ‘workers in the same workplace share all the same issues and interests’ (interview, February 2011).

In the case of CGIL, another reason is that sectoral unions oppose the fragmentation of the representation of workers and hence their representation on an individual basis. Federations of atypical workers, by contrast, consider that the sectoral unions may want to keep atypical workers in a precarious condition to protect workers on standard contracts. The dialogue between federations seems, however, to have improved in recent years. Industrial federations have acknowledged the important role and the success in recruitment played by atypical federations, while they appear themselves more inclined to include precarious workers’ issues on their agendas.

Specific strategies vary according to the workers’ contractual status and tend to adopt a ‘top-down’ approach in order to deal with the recruitment of atypical workers. As mentioned above, atypical federations signed a multi-employer collective agreement with the federation of employment agencies (Assolavoro) to cover agency workers. This was possible because of the existence of an employer organization comprising all temporary agencies and functioning as a bargaining counterpart. This contract makes the use of agency work quite expensive for companies but also ensures some flexibility for its use.

Resources for vocational training, health and safety and other welfare provisions are also jointly managed by Italian unions and the employers’ organization through the use of ‘bilateral’ structures which receive a generally positive evaluation by union officers. Another example is the collective agreement covering the so-called ‘Tagesmutter’ (day-care mothers) signed by FeLSA and Tem.p^@ and the employer organization AssociazioneDomus. These strategies are adapted to the different sectors insofar as different sectors have different types of atypical workers.

The measures taken by the atypical workers’ federations to target precarious workers depend also on the relations with sectoral organizations and are intertwined with their specific strategies. There are cases where these strategies collide. The public sector is a clear example since the increasing use of atypical workers threatens the condition of permanent workers. Public sector unions place a strong emphasis on political pressure in order to limit the use of atypical workers, while atypical unions try to mobilize them in order to improve their working conditions.

Spain

Spanish unions have not created specific federations for the representation of temporary workers. As with other challenges faced throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they showed a preference for dealing with temporary employment at the top level, rather involving the rank-and-file, that is, responding to it politically, rather than organizationally. Despite (or perhaps because) their low membership rates, Spanish trade unions have always relied on institutions that reinforce their role, not so much at the base, but at higher levels in the national system of industrial relations (Ortiz, 1999).

At a broad political level, both UGT and CCOO initially acquiesced in the deregulation of temporary employment ‘at the margin’ of the labour market. But important distinctions in this respect should be made between these two confederations. The UGT, which was closely associated with the PSOE, supported the measures introduced by that party in government, but CCOO strongly opposed them, arguing that they undermined the employment security Spanish workers had previously enjoyed. One of our interviewees, a former general secretary of CCOO, reminded us that the first step in the deregulation of the Spanish labour market, the reforms adopted in 1984, came after an agreement between PSOE and UGT that was rejected by CCOO. And a general strike called by CCOO not long after, in 1985, did not obtain the support of UGT.

Despite its initial reluctance, such partial deregulation of the labour market was later assessed by CCOO as a minor loss, by comparison with deregulation of permanent work (Fernández Macías, 2003). Permanent workers were the core of trade union membership, and Spanish unions reacted accordingly. As a result, youth was to bear the brunt of the precarious employment that increased massively in the Spanish labour market in the following years. This may well be a reason why Juventud sin Futuro (Youth without a Future), a movement that denounced the precarious situation of young people in the labour market and arose at the same time as the Indignados in 2011, explicitly rejected links with any political party or, even more importantly, with any major trade union confederation. ‘They do not represent us’ was one of their slogans, referring to traditional political parties and trade unions alike (Flesher Fominaya, 2014, 2015; Hyman, 2015).

Yet, the priority that both CCOO and UGT gave towards their own members with standard contracts did not mean that they abandoned any attempt at combating temporary employment. On the contrary, according to Cerviño (2003), they were increasingly concerned with the alarming levels that temporary employment was reaching throughout the 1990s. For obvious reasons, given their short tenure in any workplace, temporary workers were less prone to become union members. In the long run, temporary employment could lead to an increasing ageing of union membership, a detachment of the unions from the Spanish working class and a loss of legitimacy among the public opinion as a whole. Hence, if only at a political level, the unions put the fight ‘for stable employment’ (por un empleo estable) at the forefront. The political struggle reached the point of calling a general strike in 1988 in opposition to the Plan de Empleo Juvenil (Youth Employment Plan), introduced by the PSOE government to facilitate temporary employment to an even greater extent than in 1984. The unions also fiercely opposed the introduction of private employment agencies (Empresas de Trabajo Temporal or ETTs) that served to generate another form of atypical employment (Cerviño, 2003).

The reduction in the costs of dismissing permanent workers, imposed in 1997, which reduced the incentive to hire temporary workers, can be seen as an additional sign of compromise by the Spanish trade unions, but here again the positions of the two confederations differed. In our interview, the CCOO former general secretary presented his union as primarily responsible for the concession, which in his view proved that the CCOO was more committed to eliminating the inequality between permanent and temporary work in Spain than was the UGT.

The increase in temporary employment in the public sector from 1997 onwards, though, reveals that such a measure was not enough to remove the strong segmentation of the Spanish labour market. Although the unions denounced the abusive resort to temporary employment by employers and the state, insiders’ job security was largely preserved and the flexibility of companies to deal with changes in product market demand was systematically attained using temporary employment as a buffer. The fight against temporary employment never crossed the line of making temporary and permanent workers’ employment conditions converge. Recent labour markets reforms in Spain have reduced the difference in protection between permanent and temporary contracts and were strongly opposed by the unions, which tried to defend the rights associated with open-ended contracts (Sanz de Miguel, 2011).

An organizational response to temporary employment such as that seen for Italy was in Spain more the exception than the rule. Yet, there were two organizational developments inside Spanish union confederations which resemble the role played by atypical workers’ federations in Italy: youth associations and, more importantly, specific organizations for the representation of self-employed workers. In the first case, Catalonia has been the pioneer. In 1997, the UGT created its youth organization Avalot, while in the following year the CCOO established Acció Jove (Youth Action). All members of UGT and CCOO aged under 30 years in Catalonia belong automatically to their respective youth association. The general aim of these associations is to give young union members advice about issues which specially affect them, such as housing and maternity leave. More generally, Acció Jove states on its website that its objective is ‘to transform the working and living conditions of Catalan youth’ and to advance their ‘civic and social rights’. Although it mentions that the employment status of young workers is ‘very often precarious’, the high incidence of temporary employment is not a priority for either association.

When we mentioned that in Italy the confederations have specific federations for atypical workers, one of the members of Acció Jove rejected the idea: ‘it makes no sense to set up a specific organization for that purpose. Temporary workers should not be represented according to the nature of their contract, but according to work they carry out’ (Interview, May 2011). A sign of the lower internal importance of Avalot and Acció Jove is the fact that they are associations, not federations, as in the Italian case. Both associations resemble youth associations in political parties, aimed at training cadres who will later be leading those federations: ‘the association was set up with the aim of becoming a school of cadres for the union’ (CCOO interview).

There are signs that the youth associations in Spain could develop a role in specifically representing atypical workers’ interests inside the structure of the union. According to some CCOO officials interviewed, Acció Jove did indeed serve a function defending atypical workers’ interests, in the same way that the secretariat for immigrant workers did. Conversely, interviewees in both associations mentioned the reluctance of the most powerful federations inside their union to accept the creation of Avalot and Acció Jove. The general secretary of UGT-Catalunya had to overcome the resistance of some federations, such as the metalworkers. Moreover, despite a general discourse of harmony between youth associations and federations, there seemed to be situations when a conflict of interest arose, as in the arrangement of lists for trade union elections at the workplace: if members of the youth associations were included there, there would be less room to accommodate older members.

Such a conflict of interests could overlap with that between temporary and permanent workers: in a workplace of the Iberia airline, luggage porters, overwhelmingly hired on a temporary basis, had been advised by the older union members to take their claims to Avalot. ‘Go to Avalot; here we will deal with all the important issues at the workplace. These workers soon realised they were not being properly represented by the trade union branch’ (interview, May 2011). Led by Avalot, these workers managed to call a workplace assembly and forced a change in the branch executive committee.

Despite these indications that youth associations might eventually become the embryo of future organizational units specifically aimed at representing atypical workers’ interests, it must be acknowledged that they were nothing equivalent to the atypical workers’ federations in Italy. They only defended atypical workers’ interests in a subsidiary way; they had not been set up to defend young workers because of the higher precariousness associated with youth in Spain.

More similar to the Italian atypical workers’ federations are the organizations for the self-employed workers set up inside CCOO and UGT. Again, Catalonia was the pioneer: CCOO-Catalunya established TRADE (Trabajadores Autónomos Dependientes or Treballadors Autònoms Dependents in Catalan) in its VII congress, in 2000. It represents self-employed who work primarily (at least 75%) for a single client, where the relationship can be regarded as bogus self-employment and analogous to other types of atypical work. In 2008, the CCOO Congress at the state level decided to upgrade such representation to the level of the whole confederation and to stimulate similar changes in the other regional federations. But TRADE never became more than a secretariat, and with the budget restrictions following the recession, it was downgraded to a department within the secretariat for Social Protection and Public Policies.

The representation of dependent self-employed was contested inside CCOO. A minority advocated the creation of a separate union federation; an opposing position (also a minority) rejected any separate representation for such workers; the intermediate one was the compromise that prevailed. Some interviewees were aware that Italian trade unions confederations had conferred a much more important representation to these interests, but they were critical of the strategy followed by their Italian counterparts. Conversely, the UGT did decide to create a separate structure for the self-employed, the Unión de Profesionales y Trabajadores Autónomos, but this is mainly oriented to genuine autonomous and professional workers.

Our account raises two questions: why was Catalonia a pioneer in these organizational developments; and why were self-employed workers able to attain a specific representation that other atypical workers did not. One of the leading regional officials of TRADE explained that half its membership comprised former standard employees whose services had been outsourced by the companies for which they still worked; previously, they had been union members in these companies. The other main group were workers who had become unemployed and were obliged to become self-employed because of the lack of standard jobs; many such workers would also have been previously unionized. Many interviewees described a high concentration of dependent self-employment in a number of occupations: lorry and van drivers were frequently described as paradigms of the member of TRADE. Such an occupational and sectoral concentration may also have favoured a higher degree of organizational representation inside CCOO.

As regards the pioneering role of Catalonia, several explanations were provided by the interviewees. Catalonia has traditionally been one of the leading industrial territories in Spain and, thus, one of the main strongholds of its labour movement: ‘considering that many dependent self-employed workers have industrial companies as their “customers,” it is not strange that TRADE was first established in Catalonia’ (former general secretary of CCOO). This interview also referred to the more ‘mature’ character of trade unionism in Catalonia, compared to other regional federations.