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There is a date to be circled in red on the calendar. October 15th. Net of second thoughts, the state of emergency decided by the Government for the coronavirus emergency will end. It is not just a psychological or political issue. Returning to the ordinary implies leaving the logic of exceptionality also for some key issues. Like smart working, which involved between 6 and 8 million Italians. Stakes blown, for the employer in fact only the possibility of ratifying a choice imposed by Covid, but in the middle of next month we return to ordinary law, the number 81 of 2017. And therefore the obligation of an individual and written agreement between the employer and the employee. Of course, the law contains a series of rights for those who do agile work, but it increases the discretion of the employer also with respect to the granting or not of smart working. For this the government wants to intervene. It will do so by amending the law and shifting the center of gravity from face-to-face to national and, cascading, to corporate bargaining.
A point of fall within the executive has yet to be found, but the direction is already mapped out. And the Minister of Labor Nunzia Catalfo, while not going into details, will illustrate it on Thursday at the table with the trade unions and business associations. The consideration underlying the Government’s intervention is that smart working has exploded in numbers (from 570 thousand in 2019 to 6-8 million today), but above all it has caused a series of issues to explode that three years ago, when it was made the law, they were still latent and they were latent until it became a mass phenomenon. The issues are called the right to disconnect, working hours, breaks, meal vouchers. Now these issues need a more detailed framework, possibly tailored to the type of work being done. It is a very delicate step because these issues impact on workers’ rights and their daily life. And at the same time they impact on the needs of employers because smart working also has the other side of the coin: it is not only a tool to facilitate the reconciliation of private life (family and non-family) -work, but also includes risk. to turn into a sort of black hole, making it impossible for the employer to check the work done.
What the Government thinks, albeit with different nuances between M5s and Pd, is that relying everything on single bargaining between the employer and the worker can generate dysfunctions and problems for the second. So think the grillini, who push to postpone everything to the national collective bargaining agreement, and then to the company one, in order to bring the unions into the field and to broaden the discussion table to get to the concession and management of the smart working in favor of the worker. The dem also think so, but at the same time they do not want to overturn the structure of law 81. A point of balance that is emerging in these hours is to modify the 2017 law with targeted interventions. The first is the main one and that is to insert in the law a reference to national collective bargaining and to company bargaining. That must be the context in which to mature the new rules on timetables, disconnection and meal vouchers. An arrangement of this kind involves all the parties in the field and would allow smart working to be adapted to the specificities of the work that takes place. The second intervention should concern the rules that impact on female workers. The goal is to avoid the ghetto effect and in this sense the intervention management aims to bring spouses into smart working, in line with what has been done for leave and smart working during the pandemic, with measures related to both parents and not to a single figure.
If the contracts are the framework, the government still aims not to remain extraneous to this dynamic. It will not delegate everything to employers and unions. It will give some indications and some of them could be very binding. Like that of quotas. One more hypothesis, but there is. In practice, the Government would indicate a percentage of workers who can be put into smart working. In the public this is already happening because up to 31 December agile work is allowed for a share equal to 50% of the audience who can work outside the office. And this share will rise to 60% starting next year, becoming structural. A similar path could also be chosen for the private sector.
Even before the quota, however, it is necessary to decide within the Government when to intervene. And time is a major factor. From October 16 the individual agreement returns and the Democratic Party, as we said, does not want to cancel it. Even in the event of a sudden intervention, probably through an amendment to be included in a provision under consideration by Parliament, however, to make the negotiation path a priority or alternative, it will be necessary to wait some time. What is needed precisely to transfer the new rules of smart working into contracts. For many cases this time could also be very short because already today some companies are modulating agile work with agreements that impact the size of the company contract. In any case, the way of the individual agreement will remain in the field, it will not be canceled. But the goal is to make it more and more residual, to the point of actually replacing it with the bargaining scheme.
The audience moves too. It already starts from a work started by Minister Fabiana Dadone, that of the shares of 50% and 60%. But new guidelines will soon arrive and there will also be a reference to collective bargaining to create an accompanying framework. The basic principle, however, will not be undermined: the autonomy of administrations over Pola will remain, the organizational plans of agile work that will be in the hands of managers starting from next year. Executives will decide who can do smart working, rotations, but also to avoid unfortunate phenomena such as worker isolation. The ministry will accompany this process with guidelines, which will also include an address on sensitive issues such as data. The minister makes it a question also, if not above all, cultural: “True smart working, agile and flexible – she says to Huffpost – it will be an important tool for changing the cultural approach of a part of the public sector, especially the management, and will help us to move from the logic of fulfillment to that of results. It will be a very useful means to flush out the few slackers of the PA, because when every day or every week you have goals to achieve, you cannot laze around. We are sure that, when fully operational, it will generate an increase in productivity, just as happened in the private sector, for the benefit of better services for citizens and businesses ”.
The first estimates of the impact of this change of approach on the public are already circulating. Today the PA has 3.2 million employees: one million in schools, about 600 thousand in health care, 150 thousand ministerial and others linked to local authorities. Between 1.5 and 2 million worked at home during the lockdown. With the quota system fully operational, this will reach about 600-700 thousand, in practice at least one in five state-owned companies will work in smart working.
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