The future of collective bargaining in Italy between legislative reforms and social partners’ responses

In recent years, Italian legislation seems to have accomplished a ‘corporatisation’ of collective bargaining in response to employers’ demands, without the filter of national collective bargaining. Article 8 of Law No. 148/2011 made it possible to deviate from legislative provisions and industry-wide collective bargaining on a wide range of topics. The Legislative Decrees implementing the Jobs Act in 2015 have gone even further, allowing the possibility of a different regulation both through different levels of collective bargaining and through individual agreements. Faced with these changes in the balance of power, collective bargaining has been weakened. Nevertheless, a number of national sectoral agreements have provided for ambitious efforts to establish a new relationship between the levels of collective bargaining or the mechanisms of collective agreements, as well as to re-regulate forms of workers’ representation. As these national agreements are based on the voluntary compliance of workers’ organisations and employers’ associations, their implementation and enforcement in order to be effective will need to be accompanied by a re-establishment of the role of collective bargaining.