Italy: Conte’s second government, a left-leaning 5 Star-Democratic Party coalition, wins vote of confidence

At 343 votes out of a 630 total, Italy’s Chamber of Deputies majority was largely more comfortable than that secured in the evening of 10 September 2019 in the Senate house (169 votes out of 315). In his address to the Chamber, PM G. Conte’s speech sought to “give rise to a new country under the banner of development, innovation and social equity,” and to “secure a real change in economic and social policies.” In terms of work-related measures, PM Conte repeated almost word-for-word the program that was published in week 02 September 2019 (c.f. article No. 11336). “Our principal objective is to lower work-related taxation (…) so that all workers benefit,” he declared. The new government intends to unlock and make progress on the thorny issue of the minimum salary, which has already been the subject of two separate legislative proposals, one from the 5 Star Movement and the other from the Democratic Party. While the 5 Star Movement had been looking to impose an hourly salary rate of €9, this latest government appears to favor retaining the relative collective bargaining acquis by way of the mechanism of ‘the efficacy for all of collective agreements that are subscribed to by the most representative trade union organization.” This means measuring their degree of representativeness and on that question the government intends to approve a law,’ based on extremely rigorous indicators,’ stated PM Conte. Fair levels of remuneration for young independent workers, gender pay equality, and a workplace accident prevention policy complete the PM’s work-related program. The PM concluded this section of his parliamentary speech by affirming the need to ‘tackle odious forms of worker exploitation’, which previously would have been termed ‘true slavery conditions.’