In just a few months at least three company agreements have been reworked as anti-Jobs Act ‘hybrid agreements’. The move is not sector specific. Novartis in the pharmaceuticals sector, Lucchini (Cevital group) in metals and Trelleborg Wheel Systems in industry have all renewed agreements in which some key points of Matteo Renzi’s government’s recent labor market reforms have been omitted. Unions have welcomed these individual ‘victories’ because they have broadly succeeded in avoiding having the new ‘indefinite employment contract with rising levels of social protection’ for certain employees from being implemented as well as succeeding in maintaining the famous Article 18 that guarantees re-instatement of workers unfairly made redundant (c.f. article No. 8914). This strategy of short-circuiting the system is being used but not officially supported by the Cisl union and it is a strategy that is starting to annoy certain employers.
The CGIL circumventing the Jobs Act. For the majority CGIL union the goal is clearly to neutralize the Jobs Act. In Italy collective agreements or company agreements can in fact ‘skip’ a law. “ We stated at the outset that we would do all we could to counter the Jobs Act, and this is exactly what we are doing,” explained Emilio Miceli, head of the Energy-Chemicals section of the CGIL to Planet Labor. “The labor reforms are poisonous, they are divisive and set young workers against older workers
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