Fipe: watch out for pirate contracts in public establishments, harmful to employees and competition

Fipe Confcommercio is once again pointing its finger at the contractual jungle afflicting the retail sector. A sector where there are over 40 collective agreements officially deposited in the national Cnel archive.

"Some contracts," denounce the Fipe, "are signed byunions with little representativeness that try, often successfully, to attract the attention of entrepreneurs by drastically cutting labour costs, i.e. by establishing wage and regulatory treatments that are worse for workers". The Fipe survey, through a simulation on ten professional figures, highlights the evident pay and regulatory gaps resulting from the application of certain 'pirate contracts'. Just to give an example on the economic part of the contracts, the annual salary of a cook can vary by as much as four thousand euros.

Fortunately, these contracts are applied in a limited number of companies, but the phenomenon of so-called 'contract dumping' and 'pirate contracts', according to the Federation of Public Establishments, 'risks becoming a real scourge for the sector, which not only penalises employees but also creates distorted competition between companies'.

A phenomenon that must therefore be monitored and countered With these goals in mind, FIPE has prepareda veritable manual, now in its second edition - 'Contractual Dumping in the Public Establishment Sector | State of the Art and Strategies for Countering it' - that will be presented on 22 July at the Cnel headquarters, with the scheduled participation of Marina Elvira Calderone, Minister of Labour and Social Policies; Renato Brunetta, president of Cnel; Lino Enrico Stoppani, president of Fipe; Giovanni Piglialarmi, researcher in labour law at the 'Marco Biagi' Department of Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

"It is out of the question that we would not have wanted to find ourselves commenting on and explaining the reasons for this second edition of the manual on contractual dumping in the catering sector, which, three years after the first one, we instead find ourselves having to re-present as a due act," writes President Stoppani in the foreword...) Labour market trends have gradually shifted towards an increasing focus on the people employed in the sector and, therefore, to a strengthening of all human resources management tools, with a great attention to all personnel retention policies. This is why we are faced with a real paradox, namely that of a phenomenon such as contractual dumping, which not only erodes employee protections by reducing minimum wages and other forms of protection of a normative nature, but at the same time sets in motion a mechanism of downward competition that further penalises the choices of companies in the sector that, in line with market trends, seek to strengthen employee protections'.