Revenue: FLP shines a spotlight on children’s working hours and the overtime bank

Working hours for carers and the bank of hours accrued through overtime. These are two issues on which the FLP Ecofin Tax Agencies trade union has drawn attention in a communication sent to the central Human Resources department of the Revenue Agency. The communication calls for ‘guidance and technical solutions to be provided to the provincial and regional directorates that adopt the ‘children’s working hours’ scheme, so as to safeguard the varied and flexible organisation of working hours agreed between the employee and the employer’ and to schedule ‘a round of collective bargaining aimed at establishing a comprehensive and uniform framework for multi-period working hours’.

FLP emphasises that the multi-period working hours scheme is a provision set out in Article 22 of the 2016–2018 National Collective Labour Agreement for Central Government Departments. ‘The contractual arrangement in question, which has been in force for over eight years within our sector, has never – as emphasised in the letter signed by the Deputy General Coordinator of FLP Ecofin Tax Agencies, Paolo Cocozzello – ‘has never been applied uniformly and in practice, with the result that the workers at our Agency have been unable to enforce it, despite the matter being exclusively subject to second-level collective bargaining’.”

However, the trade union acknowledges that ‘within our Agency and in many metropolitan areas across the country — particularly those characterised by a lack of social support structures for the care of children or elderly parents — decentralised agreements known as “Progetto Figli” or ‘Children’s Working Hours’, which have been in place since 2015 in the provincial offices in Milan and subsequently extended to other local and regional areas’. In fact, this project has become a best practice for work-life balance.

FLP points out that these agreements ‘not only promoted a better work-life balance, but also led to a reduction in the use of annual leave, parental leave and part-time working, which would otherwise have been necessary to care for young children during periods of the year coinciding with school closures’. The adoption of these agreements “has enabled – according to FLP – the offices that have implemented them to rely, at the same labour cost, on guaranteed attendance and performance during periods of scheduled catch-up, without the temporary absence causing any disruption to service delivery: in fact, the employee did not fail to make their contribution to the work, but brought it forward, ensuring the required productivity in line with the hours actually worked.”

According to the trade union, ‘the “childcare working hours” scheme, following an initial trial period, has gradually become established, receiving the full approval of both staff and management’, with the support first of the Equal Opportunities Committee and subsequently of the Joint Guarantee Committee.