This is how the Cnel report photographs the labour market

The Assembly of the National Economic and Labour Council (Cnel) approved, at its meeting on 23 April, the customary annual report that takes a snapshot of labour market trends and the regulatory and wage structures expressed by collective bargaining.

This is not one report among many, an intellectual exercise punctuated by cold numbers which then, as is often the case with complex labour issues, all remain to be interpreted and contextualised.

The function of the report, as expressly indicated in the Mattarella law on the attributions of the Cnel, is to offer a critical examination of the available public data and their sources with the aim of facilitating, in terms of a 'political' synthesis, the elaboration of unambiguous results on individual phenomena. It is an institutional report, the result of a close and laborious confrontation between experts in the field and the actors representing business and labour who sit at the Cnel, for the contribution it offers to the understanding and governance of the transformations that are sweeping through the world of labour, profoundly influencing public life, as much in its development dynamics as in the pursuit of social cohesion objectives. For this reason, the reports of the Cnel - as expressly provided for by the law - are made available to the Chambers, the Government and the trade unions of workers and employers, as a common reference base, not only and not so much for study purposes, but above all as a tool to support decisions and the concrete implementation of policies.

In a public debate increasingly characterised by an uncontrolled excess of data and information, often used to support opposing theses, the commitment of institutions such as the CNEL plays an essential role. Contributing to providing the country with complete, reliable and as shared as possible information bases - in particular on the real trends in employment, productivity and wages - is a necessary condition for consciously orienting economic and social policy choices.

Of particular importance, in this perspective, is the attention that the Cnel annual report wanted to pay, this year, to the only existing database that makes it possible to measure the social metabolism of labour-related economic processes. We are referring to the immense material contained in the Cnel's national archive of collective labour contracts and agreements which, in recent times, has itself become the object of instrumentalisation in the public debate and in trade union-political communication on labour issues. This is also due to the opportunism of minor acronyms, i.e. not at all representative of the interests of companies and workers, which have helped to quadruple the number of national collective labour agreements in the space of a few years.