Anniversaries

When Italy painfully cut the escalator

Forty-two years ago the Valentine's Day agreement: today the priority is the blossoming of wage dynamics

by Daniela Fumarola*

13 February 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

There are dates that do not belong to the calendar of anniversaries, but to the history of a country. For Italia, 14 February 1984 had no sentimental colouring: it was a difficult but necessary night. It was a painful choice of responsibility, far from easy to explain to the millions of working men and women, who understood its urgency and purpose. With the Valentine's Pact, the Craxi government and the reformist trade unions made courage prevail over demagogy and stopped the inflationary spiral.

Forty-two years later, Italia is at a crossroads similar in importance, but opposite in direction. If in the 1980s and 1990s the objective was to curb the perverse repercussions of the escalator, today the priority is the flourishing of wage dynamics.

There is an urgent need to propose an incomes policy to unleash the growth and productivity potential inherent in our industrial and services fabric. The time has come to generate and distribute productivity in companies, supply chains, districts, through decentralised bargaining and participation.

The proposal for a new Pact for Work and Cohesion moves precisely in this direction. Not a book of dreams, but a 'political exchange', as Tarantelli would call it, between government and social partners that commits each to shared objectives. It is necessary to start building it immediately to exploit the growth margins forecast by international statistical institutes and consolidate market confidence, now that the spread is at an all-time low.

The menu of the pact depends on the urgencies represented by the parties participating in the tables already active in industry as in trade and services. It will be essential to shift the centre of gravity of industrial relations on companies and territories, towards a real right to integrative, company and territorial bargaining, pushing in particular on wage increases, training and skills for all workers, regardless of the sector.

It does not mean denying the national level, which must continue to regulate the regulatory and economic aspects common to all, but strengthening the driver that makes wages, employability, added value of labour, good production and organisational flexibility, turnover and GDP grow together. If growth is the great challenge today, it is from the quality of work that we must start again. This also applies to the persistent difficulties in including young people and women, on whom selective incentives need to be rethought.

The parallelism with 1984 not only concerns the urgency of the challenges to be taken up, but also the method to be adopted to overcome them. As then, the courage of non-populist choices is needed. The allure of seemingly comfortable solutions such as a minimum wage set by law or entrusting the courts with the measurement of representation is understandable, but it is not responsible to indulge in what is known from experience not to be effective.

It is up to us, and not others, to counter the multiplication of pirate contracts, asking the competent administrations to monitor the application of the laws that already exist and the CNEL to take a real time snapshot of the actual number of associations claiming to represent workers and companies.

It is also up to us to have the courage to overcome the era of wages as an independent variable, disconnected from any merit or productivity dynamics. The forthcoming transposition of the European directive on the transparency of wages will be an opportunity to verify the degree of organisational and cultural preparedness of companies to meet the challenge of participation, through career paths consistent with workers' skills and motivating, at the centre of which is not only monetary remuneration, but also welfare, personal health and safety, and the quality of the working environment.

Ultimately, what is needed is that 'civil courage' that Mario Romani wrote about: the ability to take decisions, even when they are uncomfortable but right, because we are convinced that merit is worth more than immediate consensus. Ezio Tarantelli, who inspired the 1984 pact, paid with his life for defending these values. We want to honour his memory by allowing wages to grow again, turning concertation into an engine of development.

(*) General Secretary CISL