Le riforme italiane e francesi del mercato del lavoro: una via indiretta per il depotenziamento della contrattazione sindacale?

In recent years, labor market reforms in France and Italy have contributed to the further deregulation of labor legislation. If in Italy these mainly concerned the issues of contractual regulation and the functioning of the labor market, in the French case they more specifically concerned collective bargaining and the system of industrial relations at the company level. Both the latest reform promoted by the Renzi government (the Jobs Act) and the one promoted by Macron (Loi Travail 2) both moved in the wake of previous measures, more or less in continuity about the contents, but also in the context of a more conflictual union confrontation conditioned by a growing propensity to disintermediation by governments. Even if the two countries have different characteristics with regard to their labour market (also due to their economy) and their model of union representation (different weight of national contracts, unionization rates, representation model’s in the companies, etc.), the two reforms could in prospect favor further de-unionization, in particular of the young workers. In other words, the hypothesis contained in this article is that the further process of contractual precariousness in the employment relationship and the reduction of the protections against dismissals, both in the Italian and French reforms, can be conducted in the medium-long term to a growing weakening of the effectiveness and coverage of collective bargaining, starting from the enormous incidence of fixedterm contracts in hiring and the introduction of direct negotiation formulas between workers and firms.