Italpizza, frozen pizza giant, replies to our article ‘
Italpizza, indigestible Made in Italy.
‘. Where we stigmatized the use, in production, of workers supplied by contractor cooperatives. This was followed by replies from the Modena industry and some brief general remarks from labor lawyer Luigi Corrias.
Not a frozen pizza industry but‘an industrial pizzeria,’ Italpizza’s retort
Italpizza defends, as a matter of course, its human resource management policy. Alleging that it does not represent a form of unfair competition against competitors who instead use their own employees, hired under the national collective bargaining agreement (CCNL) of the food industry. With the system of contracting out to cooperatives that stably provide labor, Italpizza points out,‘there has been no illicit advantage on our part but only the legitimate use of the tools provided by current regulations.’
The Modena-based company also points out that ”Italpizza is not a frozen pizza industry, but an industrial pizzeria. Unlike its main competitors, it does not have a totally industrial process, but a semi-craft process. Raw materials are processed in-house; 24h dough rising; dough stretching by hand; baking in a wood-fired oven; hand stuffing allowing for a range of more than 800 different recipes. For the same volume of business, compared with the fully industrial process, this involves the use of about two-thirds more manpower‘.
‘No wage dumping,’ according to Italpizza
As for ‘any advantages in applying the contract/cooperative contract over other competitors, better called wage dumping,’ Italpizza claims that ‘the application of a labor contract cannot bring exclusive advantage to one competitor over others, as each competitor also has the option to be able to apply it. What is different if a competitor uses a ‘spurious’ cooperative which, in illegality manages to practice lower labor cost conditions than the market.
The application of labor contracts other than the product reference sector are possible because the data to be taken as reference is not the product, but the prevailing tasks performed by the labor force in the production process.
This does not represent a ‘vulnus’; the legislation leaves it up to the entrepreneur to determine what economic conditions to apply, as long as they are congruous with the tasks performed and the needs of maintaining the family, thus not imposing the application of a CCNL.
The FCA (formerly FIAT) case is the most representative. Therefore, any competitor has the power to be able to decide whether and which collective bargaining agreement to apply, without even having to go through a Contracting/Cooperative Agreement. The use of this mode, is functional to achieve greater flexibility and therefore organizational efficiencies‘.
CCNL, inequality and workers’ rights. The analysis of lawyer Luigi Corrias
The Italpizza case introduces a far-reaching issue of collective bargaining agreements, inequality and workers’ rights. An issue unfortunately underestimated by many, on which we gathered comments from Luigi Corrias, a labor lawyer at the Milan Bar. His remarks below are general in nature, in the absence of the necessary documentation to delve into the specific case.
‘The main land for the compression of workers’ rights and underprotection is now the processes of decomposition of the enterprise within production chains and its organizational fragmentation, made easy by the regulations introduced into the system regarding outsourcing and internalization (service contracts, subcontracting, cooperative work, etc.).
Enterprises, through a series of organizational and contractual models, can thus organize and dispose of labor that formally depends on third parties-or delegate phases of its production process to third parties-without assuming the risk nor the responsibility typical of ‘doing business,’ first and foremost the responsibility of the employer.
This case is generally carried out through the provision of labor by a company that is not authorized to carry out administration, and the ‘ruse’ used to cover the provision is to enter into a contract of supply, cleverly drafted and if necessary even certified. Which generally has services as its object and almost always, as a stakeholder, a cooperative.
All this could never have happened if the rule of equal treatment and solidarity of the principal (in place since 1960) had not been eliminated upstream for the c.d. ‘in-house procurement’. Instead, the egalitarian rule-according to which equal work must be able to be matched by an equal set of rights, starting with wages-was broken by the legislative decree 276/2003, art.29. And the penalty system has recently been relaxed, with the decriminalization of the crime of illegal labor contracting, now punishable by administrative penalty only.
It thus happens more and more often that workers working side by side, sharing the same tasks, have very different pay and regulatory conditions, with possible abuses, the correction of which is made difficult by the aforementioned regulatory ‘evolution’ (or rather, involution).
Faced with the critical situation that has been described so far, the task for those who wish to combat inequality, precarity and unemployment remains to combine the depth of analysis with the courage of denunciation and criticism. Without giving in to the resignation of considering the current situation as an unchangeable fact, on which no regulatory intervention (including by case law) is possible to reverse the trend that increasingly characterizes, today, the economy and business.’
Marta Strinati and Dario Dongo
Professional journalist since January 1995, he has worked for newspapers (Il Messaggero, Paese Sera, La Stampa) and periodicals (NumeroUno, Il Salvagente). She is the author of journalistic surveys on food, she has published the book "Reading labels to know what we eat".
Dario Dongo, lawyer and journalist, PhD in international food law, founder of WIISE (FARE - GIFT - Food Times) and Égalité.
