Better work-life balance through collective bargaining

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A report published in January 2005 by the Italian food and agriculture organisation, Fai-Cisl, analyses the problem of balancing work and family life, the role of collective bargaining in regulating the issue, and the solutions proposed through certain company agreements signed by companies in the food sector.

Background

The profound social, cultural and organisational changes over the past 10 years have all impacted greatly on Italian society. While, in the past, the roles within the family, and especially within the couple, were complementary, specialised, and firmly anchored in tradition, today they are more parallel and interchangeable.

The traditional Italian family consisted of the husband as the main bread winner and the wife as responsible for the home and other family-related aspects. Work, school, health care services and many other aspects of ordinary life were based on the assumption that someone (the wife) would take care of these during standard working hours. The wife could count on an extended family network (sisters, aunts, grandparents) to support her in looking after the children after school and during summer time, taking care of them when they were sick, and tackling house and family-related tasks and problems.

Nowadays the situation has radically changed, with most families no longer relying on just one source of income as both partners are in employment. Consequently, the couple has to find a balance between the various needs and individual aspirations in trying to combine their private and professional lives. Besides the problem of childcare, there is also the growing problem of dependent elderly people, an onerous and delicate situation in a country which is ageing rapidly.

The increasing participation of women in the labour market, together with a greater need for companies to have more worker involvement and commitment, has led the social partners to start regulating and trying to facilitate the balance between private and professional life.

Flexibility: a goal of both workers and companies

The January 2005 study, carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organisation affiliated to the Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions (Federazione agro-alimentare, Fai-Cisl) (Conciliare lavoro e famiglia. La contrattazione collettiva - Fai-Cisl Servizio documentazione - No. 1 -2005), highlights aspects of the work-life balance issue and points to solutions either collectively agreed or proposed by companies. It is clear that neither male nor female workers are nowadays in a position to devote themselves entirely to the care of children and their families.

Both men and women demand more flexibility in their working life in relation to various kinds of commitments and family needs which can be ordinary (birth, child-rearing, placing children in schools, adolescent problems, ageing of parents) or extraordinary (chronic illnesses, disabilities, social problems). Companies, for their part, put forward the same request for more flexibility, but on totally different grounds: more availability, greater flexibility and involvement.

Companies are beginning to realise that workers’ unfulfilled needs are having a negative impact on the company: family-related problems can upset company production and result in absenteeism, stress, reduced productivity and reliability. Companies may decide to tolerate these behaviours in their most difficult cases, repress them with the available regulatory tools, or try to limit them by helping workers during difficult phases of their lives.

Trade unions need to negotiate these issues in order to find solutions to collective problems which cannot be solved through individual bargaining, as it is not feasible to ask companies to allow multiple exceptional cases.

Collectively agreed solutions

Some family-friendly policies already regulated by collective agreements include: reduced working time, flexibility in the arrangement of working time, services and forms of insurance cover for family members, company and trade union support for workers during the most difficult family and professional periods.

Flexible working time arrangements include: the reduction of working time on an annual basis (part-time in terms of shorter days or shorter weeks), daily, weekly or multi-period reductions (flexibility of entry and exit working times); job sharing; fixed working time without overtime or with clearly scheduled overtime hours.

While such measures do allow for flexibility in terms of reducing working hours, they tend to be restrictive for the workers. Job sharing, for example, is a tool which often turns out to be very binding for the two workers involved.

Company solutions

The Fai-Cisl study cites examples of schemes introduced by companies through company agreements in order to improve the work-life balance of male and female workers, such as:

• Company childcare services, summer camps and other kinds of similar services: these services are especially appreciated by families with young children, although nowadays are less available than in the past, due most likely to the current low birth rate and to the diminished responsibility of companies to bear the direct cost of managing the initiatives. These could be replaced by other forms of economic support or with information services about the availability of similar services provided at local level.

• Financial advances: another form of economic support, which can be found in several company agreements, is an improvement of the forms of 'economic advance' provided for by law. This includes the possibility of advancing to the worker part or all of the end-of-service allowance (trattamento di fine rapporto, Tfr), not only for a house purchase or renovation but also for health care problems encountered by the employee or members of his/her family (Trinity Alimentari Italia company agreement - OO.SS. of 4 July 2002). Another example of this is the case of the maternity allowance paid by the National Social Security Institute (Istituto nazionale per la previdenza sociale, Inps) (Tre Valli company agreement OO.SS. of 4 July 2002), which is paid in advance by the company and then deducted from the worker’s salary when she comes back from maternity leave, or by the Tfr if the employment relationship is interrupted.

• Supplementary health care insurance: unfortunately, very often this kind of insurance covers the employee only and is not extended to other members of the family.

Company cases

The study highlights the company agreement signed at the Tre Valli food company (Azienda agricola Tre Valli - OO.SS. of 4 Julyu 2002), which proposes a fixed form of part-time work, similar to job-sharing. The company, at the worker’s request, grants part-time work for one year, provided that the request comes from two workers operating in the same division and working in the same shift, and that both agree to complete the other worker’s shift in the case of absence. Thus, while the company agrees to its employees reducing working hours, it does not want to run the risk of a deterioration in performance, which demonstrates the limits of its willingness to meet the needs of workers going through a difficult period. The part-time option is permitted in cases of giving assistance to disabled family members, for health problems or for the care of young children.

However, there are many other cases which illustrate a genuine desire on the part of companies to meet their workers’ needs.

Some companies have, for example, introduced part-time work with the 'explicit objective of combining family and professional life by precisely identifying the beneficiaries'. The Ferrero food and chocolate company (Ferrero company agreement - OO.SS of 4 July 2002), for example, as well as several other companies (e.g. Soveda company agreement - OO.SS. of 25 July 2002) offers part-time work to working mothers hired on open-ended contracts following their maternity leave until the child reaches three years of age, as well as to other categories of workers with proven health problems. Other companies, such as Lavazza (Lavazza company agreement - OO.SS. of 16 July 2002), have introduced the possibility of working partial or fixed shifts for working mothers returning to work after maternity leave.

Among the most innovative and original forms of support is that introduced by the Kraft company (Krafts Foods Italia company agreement - OO.SS of 2 July 2002) which, besides offering a regulated flexibility in working hours, provides its employees with the option of benefiting from a range of supplementary services: home-delivery of groceries, dry-cleaning, bank, postal and registry office-related services.

Ways of combining private and professional life satisfactorily should be top of the agenda not only for companies but also for trade unions. The latter, indeed, should not be exclusively focused on collective bargaining but should also offer family support services to their members.

Commentary

The issue of reconciling private and professional life is very topical in Italy. The tools proposed by the national regulation and used by collective bargaining to face the problem are mainly alternative forms of working time: part-time work, telework, reduced working times, individual working times. However, in an unchanged labour culture, those who accept such conditions are often regarded as unusual or marginal.

Companies and the social partners are aware of the problem and are endeavouring to find other solutions. The primary objective is to obtain the twin goals of high company performance and a more fulfilling personal and family life for the individual worker.

It is clear that it is necessary to strengthen the network of services and structures aimed at supporting the family in its concrete needs. Collective bargaining and company agreements could play an important role in building those supports. This would also partly fulfil one of the priority aims of the social partners: to create the conditions for increasing the participation of women in the labour market. In this, Italy currently stands bottom of the league among European countries in attaining the goals of the Lisbon objective. (Domenico Paparella, Cesos)