Flexible job-creation agreement reached at Infostrada

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In September 1998, an agreement was signed by trade unions and Infostrada, an Italian company in the fixed-network telephone sector, on the recruitment of 1,300 people to work in customer-service call centres. Given the particular characteristics of the customer-care activity involved, and considering that this is the start-up phase of the call-centre service, the parties agreed to a high degree of flexibility in both the employment relationship and working time.

On 21 September 1998, an agreement was signed between the management of Infostrada and the Fiom-Cgil, Fim-Cisl and Uilm-Uil trade unions on a plan to recruit 1,300 workers to staff the fixed-network telephone company's customer-care service. The workers will provide information on telephone services, put into operation new subscriptions and provide after-sales assistance. Infostrada is a company in the Olivetti group which is jointly owned by the German Mannesmann as part of a strategic agreement between the two multinationals. Infostrada was the first Italian company to offer long-distance telephone services to individual private customers, in competition with Telecom Italia, as part of the Europe-wide deregulation of telecommunications.

The agreement

The agreement between lnfostrada and the unions provides for the hiring of 1,300 customer-care operators in the areas of Ivrea and Milan. This is a considerable increase on the figure envisaged by an earlier agreement signed in May 1998, which set a target of 600 new jobs.

Given the particular characteristics of the customer-care activity to be delivered through the creation of the call centres, and considering that this is the start-up phase of the service, the parties have agreed to a high degree of flexibility in both the employment relationship and working time. In particular, the company and the unions agreed to begin a period of experimentation until the end of 1999, during which the various variables influencing the performance of the service will be analysed.

The main points of the agreement are the following:

1. the recruitment and training of 1,300 people, 800 for the call centre in Ivrea and 500 for the one in Milan;

2. about half of the workers will be hired on fixed-term part-time contracts, while the rest will be hired on work/training contract s (in the latter case, the maximum age of the worker is fixed at 32);

3. the company envisages converting at least 60% of the fixed-term and work/training contracts into indefinite-duration contracts. This transformation, however, will depend on the verification of actual business volumes;

4. at the end of the experimental phase, the use is envisaged for the customer-care service of part-time contracts of 20-25 hours per week, including "vertical" part-time work arrangements (whereby employees work only on certain days, weeks or months);

5. due to requirements arising from the launch of the service for individual private customers, which took place in September 1998, the company will take on 110 workers on two-month temporary work contracts;

6. in consideration of the licence granted to Infostrada in February 1998 by the Ministry of Communications for building up a telecommunication network for voice-telephony services, which assigned to Infostrada the status of a public service operator, the agreement states that customer-care activity may be exempt from regulations on the prohibition of Sunday work and may also fall under the provisions of law 146/90 on the guarantee of minimum essential public services in the event of withdrawal of labour (ie guaranteeing minimum service levels during strikes);

7. during the experimental phase, the company and unions have undertaken to devise an incentive scheme and to examine the possibility of setting parameters to assess the quantity and quality of work performance, and of the service's efficiency and effectiveness, to which the incentive scheme would be linked; and

8. finally, as far as working time is concerned, in view of the necessity to provide a continuous service (which in full operation will be 24 hours a day on seven days a week), the agreement provides for a two-hour leeway for flexibility in daily working time and for variations in the weekly shift schedule. The parties have also decided to set up a joint committee on the working hours system and structure, whose findings will be subject to joint assessment by June 1999.

Evaluations by the unions

The unions unanimously declared their satisfaction over the agreement with Infostrada, not least because the creation of new jobs is a sign of revival for the Ivrea area, where in the past years corporate crises and restructuring, which have included Olivetti itself, have led to thousands of redundancies. According to Gian Piero Castano, the national secretary of Fiom-Cgil in charge of the computer and telecommunications sector, the agreement confirms forecasts on the growth of the telecommunications industry and validates Infostrada's strategic choices. As regards the high degree of flexibility provided for in the employment relationship, Mr Castano believes that this choice - which has already been introduced at Omnitel (the Olivetti group company which operates in the mobile telephone sector) - is made necessary by the two factors of lnfostrada being a relatively new company and the telecommunications sector being still a developing one. The unions, anyway, are confident that the consolidation of Infostrada's business will be matched by a corresponding consolidation of employment, as has happened in the Omnitel case.

According to Giorgio Paolo, national coordinator of Fim-Cisl for the Olivetti group, it is highly significant that collective bargaining within the group has finally started to cover employment creation again. He also considers telecommunications to be a sector of great importance for trade union activity, in which collective bargaining will have to be able to grasp and interpret developments and innovations. Working hours and new skill requirements, in particular, may prove to be the critical areas for a business in which customer care is of crucial importance and flexibility needs are therefore particularly high.

Commentary

The agreement between Infostrada and the trade unions is significant from several points of view. Firstly, it is an important example of an agreement on job creation where a high level of work flexibility - which includes flexibility in the type of employment relationship, a widespread use of part-time and flexibility of daily working hours - is agreed by the parties in order allow the start-up of a business in a new sector with a great potential for growth. In this sense, as pointed out by the unions, concessions made to the company are part of a medium- to long-term approach in which employment growth is expected to consolidate and become stable.

Secondly, it seems that trade unions recognise the need to implement a structural flexibility of work owing to the peculiar characteristics of a customer-oriented activity, notably in a case like this of a public utility. This is a highly topical issue in view of the process of privatisation of public utilities which is underway in Italy. It is therefore probable that the unions will increasingly have to face the need to find bargained responses to the flexibility requirements of customer-care services. From this point of view, the acknowledgement of the applicability to Infostrada of law 146/90 on the minimum level of activity that must be guaranteed by workers in public essential services even in the event of a strike, and the setting-up of a joint committee to define the working time regime at Infostrada, appear to move in the direction of the creation of a system of joint regulation.

Finally, development of the telecommunications sector may provide major opportunities to narrow the employment gap between the different areas of Italy. The possibility made available by new technologies to locate in any province call centres serving the entire national network is a real prospect for the future. In this regard, the recent agreement at Infostrada may provide a useful model for similar initiatives in the Mezzogiorno, by both lnfostrada itself and other operators (Roberto Pedersini, Fondazione Regionale Pietro Seveso).