Patterns of trade union participation in territorial pacts: the case of a northern Italian province

Abstract

This article analyzes the role played by trade unions within Italian territorial pacts (TPs). Trade unions have always played a part in the negotiations that establish TPs, but their role has been rather underplayed in the wider literature. Based on comparative empirical research into the eight territorial pacts signed in the Province of Turin, in the north-west of Italy, it was found that union participation in the TPs was shaped by the type of TP, the size of union organizations, and the personal commitment of individual union representatives. It was found that the patterns of union participation in TPs reflected the long-standing Italian tradition of micro-concertation, but the outcomes did not.

Notes

 1. Recent contributions include Piselli and Ramella, Patti sociali per lo sviluppo; Negrelli and Pulignano, “Evolution of Social Pacts”; Ramella, “Negotiating Local Development”.

 2. Regini, Uncertain Boundaries.

 3. Ibid., 124.

 4. Ibid., 77.

 5. Ibid., 73.

 6. For example, Barbera, “Le politiche della fiducia”.

 7. Carrieri, “Tra contrattazione e concertazione”.

 8. The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno was a national policy of economic support instituted in 1950. The aim of the State was to distribute funds to finance economic activities in order to reduce the economic gap between the northern and southern regions. Important entrepreneurship initiatives took place until the 1980s, though, as some argue, without really enhancing the needed growth and emancipation from State dependency. Trigilia, Sviluppo senza Autonomia.

 9. Ten of these TPs were European pacts for employment financed by the European Union.

10. Such limits were particularly evident in the assessment of the employment objectives of the TPs. Two scholars of public policy evaluation were contacted at the time of the fieldwork and claimed to have given up investigating the employment outcomes of TPs because of the lack of data.

11. Galetto, “I patti territoriali nella letteratura giuridica e socio-economica”.

12. Przeworski and Teune, Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry; Anckar, “On the Applicability”.

13. In Italy, after the Second World War, the predominant organizational model of trade unions has been based on a combination of vertical and horizontal structures. The three main Italian union confederations Cgil, Cisl, and Uil considered in this research have decentralized confederal and sectoral structures. The other unions, generally smaller, like rank and file unions, did not participate in the TPs. Unless otherwise specified, we will here refer to the Cgil, Cisl, and Uil decentralized structures at the province level. The same trade union organizations are then present in the workplaces through the respective delegates who are elected by all workers (regardless whether they are union members or not) of a given workplace. In terms of membership, the situation of the province of Turin reflects the average distribution of members at national level: in 2009, Cgil had 379,710 members, Cisl 296,509, and Uil had 139,429 members. In the past, the differences were even wider, with Cgil having almost the double number of members of Cisl. Uil is traditionally stronger in the southern regions.

14. A database of all territorial pacts was set up by the Department of Development Policies of the Ministry of Economy.

15. The interviews were semi-structured and aimed at reconstructing the union representatives' experiences of and contribution to the TPs. Questions would range from issues about the main tasks foreseen during their participation in the TPs to descriptions of the projects they engaged with; the roles they performed in the various phases of the TP; what they perceived as their main contribution to the TPs as trade union representatives; what their expectations were before engaging in the TP and to what extent were these met.

16. Italian Statistics Office Figures (2008).

17. For example, Riccone, “Programmazione negoziata e sviluppo locale”; Rinaldi, Patto territoriale; Vesan and Sparano, I partenariati per lo sviluppo locale.

18. Vesan and Sparano, L'istituzionalizzazione dei partenariati locali per lo sviluppo locale.

19. Little is known about the pacts and their actual achievements against set objectives. This has been attributed to the lack of systematic and uniform data on TPs.

20. Regini, Uncertain Boundaries, 124.

21. Although recent studies show that this is not always accurate, see, for example, Regalia, Galetto, and Tajani, “Osservazioni sulle relazioni industriali nei casi di contrattazione separata”.

22. Regini, Uncertain Boundaries, 120.