The Social Partners in the Welfare System in Italy: From Coordination to Fragmentation

This article offers a critical overview of the role of the social partners in the development of the Italian welfare system. The involvement of the social partners in collective bargaining at various levels is a significant driving force for the development of welfare programmes. Social security measures laid down by collective bargaining are a significant feature in Italy, contributing to the stability of the Italian industrial relations system and to the qualitative and quantitative strengthening of social protection for workers. However, unequal access to supplementary pensions, and even more to company-level welfare, with persistent discrepancies between strong and weak sectors of the labour market, is one of the most significant limits of the Italian model. Company-level welfare may be seen as a key element in the fragmentation resulting from the interaction between legal sources and collective bargaining, providing a range of services for specific groups of workers, by means of national and company-level agreements. It is argued that the occupational welfare strategy accentuates the differences in the productive system of the country, along territorial, company size and sectoral lines.