The unions are most active in advance of the renewal of a collective labour agreement for a given industry. The agreement is usually renegotiated every three years. After the agreement has been negotiated there usually ensues a period of relative peace, unless the unions call on the workers to make demands on national issues such as better housing, schools, cost of living or unem-ployment.
Each industry has a collective agreement which stipulates minimum wage and pay scales. Except in the most depressed areas, very little labour would be available at this minimum wage. No statistics are available on average wages and salaries in industry.
From 1975 until December 1991, there was an automatic indexing mechanism for workers' pay based on the cost of living, in the form of compensation for a high cost of living or "sliding scale". Under the terms of an agreement drawn up in July 1992 between the Ministry of Labour and the employers' and trade union organisations on the subject of labour costs, this automatic mech-anism has been definitively suspended and the social partners have been requested to determine wage adjustments by means of collective agreements.
All employees in Italy are entitled to an additional month's remuneration (the so-called thirteenth month) payable in December. Furthermore, the collective agreements provide for additional pay-ments for some enterprises. For example, in banking, monthly salaries are paid sixteen times in a year and, in the petroleum industry, fifteen times. In commerce, a fourteenth monthly salary is payable in June of each year. In addition, on leaving the employment of a firm for any reason, an employee must be paid a termination of employment allowance.
Services performed over and above the hours stipulated in the contract constitute overtime, which is remunerated at a more generous rate than normal hours. The amount of this increase is fixed by collective agreement and depends on the category of the overtime (during the day, at night, on public holidays), which is also defined in collective agreements. Finally, the Ciampi Protocol on labour costs (an agreement reached between the government and trade unions in July 1994) should be mentioned. It contains clauses which (in this section) represent agreements between the social partners on the following issues: parties to the contract, duration of contract, content of contract, agreed holiday pay and level of contract (national or company level; the latter case is related to company performance on the basis of a range of parameters: productivity, value added and improvement of services).
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