Premier Matteo Renzi's flagship
Jobs Act freeing up Italy's rigid labour market while raising
rights and safeguards for the precarious was set to pass a key
confidence test in the Senate Wednesday night.
The vote was seen as a foregone conclusion given that a
dissenting group from inside Renzi's Democratic Party (PD) had
already announced they would be voting to keep the government
alive, despite their misgivings about the reform's scaling back
a historic job-protection provision - Article 18 of the Workers'
Statute - seen as a sacred cow by critics but jealously guarded
by leftists and their union allies.
After a 40-year wait for labour reforms in Italy "we will
bring home the results we said we would", Renzi said after a
European Union summit on employment earlier in the day.
Meanwhile the Jobs Act, which will now move to the Lower
House, garnered an array of support at the EU summit on jobs in
Milan.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the Jobs Act was
"an important step" towards "eliminating barriers" in the
Italian labour market.
French President Francois Hollande noted that Italy, with a
raft of moves including the Jobs Act, was "pushing forward with
modernisation" which his country aspires to also.
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso also
congratulated Renzi for a reform that aims to make the Italian
business climate more welcoming for overseas investors.
Barroso called the act "an important reform that can have
great impact on the competitiveness of the Italian economy".
And European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said
Renzi's planned labour-market reforms were "very good".
Van Rompuy said that the labour market "must overcome the
growing gap between the haves and have-nots".
"This dualism in the job market explains the sharp growth
of unemployment in several countries", Rompuy said, adding that
"the weakest fall first" when crisis hits.
Renzi, who is aiming to exchange structural reforms with
some wiggle room in EU pacts for budgetary pump-priming,
reiterated that "Italy will only be credible once it has
implemented reforms".
Shortly before the confidence test, Labour Minister
Giuliano Poletti said the Jobs Act changes will "reduce
precariousness for workers and give certainty to business" by
eliminating the worst sort of temporary contracts that have
fostered abuse.
PD dissenters said that although some last-minute
amendments to the act were "welcome," these were "still not
enough" to meet the demands of the 35 PD members opposed to the
act as it stood before Wednesday's vote.
Still, they would support the act in the confidence vote,
said Maria Cecilia Guerra, speaking for the PD minority that
included 26 Senators and nine members of the House.
Poletti said the act will definitively scrap the
possibility of a worker being rehired after being sacked for
economic reasons.
He made this clear while describing the mounting safeguards
which new temporary hires would get in the Act, reducing the
so-called apartheid between precarious and steady workers.
The amendments include reinstatement for workers wrongly
fired for disciplinary reasons and those discriminated against -
particularly in serious cases, Poletti said.
"We are aiming to change a very serious situation," Poletti
said.
Renzi was confident of overcoming internal dissent with the
confidence vote.
Article 18 of the 1970 Workers' Statute protects workers in
companies with 15 or more workers from being sacked without just
cause.
The article has been blamed for companies' reluctance to
hire long-term workers and for foreign investors' uncertainty
about putting money into Italy.
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