WORK–LIFE BALANCE AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN ITALY Open Access

It is impossible to entirely understand the issue of work–life balance in Italy without a brief description of its socio-economic environment, with particular regard to women's employment, welfare and the family culture. The most relevant characteristics of this environment are:

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  a low female participation in the labour market and a lack of part-time employment opportunities;

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  the unequal distribution of household and family chores within couples;

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  the rather insignificant part of overall welfare expenditure devoted to family services;

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  the increasing female immigrant workforce employed as housemaids; and

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  a very low fertility rate.

Up to recent years, the labour market in Italy was closely centred on the ‘male breadwinner model’ in which women, young people and atypical workers in general constitute a minority (Bettio and Villa 1997). More recently this situation has changed, and at present most young women enter into the labour market. Yet the employment rate of Italian women, while increasing, is still very low: with 47.7 per cent, Italy lies more than 15 points below the European average (Eurostat 2003). Part-time employment has, moreover, always been very scarce in Italy: in 2001 it was only 8.6 per cent (18 per cent for females) against that of 17.9 (34 per cent) which was the European average (Eurostat 2002). Although more recently the situation has changed somewhat, especially where new hiring is concerned, the lack of part-time jobs may be one of the reasons why a number of women with family responsibilities have still not entered the labour market, or give up their work when they cannot transform their full-time job into part-time after maternity. We should say, however, that a civil servant's working schedules are quite comfortable since most of them do not exceed 36 hours a week and are mainly scheduled in the morning (08:00–14:00 hours) and teachers’ schedules do not exceed 30 hours a week. This is obviously the main reason why in public administration and in public services most employees are women.

Many statistics show that Italian women still take most of the domestic work on their shoulders. A very noisy debate was originated by data distributed at the UN Conference in Beijing in 1995, highlighting that Italian women were the last in the world in the ranking of care-work distribution within couples. What is worse, in recent years the gender asymmetry in care work has not changed at all: the last Istat Indagine Multiscopo sulle Famiglie (survey on families of the Italian national institute of statistics) shows that 48.4 per cent of women in households with children aged up to 13, usually work (professional and care work) 60 hours a week (against 12 per cent of men in the same situation). In general, the female workload can be estimated as still six hours a week more than that of the male (ISTAT 2001).

The offer of services for child and elderly care is very scarce and expensive in Italy. The Italian welfare system has been described – in opposition to systems in the Northern countries – as ‘heavy in transfers and light in services’ (Esping Andersen 1995). In fact, according to a government commission on the welfare system situation, public family services represent only 3 per cent of total welfare expenditure (Relazione Commissione Onofri 1999). While schools for children from ages three to six cover the majority (98 per cent) of the demand coming from families, the service supply (public and private) for children aged up to three does not reach 10 per cent (CENSIS 2002) and it has not been balanced by the recent government measures to support the creation of in-company and private crèches. Besides this, in comparison with other European countries, prices paid by families for public crèches are the highest in Europe.¹ This shortfall in care services together with the scarcity of part-time jobs defines the so-called ‘Mediterranean model of female labour supply’, which is characterised by a weaker participation in the work force and a higher propensity to leave employed work in middle age (Esping Andersen 1990, 1999; Del Boca and Tanda 1996; Del Boca and Pasqua 2004).

On the other hand, welfare transfers to families have traditionally been allocated to the breadwinners, under the form of pensions or lay-off allowances. Benefits for parents have so far not received similar attention. The maternity legislation has been traditionally generous, assuring a good wage protection to mothers for the fairly long (five-month) compulsory maternity leave, while the new law on parental leave (Law 53/2000) introduces only small incentives for fathers, while the allowance remains rather low (30 per cent of pay) and, with few exceptions, is only provided until the child is three. The male's income frequently being higher, low paid or unpaid leave may have the unintended consequence of strengthening the male-breadwinner model, since mothers will be much more likely to exercise the right to parental leave (Bruning and Plantega 1999). And this is exactly what is happening now in Italy: according to INPS (Italian National Institute of Social Insurance) during 2002, in Lombardia – considered to be one of the most advanced regions in the country – only one father in 40 among the entitled took parental leave of any duration.

In this situation, a private solution is often the only one available in order to reconcile work and family life. Precious help for childcare and elderly care comes from relatives: in 1998 more than 61 per cent of households with children and 42 per cent of households with elderly to be cared for, used only the help of ‘relatives and/or friends’ (ISTAT 2001). The involved relative in this inter-generational solidarity is likely to be a woman. With regard to childcare, they are usually non-employed or early-retired grandmothers, who in the last decades without any clamour (and sociological consideration) have been, in Italy, probably the most important pillar for the work–life balance of their daughters and daughters-in-law. Yet, the increasing participation of women in the labour market means this number will disappear in the future.

When mothers and mothers-in-law are still part of the labour market, it may often happen that the only solution is the most censurable. Italy is now the country with one of the largest female immigrant workforces employed as full-time live-in housemaids, especially for elderly care (a considerable part of them may, moreover, not be working legally). This archaic kind of employment is having an important role in allowing the increasing participation of Italian women in the labour market (Reyneri 2002). Yet, it is also subjecting them to strong criticism by feminists: Jacqueline Andall (2000) argues that Italian women are becoming emancipated ‘inside’ the family rather than ‘from’ the family. We would rather say that a certain number of Italian women – as other working women of the First World who are faced by a strong male refusal to share domestic burden – ended by being the blameless cause of that contradictory phenomenon which has been called the ‘drain of care’ from the Third World (Ehrenreich and Hoschschild 2002).

Households still play a crucial role in the Italian economy. Being influenced by a traditional culture which puts great emphasis on the central role of the family in society, the overall welfare system in its origins was built around the family and up to now has been largely based on the family (Esping Andersen 1990). Despite the great ongoing social change, especially in terms of transformation of housewives into working women, Italian families still maintain two important economic tasks. The first is the protection of their young unemployed members, giving them economic help while any unemployment allowance is provided by state and keeping them at home until they become independent (often until their thirties). The second is to carry out most household and care work inside the family. The family therefore plays the role on the one hand of a ‘social buffer’ and on the other hand of free service provider. The protective role of the family and the gender asymmetry in care work have important implications for two characteristics of Italian society: that of the lowest birth rate in the world (see below) and of the widespread strategy among young people to remain inside the family for a long time and to put off marriage and the birth of a first child. Both these characteristics have a serious impact on the lives of women – either daughters or mothers – on their employment prospects, on their daily workloads and on work–life balancing strategies.

In a paradoxical way, considering the very central role held in Italy by the family, in the last decade it has been the country with the lowest birth and fertility rates. Despite the slight increase in last few years, in 2001 the Italian fertility rate was 1.25 children per woman of child-bearing age (only Spain, with 1.22, had a lower rate). The decreasing fertility rate in Italy was first associated with the difficulties in work–life balancing for new women entering the labour market. Now international data have shown that countries with a higher female participation rate also had a higher birth rate (OECD 2001), the Italian case – where the increase of female participation has gone hand in hand with the lowering fertility rate – probably requires some more explanation. Actually, many other variables are likely to be involved in the general picture influencing both women's participation in the labour market and parenthood decision-making, such as education, part-time job supply, provision of care services (Villa 2003). For instance, as far as education is concerned, we might say that a certain polarisation among working women can be observed in recent years: highly qualified women tend to remain in the workforce even when they have children, while less-qualified women are faced with a dry choice between working and childbirth (Reyneri 2002). Nevertheless, it is hard to predict how female employment and fertility will combine in coming years.

As we have seen above, in Italy, more than anywhere else, there is a complex relationship between societal culture, the welfare system and women's opportunities to enter (and to stay in) the labour market. Since all young girls now demand the right to enter the labour market, the traditional welfare system, based on a large production of services within the families and, in particular, on the important contribution of housewives to the economy, cannot survive any longer.

Yet no serious substitution is in sight. The well-known crisis in public finance makes it almost impossible to apply the Keynsian strategy followed by Northern countries 50 years ago to our own country, although some authors are persuaded that providing care services whilst creating more jobs for women would be feasible and useful at an economic level, in terms of social investment, as well as desirable at a social level (Esping Andersen 2004). Rather far from this kind of consideration, the current Italian government is managing the ongoing crisis of the welfare system solely under the aspect of a pensions reform and is relegating the issue of services-to-families to a matter of creating a synergy among public childcare, market services and the so-called ‘company welfare’, mainly consisting in crèches within firms (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali 2003).

A relevant step forward could be provided by significant change in distribution of care work within the families. Yet, although some change is occurring among younger generations, the redistribution process of care work between women and men seems to be advancing far more slowly than the redistribution of market work (Saraceno and Naldini 2001). Therefore, life for Italian women is still characterised by the so-called ‘dual presence’, since they are citizens of two worlds, that of the family and that of work (Balbo 1978; Saraceno 1991). Differently from working men, they maintain full-time responsibilities in each area, so the issue of work–life balance appears to be a private female problem rather than a real social problem. For this reason, at present most Italian working women face in solitude the challenge of keeping both the role of ‘home queen’ that strong family tradition has shaped on them (a sovereignty that some of them would surprisingly hold on to) and that of their professional fulfilment.

Work–life balance more and more takes on the shape of a systemic issue, contemporarily dealing with different interrelating systems: societal and family cultures, welfare systems, private service supply, labour market regulation, corporate cultures. As seen above, Italian women do not yet receive, either from their partners or from public care services, any significant support in caring. Are they likely to receive some help at the workplace, in terms of new ways of organisation of work, new scheduling, in-company caring services, leave and other benefits addressing parents? Will company Human Resource practices take care of their diversity? Will labour relations and collective bargaining provide a better balance in their life?

In Italy, most probably like anywhere else, women's presence in the labour market is especially concentrated in the service sectors, in a few high-segregated manufacturing occupations, in small businesses, in atypical and unregistered jobs. Except for public administration and banking which are rather ‘protected’ sectors, where high guarantees are still provided, women's position in the labour market and their working conditions tend to be more flexible and less protected than the male ones.

Despite the emerging polarisation among occupations in terms of qualification (Reyneri 2002), women's employment is persistently weaker:

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  The low-qualified majority of them are segregated in low-productivity service sectors such as retail, family services, call centres, tourism, cleaning, etc.; in these sectors unregistered and atypical jobs are widespread, like fixed-term contracts in tourism, part time in retail, agency work in call centre.

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  A high-qualified minority, mainly consisting of well-educated young women, are employed in full-time jobs in computer servicing, media, publishing and editorial services, internet, etc.; in these sectors freelance work is becoming more and more common.

From the point of view of gender equality and work–life balance issues, actually, both these parts of the labour market are far from reaching a fair regulation.

As for low-qualified female occupations, companies are unwilling to spontaneously introduce equal opportunity measures or whatever else might help mothers in their family responsibilities, since this workforce is easily substituted. Only in two specific sectors – retail and call centres – is something different happening in very recent times, where some WLB measures have been introduced in order to contrast the high turnover of mothers with small children.

As for the high-qualified occupations, companies usually still prefer males. For this reason, female employees are often the first to deny their family problems – or to try to privately solve them – in order to avoid discrimination in their career. Moreover, the current company culture does not recognise the fathers’ responsibilities in caring, discourages them and sometimes even laughs at fathers who take parental leave to stay with their children.

Although some authors maintain that employers that help their employees to balance their work with their lives see an improvement in their business performance (Scheibl and Dex 1998), the profitability for firms of family-friendly policies is still under discussion. A recent review on WLB economic literature suggests that slow growth of family-friendly practices in the face of growing need might be due to many different factors, as market failure associated with human capital, unemployment, asymmetric information and externalities (Hardy and Adnett 2002).

Employers going beyond strict economic considerations, are likely to be even less common in Italy than elsewhere, since most of the economy is characterised by very small or small businesses where human resource management culture is not so widespread. This kind of employer does not usually make use of sophisticated tools for retention and development of human resources. As for women workers, in most cases employers and managers of SMEs are simply engrossed in facing maternity leave substitutions and in worrying about the increasing absenteeism of working mothers. These workplaces are obviously the most at risk, because even transforming a full-time job into a part-time one or allowing a daily flexi-time may result in heavy costs for the business. Therefore post-maternity resignations are higher in small companies.

HRM practices are more frequently adopted by large companies. Even in this case, equal opportunities and work–life balance issues cannot be taken for granted. By the way, when innovative HRM tools have been adopted – i.e., allowing a greater autonomy in working hours to employees, introducing ‘management by objective’ system instead of a boss's strict supervision at work, changing career systems, taking into account an employee's private life and problems, etc., evidence from research shows that they had a positive influence both on gender equality and on reconciling work and family life for employees (Bombelli 2000).

While presenting results of research into the employment patterns of women with young children in five countries (Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, Great Britain and Japan), some authors point to the fact that in recent years trade unions have been active – either through bargaining collective agreements or campaigning for government policies – ‘in moving societies in the direction of shared breadwinning and shared parenthood’ (Gustafsson and Kenjoh 2004).

Actually, the current position of Italian unions towards workers’ family caring problems and, even more, towards equal role sharing seems not to be that advanced. In Italy, unions still seem to benefit the male breadwinner against working mothers. We could say in general that trade unions have shaped themselves on the male Fordist model, where wages and career rather than working hours or the quality of life are the most important bargaining issues. The trade-unionists work culture, moreover, is likely to be a typical ‘macho’ culture since a majority of them usually work very long hours, have late-evening meetings and consider their job the prominent activity in their life.

Anyhow, more than one objective difficulty certainly exists for unions in fully representing working women's issues. The structure of Italian collective bargaining provides the presence of two different bargaining levels that may operate jointly: the national industry-based labour contracts and the company-level agreements. Working hours, the organisation of work, flexible arrangements and other issues concerning work–life balance and the quality of working life are usually bargained at decentralised level. Whilst the bargaining coverage is very high as far as national industry-based contracts are considered, the coverage rate of decentralised collective bargaining is rather low, especially in businesses of up to ten employees, where a majority of women are concentrated: currently, only 10 per cent of total workers benefit from a decentralised collective agreement. In the most fragmented and female sectors – retail trade, hotels and restaurants, business services, cleaning, small and micro manufacturing undertakings – company-level bargaining has been formally replaced by a ‘territorial bargaining’ system that should group together several firms in the same sub-sector and allow unions to reach even those workers in very small undertakings. Yet, territorial bargaining has so far found many difficulties to be addressed and, when they have been addressed, bargaining has been still focussed predominantly on wages. Therefore, women's and caregivers’ needs are not likely to be adequately fulfilled through current collective bargaining.

It may be no accident that Italian women are not so willing to join unions. Over the last two decades Italian union membership has been steadily declining (from 49 per cent in 1980 to 35 per cent in 2000), due to the crisis in the stronghold of large factory workers, which was not balanced by a parallel increase in the new areas of work (office staff, small enterprises, the services sector) (Ebbinghaus and Visser 1999). The decline has been particularly evident, actually, in the retail trade and personal services sector, which are typical female sectors. The overall negative trend has been imputed to the lower amount of trade-union control legally and organisationally permitted in this area of small and very small firms and to the shorter duration of employment relationships stemming from the high mortality rate of small firms and to the increase of atypical jobs. Yet, according to some authors, this is also due to the greater weight in the labour force of categories which in Italy traditionally resist unionisation: women, young people, and the well-educated (Feltrin 1999). Women plainly feel that unions are unable to represent their needs through collective bargaining.

As seen above, the Italian case confirms the relevance of current debate on the opportunity of renewal and modernisation of unions in order to better meet the changed composition of workforce (Valkenburg 1995; Zoll 1995). As a matter of fact, unions still continue to operate from a ‘male, full-time, native-born worker’ (Hyman 1994) point of view. Historically, they ‘benefited the male breadwinner career to detriment of working mothers’ (Gustafsson and Kenjoh 2004). Yet, at present, the need to give women, young people, immigrants and other diverse groups a better representation in decision-making structures and amongst negotiators has been recognised as one of the most relevant challenges for unions in all Western countries (Waddington et al.1997; Dickens 2000) while, from a more specific feminist viewpoint, fighting the ‘active male resistance’ within trade-unions has been emphasised as a means to face union decline (Cockburn 1991). Likewise, collective bargaining has been mostly gender-blind so far. Collective agreements on equal opportunities or aimed at helping women combine work and family ‘remains very limited or indeed marginal’ (Kravaritou 1997), while another author warns against merely introducing ‘women's measures’ in existing bargaining agendas and underlines that measures which rather focus on the problems posed by organisation to both parents are more likely to ‘shake the existing gender order’ (Dickens 2000).

Anyway, from a wider point of view, we must consider that the non-universalistic, fragmented and changing nature of WLB interests is raising serious difficulties for unions’ traditional ways of bargaining. Caring strategies and, subsequently, WLB demands are very diverse among workers, depending on structural factors (number and age of children, family income, present working hours, public childcare supply, etc.), but also on very subjective ones, such as beliefs about childcare or the ideology of family and motherhood (Hattery 2001). Therefore, they are needs which are difficult to be rationalised, planned and reduced to collective norms. Nevertheless, leaving them to individualised labour relations may end up making mothers (and care-sharing fathers) even weaker on the labour market.

According to some IR and women's studies authors, one of the most important challenges for unions currently consists in designing different and more effective ways of representing and negotiating women's needs and interests (Cockburn 1991; Dickens 2000). Involving in their action ‘a wide range of stakeholders, including not only workers and employers but also local governments, services, carers, the cared-for and the whole society’ has been indicated as a possible way (European Foundation 2002). As a matter of fact, WLB interests are not just a workers’ affair, nor a company one. Care work is a wider social issue and it necessitates bargaining at a wider level. First of all, it requires a renegotiation of a ‘new moral order’ inside the family between men and women in order to better balance personal autonomy with caring for others (Gerson 1998). Then, at community level, it requires the implementation of a ‘new paradigm of work and family for women and men’ which puts the lives and the interests of people first (Friedan 1997). It necessitates a restructuring of the economy confronting the needs of families that cannot be ignored in a labour market where women now equal men in number and more and more men share the parenting responsibilities. Labour relations should open out at the level of the whole society, where a ‘new project of social citizenship’ should be established in order to reconcile company aims, workers’ aims and the aims of society (Muckenberger 1996). Trade unions could be the major actor of this new project for quality of life, putting together the rights of working caregivers and the rights of children and the other people being cared for.

Two different surveys (AA.VV. 1999; Ponzellini and Tempia 2003) have investigated measures aimed at fostering work and family balance that have been introduced in Italian companies during the 1990s, both through company collective agreements and through direct HR practices. Measures in this domain have been classified as follows:

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  flexible working hours;

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  in-company childcare and services to families;

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  extra leave, allowances and special rights for caregivers; and

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  aids to working parents’ careers.

A similar classification has been used in a recent international survey (OECD countries), where four main types of family-friendly arrangements have been defined: leave for family reason; change in work arrangements for family reason; practical help with childcare; provision of training and information (Evans 2001).

The following is a detailed description of these extra-statutory arrangements.

Flexible working-hours

Working-hour measures are certainly the main group of measures which were introduced by companies in order to better their employees’ work–life balance. In fact, in recent times flexible scheduling has become very common in Italian enterprises in order to face market competition and to fulfil productivity needs by means of new systems of production (such as just-in-time production). Yet, in some cases, this has given the opportunity for redesigning work organisation and the working hours of employees while also taking into account workers’ needs.

New working hours also based on employee preferences mainly consist of different forms of part-time work, such as half-a-day part time, week-end work, annualised part time. Part-time working is now rather wide spread in white collar environments (public administration, health care, banks and insurance, telephone companies, call centres) as well as in the fast-food and large-scale retail trades. The resistance of manufacturing companies to part-time is still a fact, since it adapts itself with some difficulty to production activities. Otherwise job-sharing schemes have been introduced in a few manufacturing contexts, both in metalwork and food sectors.

Daily flexi-time is also now quite common among white collars – both in public administration and in private jobs – whilst it meets organisational constraints in production activities and in front-line services which obviously require more rigid schedules.

In retail, the most interesting flexible-hours formula now being experienced is the so-called ‘isole-cassa’ system, a system whereby every group of check-out clerks (‘isola’) can self-manage their weekly shifts. The widely bargained ‘banks of hours’, a system allowing employees to save their overtime hours and to spend them when needed, has, on the other hand, not been as successful as was expected. The two main reasons are that people with family responsibilities usually do little overtime and that little autonomy is actually given to workers in order to make use of their own saved time.

Against all expectations, teleworking is now common among highly qualified men rather than among low-qualified women. In any case, as regards WLB practices, few interesting experiences of teleworking arrangements took place, especially aimed at mothers returning from maternity leave.

The ongoing experiments in ‘positive’ working-time change show that the time needs of workers can usually be satisfied even at zero cost to companies: as with many innovations, the only cost consists in the effort required to devise and introduce them. They show, as well, that certain categories of workers are willing to accept non-standard working hours if these enable them to reconcile some personal and family needs with work more satisfactorily than was the case with traditional working time schedules.

In-company childcare and services to families

At the beginning of the industrialisation process, large Italian companies – also including large public utilities – traditionally provided many services to employees, such as houses, nurseries, summer camps for children, entertainment and cheap tourist accommodation, etc. More recently, these ‘paternalistic’ aids to workers have been disappearing. Yet, in very recent times, a new flourishing of company crèches and baby-parking is ongoing, especially in some workplaces where women make up the majority of the workforce, such as call-centres, hospitals, insurance companies and, even more rarely, in manufacturing companies. Sometimes, an agreement exists with local government for the opening of the crèche to other families living in the area; and while only a few of them are free of charge, most of them are less expensive than the existing ones, either public or private. These services have probably been thought up above all as HR tools for retention of staff, in a situation where the excessively high turnover of young women of childbearing age can jeopardise corporate efficiency and quality of service. They may represent a social answer to the shortfall in public supply of childcare for children aged 0–3 years. Yet, only large companies can invest in providing them which is problematic in the Italian economy where small and micro enterprises are predominant. Besides, although company crèches usually do not formally exclude atypical workers, amongst whom many are women, obviously they are not the proper answer neither to contingent workers (they cannot change crèches every time they change workplace …) nor, for different reasons, to part-time workers.

Other kinds of services are slightly more widespread. Some of them consist of after-school activities or in-town summer camps for school children. Some other are aimed at supporting household chores, such as a company providing take-away meals for their employees. Some other services are targeted towards families with difficulties, such as counselling services for maternity and social and psychological assistance.

Extra leave, allowances and special rights for caregivers

These kinds of aid are very traditional, yet in recent times they have not been widespread. Grants for children's education and home-buying loans or loans for other relevant family expenses used to be rather common in the old, large Italian companies. Other kinds of common allowances to families consisted of integration to the maternity allowance provided by the law. In a few cases employees sent away on business are given a reimbursement for nursery costs (or baby-sitting or elderly care costs). Yet benefits and allowances, as in general are all the extra-wage measures, are less and less common.

Special rights are also recognised to employees with caring responsibilities, and these mainly consist in leave for various family problems, such as paternity leave, leave for the caring of sick, disabled or drug-addicted relatives and leave for death in the family. In a few cases, specific leave for assisting a child at nursery during the initial period of attendance is provided. Yet most leave is not paid.

Aids to working parents careers

Some kind of help is sometimes given to women or to parents of small children in order to avoid risk of marginalisation after career breaks due to maternity or parental leave. Many companies have established the right to come back to the same position held before leave and to benefit from paid training for skill updating. A few others have introduced specific measures in order to keep employees in touch during their leave, through newsletters, e-mail information about training opportunities or calls for internal job posting and promotions. A very few companies run an in-house service for legal and contractual advice to mothers and fathers. Despite being interesting, the measures taken to support the careers of caregiver employees are still rare, in so far as they require companies to have a certain ‘diversity management’ culture and particular sensitivity to social issues.

Very relevant similarities can be observed between results of these Italian surveys and those coming from international studies, particularly from a qualitative point of view. With regard to types of measures being implemented, data gathered also in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States show that working-hours arrangements are everywhere the most common practice, while extra family leave or in-company crèches are more rarely mentioned. Moreover, evidence from both Italian and international survey shows that these arrangements are more common in large companies and public services, in those firms where measures of equal opportunity have been already implemented and/or where human resource management practices are more widespread. Another, rather surprising, common output concerns the scarce evidence of significant growth over time in family-friendly company arrangements being observed both in the Italian case and in the international survey (OECD 2001).

Italian survey results are also consistent with European industrial relations literature. A recent review of articles of the national centres of the European Industrial Relation Observatory underlines that new forms of work organisation and working time flexibility, together with special leave, are ‘in the core of industrial relations’ in most European countries, while other work–life arrangements – such as agreements for pregnant workers, childcare and elderly support – are less considered (Eiro 2002).

Anyway, as for the spread of these arrangements, we have to consider that the measures highlighted by the two Italian surveys, while quite interesting and even amazing at a qualitative level, are still of little relevance from a quantitative point of view. Many among them are still rather isolated experiences, provided by a few, open-minded employers. They matter simply as ‘best practices’. An estimate has been made that not more than 3.5 per cent of private companies have negotiated a collective agreement during the period, or introduced any WLB measure (Ponzellini and Tempia 2003), which may be considered a signal that Italian social partners are not sensitive enough to this problem. Therefore, it is quite surprising that the Second European Survey on Working Conditions of the Dublin European Foundation rates Italy (in 1995–1996) amongst the top five countries for extra-statutory employer-provided family-friendly practices, taking into account two specific factors: extra family leave and company provision/subsidies for childcare (European Foundation 1997). The correct explanation for this optimistic evaluation may come from an OECD analysis of the same data, when it concludes that ‘firms in countries with high levels of statutory provision tend to rely almost entirely on that provision’, while where national provision is low – this is the Italian case, especially for public childcare – extra-statutory provision is somewhat higher but ‘firms do not appear to have filled the gap’ (OECD 2001).

Also, in-depth company case studies show relevant difficulties and obstacles in collective bargaining of work–life arrangements, coming both from trade unions and employers.

As for trade unions, collective bargaining failure may firstly depend on unions’ being less present precisely where there are more women: in atypical jobs and in small and micro undertakings. By the way, this might also be a reason for unions being little aware of work–life balance problems. Secondly, old prejudices towards any kind of non-standard employment (i.e., part-time working and teleworking) and individualised working conditions – such as individualised hours – still persist in union work culture. As a matter of fact, wages are still the central issue for trade unions, while quality of working life, work–family reconciliation and the planning of social times are not issues so far featuring on union agendas. A reason might be that workers’ needs for a better life are not universalistic demands. They are quite different, in fact, as far as life aspects involved and solutions required, they may vary across gender, across groups, across ages and they may even raise conflicts among workers. Therefore it is rather difficult to collectively represent and bargain for them.

As for employers, evidence from research shows that most of them are more aware of costs than of potential benefits (improvement of morale and commitment, reduction of absence, better retention rates) by their paying more attention to the work–life balance of their employees. Furthermore, most companies appear to resist cultural and organisational innovation that might guarantee employees a better quality of life. Many constraints still seem to exist to a wider propagation of part-time work, teleworking and other flexible schemes within business, despite their low cost or even the benefits coming from their implementation. One of these is the continuing reluctance to innovate personnel evaluation systems by transforming working-time-based control into a performance-based one, a transformation which could make life easier for employees by giving them more autonomy over working hours.

Nevertheless, research also shows that in a few companies the human resource practices – and WLB arrangements amongst them – appear to have quite a relevant role. Although the majority of new family friendly arrangements have been collectively bargained with unions, some interesting practices (i.e., new company crèches) rather than coming from union initiatives, actually seem to originate from businesses. Large multinational companies, utilities and public services and a few especially locally rooted national companies are taking the most active part in this field. Anyway, these companies appear to be moved by different aims and interests. Three different approaches have been singled out. In the first group – the ‘pragmatic’ approach – WLB measures (especially part time work, self-managing of working shifts, teleworking arrangements, crèches, etc.) are clearly aimed at a wider control of the internal labour market and at a reduction of the personnel turn-over and absenteeism. In the second group – the ‘social responsibility’ approach – WLB measures (in particular family-oriented traditional benefits like crèches and other open-to-community services) are driven either by the purpose of a wider participation in the community life or by the culture of corporate social responsibility. While a few other companies – which can be classified under the ‘marketing’ approach – consider that having a family-friendly image may be a means for reaching better business goals: this is, for example, the case of companies producing baby-care goods which are usually willing to experiment any kind of family-friendly arrangements (Ponzellini and Tempia 2003).

The Italian work–life balance system keeps some typical characteristic of the Mediterranean countries – low opportunities for part-time working, lack of public childcare, family leave provision which are still inadequate to effectively promote an equal sharing of care work – so preventing from a speed decline in the male breadwinner model (Figart and Mutari 2000; Hardy and Adnett 2002).

On the other hand, the Italian employment regulation system rests on collective bargaining rather than on legal regulation. That is the reason why, in addition to a medium-low level of WLB statutory provision, a certain number of bargained arrangements exist at company level helping parents to better balance their work with family life. Unfortunately they are not enough to fill the gap with countries having high welfare provision (like Nordic countries) and to ensure women a full participation to paid work and equitably shared care work.

Many constraints still affect industrial relations and social partners’ behaviour in this field. Employers resist cultural and organisational change. Moreover, they are not aware about potential benefits to their business coming from a more family-friendly human resource management. On the other hand, unions still continue to operate from a ‘male’ point of view. When facing work–life balance needs, they tend to emphasise on protection of mothers rather than on changing organisation of work for both parents and pay scarce attention to measures enhancing the share of caring responsibilities.

Therefore, some change in industrial relations appears necessary. The important role played by collective bargaining in the employment regulation in Italy may represent a chance for the Italian case, since a good WLB system, in order to match collective representation and fragmented interests, often requires local enforcement and specific articulation of centrally formulated rules and provision which collective bargaining might provide for. Yet, local enforcement of statutory regulation and provision (i.e., articulated rules for part time working, flexible working and family leave as well as local integration to public childcare) requires more decentralised bargaining structure and social dialogue. Specific norms and arrangements might be negotiated both through already existing company-level collective agreements in large firms and through new experiences of territorial-level bargaining, better suiting the small size of most Italian firms. Moreover, as a WLB system contemporarily depends on statutory provision, national and local service policies and company family-friendly arrangements, the new experiences of social dialogue at decentralised level now ongoing in Italy (‘territorial pacts’) might be an interesting direction to take; especially when involving not only employers and unions but also the wider range of social actors at community level – families, employers, unions, local government, services, caregivers and the cared-for – who share the issue of care work. For unions and the industrial relations system might be the right opportunity to initiate a renewal process. Otherwise, they – without women, without working caregivers – may come up against a severe decline.

Anna M. Ponzellini Sociologist, is research director at Fondazione R. Pietro Seveso and Professor in Industrial Relations at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests include industrial relations and labour market issues, pay systems, working time and the organisation of work, equal opportunities and work–life balance, the quality of working life. She is author or co-author of several books and articles: Ponzellini, A. M. and Treu, T. (eds) (1994) Servizi pubblici, privatizzazione e relazioni industriali in Europa; Angeli, F., Piazza, M., Ponzellini, A. M. and Provenzano, E. (1999) Riprogettare il tempo, Roma: E.L.; Ponzellini, A. M. and Provenzano, E. (2001) ‘The services sector in Italy. Towards a more inclusive and flexible labour market’, in J. E. Dolvik (ed.), At Your Service. Comparative Perspectives on Employment and Labour Relations in the European Service Sectors. Bruxelles: European University Press; Ponzellini, A. M. and Tempia, A. (2003) Quando il lavoro è amico. Roma: E.L.; Gold, M. (ed.) (2003) ‘Worker participation in bargaining on working-time in Italy’, New Frontiers of Democratic Participation. London: Ashgate; Bordogna, L. and Ponzellini, A. M. (2004) Qualità del lavoro e qualità del servizio negli ospedali in Italia e in Francia. Roma: Carocci.