Introduction

The regulation of labour in contemporary Italy has rested, since the post-war period, on a complex and variegated set of laws and collective agreements that have stacked up in time, making any attempt at systematisation extremely difficult. In this chapter, we will try to outline their evolution, following the development of labour flexibility policies, the regulations that have broadened the range of non-standard contracts. As a way of portraying Italy's regulation on a comparative backcloth, labour market policy developments occurring in Germany, Spain and Japan over the past 20 years or so will also be analysed in some detail.

In what follows, we will distinguish three different phases in the evolution of labour flexibilisation policies since Italy became a republic in 1946: the first phase, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s; the second phase, which roughly lasted until the end of the 1980s; and the third phase, which began in the early 1990s and is still ongoing.

The protective model of the golden age

In the first three decades after the end of the Second World War, a specific model regulating labour relationships took shape and became consolidated. It was characterised by a ‘protective’ approach, aimed at guaranteeing labour relationships, essentially understood as full-time and open-ended, and their stability through time. However, the promotion of the principle of labour stability was fully achieved in Italian law only in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Based on the civil code of 1865, in pre-fascist Italy it was forbidden to establish open-ended labour relationships, by virtue of the liberal principle of freedom and non-perpetuity of obligatory ties. Only towards the end of the fascist period, with the new civil code of 1942, were open-ended labour contracts legitimated, acknowledging the existence of a situation already well-established in practice. Since the early 1900s, in fact, open-ended work relationships had been rather widespread, as entrepreneurs needed to avail themselves of loyal labourers permanently integrated in the production processes. Nevertheless, the 1942 civil code also granted complete freedom in dismissing workers without any justification.

Between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, Italy went through a phase of fast economic growth, also characterised by deep changes in its production system. In the second half of the 1950s, agriculture was overtaken by the industrial sector as the primary employment provider.