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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2014

The Italian National Debt crisis, just another argument to push towards territorial fragmentation?

Résumé

The Eurozone debt crisis and austerity measures have put public authorities under strong pressure. Facing significant financial resources' reduction, the Lombardy regional authority has sought to use the European Social Funds (ESF) for occupied workers training, in cooperation with the Italian Fondi Paritetici Inteprofessionali (FPI), that are Labour Capital joint management commissions. FPI collect and mutualize the employers' compulsory training taxes, and implement training projects. These collective actors contribute to the regulation of the labor market in a private manner. The analysis of this cooperation between private and public actors of regulation through the case of ESF is threefold. First, it assesses the theoretical implications of Putnam's legacy for researches on public-private partnerships in Italian regions. Second, the very argument of regional differentiation is assessed for the case of adult education. On the one hand, the fragmentation argument is confirmed. Lombardy experiences much better rates of employers' membership in the FPI, than other parts of the country. Yet, on the other hand, when it seeks to share ESF with these FPI, the regional council services face a mitigated reception. To understand that paradox, pinpointing the contradiction between ESF general skills ambition and employers' specific skills demands is insufficient. The third argument developed in the article is that other variables need to be taken into account. To do so, literature on the tensions surrounding logics of membership in business associations is mobilized, together with scholarship on the strategic usages of Europe. Eventually, the Lombardy case study is compared with France. It allows identifying common trends in the practices of FPI facing EU norms: avoidance; inertia through strategic usages and reframing; or adoption. The probability to develop one or the other trend depends on the status of the training tax, alternatively considered as a continuation of employees' wages or as a part of employers' investment. That intermediary variable is in turn explained by a set of three variables that shape further research: the degree of competition amongst business associations and FPI; the skills strategies stemming from sector collective bargaining; the discourses held by interviewees on employers' autonomy.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00962595, version 1 (21-03-2014)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00962595 , version 1

Citer

Josua Gräbener. The Italian National Debt crisis, just another argument to push towards territorial fragmentation?: Some (contradictory) evidence from Lombardy's lifelong learning policy. The Debt Crisis in the Eurozone: social impacts, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp.56-82, 2014. ⟨halshs-00962595⟩
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