An employment contract signed in Italy is difficult to apply in another EU country and vice versa. The difficulty of comparing the agreements is one of the reasons that slows down labour mobility in Europe, which is still very low (0.5% of the population, equal to 1.1 million according to the latest Eurostat data).  

Precisely to meet this need, the CNEL has joined the ColBar-Europe project, which provides for the comparison of the contracts in force in Italy with those adopted in other EU countries contained in the database of the Dutch foundation Wageindicator, which takes care of the collection, the in-depth analysis of the contents and codification of nearly 800 collective agreements of the public and private sectors of 23 EU countries and, to a lesser extent, transnational agreements.  

The CNEL has already entered and compared about 80 NCLAs and it emerged that the Italian ones are much more advanced than the agreements of other EU countries in the social security regulations, in the discipline of welfare and in the private sector, but also in the training, even if there there are significant differences between sectors and their implementation is often disregarded. Our NCLAs of the credit and engineering sectors are among the most advanced.  

The project, funded by the social dialogue program, of which the University of Amsterdam is the leader and of which the CNEL is a member, together with the CELSI research institute in Bratislava, is developed in the context of a wider line of research that started 5 years ago.

The basic idea of ​​the activity that this body carries out is the sharing of the contents of collective bargaining, through the publication of the texts (particularly interesting in countries that do not have a contract archive) and the related reading schemes, with the ambition to provide operators with a way to better understand and compare the clauses and contractual provisions between companies, sectors and countries.  

"Workers who move across Europe from one country to another through the Wageindicator platform will immediately have the perception of what their rights are, their wages, their holidays, their illness in each individual country and therefore also the Italian contracts will be visible to everyone, workers and companies - states CNEL Councilor Manola Cavallini - At the same time, this project put in field by the CNEL is very important because it allows us to have a comparative analysis of contractual institutions in all countries where the bargaining is developed. This articulated and complex work was made possible thanks to the data of the National Contract Archive at CNEL, one of the largest and most complete international contract databases. Without the archive, everything would have been more difficult. "

Watch the interview with CNEL Councilor Manola Cavallini