Culpepper, p. 8
devaluation to compensate for high wage increases, thus increasing the relative costs of
the system for them. In June 1989, the peak association of Italian employers
(Confindustria) publicly signaled to unions and government official its intent to abandon
the scala mobile.
among the three concerned collective actors in Italy: employers, unions, and the
government. After the threat of government intervention, the employers’ association and
unions agreed to put off the cancellation of the wage escalator until the following year. In
July, 1990, the social partners signed an agreement that foresaw the termination of the
scala mobile at the end of December, 2001, but the unions viewed that agreement as a
temporary halt to the system, not its demise. The decisive agreement on the permanent
end of the scala mobile was signed in July 1992, where the head of the government
threatened to resign if agreement was not reached (Mania and Orioli 1993: 24). That
agreement included a one-year freeze in salaries and a moratorium on firm-level
bargaining. One year later, an agreement signed on July 3 by employers and unions
officially established a new system of wage setting institutions, in which national wage
bargaining was strengthened and new forms of workplace representation at the firm level
were adopted.
The intellectual puzzle of institutional change in Italian wage bargaining is why
the unions accepted the abolition of the scala mobile and the adoption of centralized
The are currently two prevailing interpretations of the evolution of union
3
The scala mobile was formally renewed by periodic agreement between employers associations and
unions; thus, one actor could (in theory) fail to renew it at any time.
4
Sofia Perez (2000) has written persuasively about the reasons Italian employers at the end of the 1980s
began to favor greater centralization of wage bargaining to control the growth of public sector wages. Perez
also notes that, by contrast, the motivation of unions “in the return to national bargaining is harder to
understand” (2000: 452).
Convention