This paper was presented at the international seminar The social partners and the welfare state: challenges and opportunities (Stockholm University, 7-8 March 2019), and will be published in the conference proceedings.
This paper offers a critical overview of the involvement of the social partners in the development of the Italian welfare state. The role taken on by the social partners in the Italian welfare system is considered a significant driving force for the development of collective bargaining at its different levels. Contractual social security is a dynamic and articulated reality in Italy, and it certainly contributes to the overall upkeep of the Italian system of industrial relations as much as to the qualitative and quantitative increase of the entire supply of social protection for workers. At the same time, the highly unequal spreading of access to forms of supplementary pensions and even more to corporate welfare, broadly speaking, with persistent discrepancies between strong or weak areas of the labour market, highlights all the limits of a system, which is typically the Italian one, that is not rooted to a strong base of universal public social protection schemes.