Di prossima pubblicazione.

The paper argues that the absence of clear rules and the weakness of the self regulation by the social parties reduces the effectiveness of industrial relations and their capacity to meet the present social and economic challenges.
It indicates the necessity of well defined rules on the criteria of representativeness of the social parties, unions and employers associations, and on the perimeters of national collective agreements. Both are prerequisites for putting order in the industrial relations system and for recognising general binding effects to the wage contents of these agreements. These effects which are common to the agreements of many European countries are decisive in order to fight the high rate of evasion of the Italian agreements, and confine the legal minimum wage to a residual function. While the criteria of representativeness can be fixed directly by the law, even though taking into account the indications of the parties, the definitions by law of the contractual perimeters poses difficult problems of constitutionality as proved also by the German experience. The paper proposes to set up institutional procedures between the parties with the intervention as conciliator arbiter of a third party with the task of identifying and adjourning the contractual perimeters most suitable to the variable economic sectors.