Agenda Monti is the electoral programme of the Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti for the next national election, due in 2013 spring. In this paper we discuss a specific issue of this Agenda: Performance Related Pay. We argue that the concept of flexible wage through firm level bargaining is a very conservative one and present several limitations in order to pursue increases in labour productivity. The idea of the project does not consider at all the preeminent role of national level of bargaining activity, focusing only on decentralized negotiations at firm level without considering that less than 30% of the firms are covered by this level of bargaining between trade unions and employers associations. In addition, suggest to use fiscal advantages for flexible wages to favour the diffusion of decentralized bargaining, without introducing any monitoring procedures to decrease the risk of “cosmetic” contracts. Finally, the link between wages and firm performance is based only on productivity or profitability indicators, without taking into account any form of employees and trade unions involvement in the work organizations, innovations in technology and organizations realms, and decisions making process within the firm, excluding the role of participation, as suggested by the more recent managerial and business literature and also by the well known classical economic literature.
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