Salaries are increasing more than inflation, but almost 7 million workers are still awaiting contract renewal and non-EU trade is decreasing. Istat today took stock of wages and exports. And in the meantime, worrying cuts to the automotive sector, already in crisis, and large funding for Defense emerge from the Maneuver.
Purchasing power is slowly starting to grow again, but the situation remains critical for around 6.9 million Italian workers awaiting contract renewal. At the end of September, almost 53% of Italian employees were waiting for a salary update which is slow in arriving, with an average waiting time of around 18.3 months for expired contracts. Compared to a year earlier, this period dropped dramatically from 32.2 months, a sign that contract negotiations have made some progress. Despite the slowness in renewals, Istat detects a positive signal on the wages front. In the third quarter of 2024, contract wages increased more than inflation, with the increase outpacing the consumer price index by about two percentage points. Sectors such as credit and insurance (+11%) and metalworking (+6.4%) drove the growth, while public administration employees still see very small increases (+1.6%).
Istat also detects worrying signs on the export front to non-EU countrieswith a reduction of 1.9% in the third quarter of 2024 compared to the previous period, driven by lower exports of energy (-48.6%) and capital goods (-6.7%). This decline in exports, although slight compared to the worrying numbers of previous months, still translates into an annual decline of 2%. The lower sales to strategic markets such as the United States (-13.4%) and Japan (-12.3%) make us reflect on the urgency of stimulating the competitiveness of Italian companies on an international scale. On the import front, however, the contraction was 6.2%, largely caused by the reduction in energy purchases, a dynamic which however contributes to improving Italy’s trade balance with non-EU countries, now positive for over 3.6 billion euros.
In the meantime, a modification to the Fund for the automotive sector appears in the Budgetdrastically reduced by 4.6 billion euros, 80% of the overall budget. A hard blow for an already struggling sectorwhich recorded a 30% drop in production in the first nine months of the year. The companies and trade unions in the sector immediately mobilised, defining this cut as a “bolt from the blue” which goes in the opposite direction compared to the incentives for the ecological and technological transition. The government has turned these funds to the Defense sector, with a refinancing of 2.5 billion per year, for a total of 34 billion euros by 2039 (15 by 2030). Part of these funds will go to renew peacekeeping missions and support the aerospace and maritime defense industry. According to unions and entrepreneurs in the automotive sector, this choice undermines years of collaboration with the government for the relaunch of the entire sector and could lead to the loss of thousands of jobs in the coming years.
