The talks between Telecom Italia and the Trade Unions during which the company proposed the text of an agreement aimed at revitalising the Group's Caring division, through significant interventions to simplify processes, optimise service and make more effective use of internal resources, ended yesterday.
The text, if accepted, will allow the company to overcome the project to spin-off of the Caring Division specified in the agreement signed by the Trade Unions in 2013, and to maintain operations at 39 of the 52 regional offices, closure of which had been decided in the 2013 agreement with the trade unions, with transfer of the personnel to nearby premises.
The text of the new agreement proposed by the company is the fruit of lengthy negotiations with the trade unions in which the company covered all the issues of a sector, namely Caring, that is experiencing a deep crisis at national level. After 6 months of negotiations, in the absence of the complete approval of the Trade Unions due to the sole opposition of Slc-Cgil, it has been decided that the text will be subject to a referendum of the employees of the Caring Services Division by 20 December next.
The company hopes that through the referendum of the workers a long and ramified phase of negotiation can be concluded positively, allowing Telecom Italia to shelve the spin-off proposal, and revitalise the Caring division.
The initiative is therefore coherent with the turn around policy of the company, since its principal objective is the stabilisation of the work in the call centers and long term sustainability within the Group.
So the project aims to guarantee to the Caring internal services the possibility of differentiating themselves from those offered by the market in outsourcing.
In particular, Telecom Italia intends to introduce a new "Skills Cloud" model, which will allow the skills and individual capacities of workers to be recorded, and the routing of customer requests to the operator with the most experience and knowledge of each issue. The aim is to achieve higher and higher levels of customer satisfaction and service quality.
The new model, provides, within the context of the regulations laid down in article 4 of the Statute of Labourers and in full compliance with the rights and dignity of the individual, an innovative approach for our country in the use of technologies, in order to meet customer needs more effectively.
The individual knowledge of skills will allow the company to establish targeted training pathways to improve the specific capabilities and skills of the worker and re-employ excess personnel.
The project also envisages the conversion of 100 part-time jobs to full-time jobs, and the award of a one-off payment of 200 euros to the 9000 plus employees of the Caring Services Division of Telecom Italia.
If the company proposal should be rejected by the workers, the company will continue to pursue its objective of creating economic stability for the Caring sector, as yet unrealised, by implementing the agreement already signed in March 2013.
Rome, 02 December 2014
