Abstract

As a result of an examination of the employment policies adopted by Mr Berlusconi's Government, this essay detects a peculiar element of duplicity as their unifying trait. The analysis takes into account four keywords (Europe, modernization, collective bargaining, joint regulation), evoking as many fields where the distance between professed aims and real objectives is clearly recognizable. The prospects of a revival of joint regulation practices and, more generally, of the industrial relations system are focused on in the last section, trade union democracy being identified as the fundamental knot to be untied.