White Collar
Amedeo Modigliani, “Portait of Paul Guillaume,” 1916
As a wannabe welfare state, Italy has very high labor costs. Employers, when they need to make an “eyeball” estimate, use as a rule of thumb that the actual expense of employing anyone is at least twice his or her salary.
This understates the problem, both because the direct cash cost is often in fact greater than that and because it ignores the amazing administrative burden associated with having employees – not to mention having to treat them decently…
There is though a way around all of this: election to Parliament. A recent investigation has shown that of the assistants to the 635 members of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, only 54 are not being paid “off the books.” When asked about this, the “Minister for Social Solidarity”, Mr. Paolo Ferrero, found it “inappropriate” to comment on parliamentary affairs “since I’m a member of Government.”
These staffers are called “porta borse” – “bag carriers” – in Italian. We would say, “flunkies”. They are hugely exploited, often earn well under the minimum wage and do without paid vacations or standard health care. “Upper Italy” knows a press aide to a Minister who was ordered to report for work – or be fired – even though she was being treated for a case of pneumonia.
All of this is of course technically illegal according to laws passed by, ahm, Parliament. Happily, parliamentary immunity as it is structured here means these laws are in practice applicable only to other people.
On the whole, the pitifully exploited state of the bag carriers attracts no sympathy whatever in Italy, because it is understood that they are in politics out of choice and ambition – and, further, that if they are at all clever with their fingers they will find a way to get “something out of it.”
The expectation that employees “steal their pay” is not peculiar to Italy, but may be unfamiliar to the Anglo-Saxon mind-set. It might be thought of as being distantly related to the idea of waiters paid at the minimum wage who are then expected to actually live off their tips.
Beyond parliamentary staffers finding a way to get by through petty influence peddling – and in the hope of the later granting of a sinecure in the form of a permanent and well-paid job in the State Administration – the idea is hardly alien to many other areas of Italian employment.
It is understood, for instance, that the buyers in the purchasing offices of large companies and major retail chains may find ways to “round off” their pay packet in situations involving the acceptance of “stecche” – “kickbacks” – from certain suppliers. Their conditions of employment may reflect this understanding. The granting of contracts to advertising agencies, as a further instance, or for the purchase of any other good or service whose value is largely a matter of opinion, is often subject to a “five percent solution.”
An associate of Upper Italy recalls his negotiations over a job offer with the Head of Personnel for a large Italian company during which he was told not to insist overmuch on salary issues since the position offered access to financial information that would have allowed him to earn as much as he wanted “from insider trading.” To be fair, insider trading had not yet been formally outlawed in Italy when that offer was made…
Readers who are feeling anything like a sense of superiority at this point might want to think again. They might remember that when the owner of a company, as opposed to an employee, takes something back from a supplier it is called a “discount” rather than a “bribe”.
Italy has been slower than other countries in the West to fully accept the white collar mentality, but it is in this respect only mildly outside of the Western mainstream. The sale of bishoprics in the English tradition, for example, resulted in the delivery to the lucky clergyman of what was known as a “living” – and precisely for the reason that he was expected to make his living off of it.
Economic rationality might further lead us to wonder what in the hell American congressmen are thinking when they spend millions of dollars – sometimes of their own – to win a seat in the House.
We have already discussed this issue in a somewhat different way (here)