Break up to Get Back Together: The Impact of Unionisation Through Innovative Service Provision on Union Membership and Industrial Relations. Country Report: Italy

The issue of the renewal of union membership has been at the heart of the debate on industrial relations for many years. Among the possible strategies for revitalising collective action, the literature has mainly focused on organising; less attention has been paid to servicing. Servicing goes beyond the supply of individual goods as a form of "selective incentives" to join the unions. Instead, it is a strategy based on the supply of services, which aims to bring both workers who are most distant from the unions and those who are located in a marginal position or outside the labour market. Unlike organising, in which the renewal of membership is pursued through the creation of new communities of worker-activists, the rationale of servicing is to increase the perceived usefulness of membership in the union. This work presents the results of the research conducted by CISL, the University of Florence, and the Tarantelli Foundation in Italy. The research was divided into two phases. The first phase focused on exploring membership renewal strategies at the confederal level which included the supply of services. The second phase concerned five in-depth local and national case studies through the use of a mixed methods, including the conduction of semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and a web survey. The case studies – carried out starting in the autumn of 2020 – have tried to cover a broad spectrum of categories of workers and territories.