Presa Diretta is a program broadcast on the Italian public broadcaster RAI3. This program, which started in 2009, is made up of several different journalistic reports, always around a unique topic central to each episode. Its main feature is the how it looks at one topic, such as immigration or labor, from many different points of view. The idea is to give a broader overview than is normally offered on radio and television news programs.
Its most recent episode was focused on the Italian labor market, under the title “minimum wage” (the whole program can be seen for free by simply signing up), which asked the following question:
“The fragility of Italian workers, in all sectors: from logistics to industry, from professionals to apprentices, from shops to seasonal workers. Low salaries, precarious working conditions, a jungle of contracts, accidents and deaths, savage layoffs and difficulties in finding work. Italy is the only country in Europe where salaries have dropped in the last 30 years. What happened to our labor market? But who are the workers who receive these starvation wages? The stories and testimonies filmed by the Presa Diretta cameras are surprising. And then we have the “pirate contracts”. There are almost 1,000 collective labor agreements in Italy, oftentimes applied to just a few dozen workers, with starvation wages and zero rights.”
In this program, after some statements from the vice-minister of the Ministry of Economic Progress, Alessandra Todde, in which she claims that without capital, without companies, there is no work, and companies cannot be forced by too much legislation that is overprotective of workers, the program shows this report about the Mondragon Cooperatives and the model that has become a worldwide success (and about which we have spoken on many occasions). The Basque cooperative model breaks many preconceived ideas about what a company has to look like.
Last Updated on Feb 21, 2022 by About Basque Country
