Trade union agreement shakes up Italian NGOs

Just twelve lines of text are tearing the Italian NGO community apart.

CINI, the country’s network of international nongovernmental organizations, refused to sign a trade union agreement that sets new rules for so-called project contracts, usually adopted for technical experts and individual consultants.

The document specifies in which cases an NGO can use this system and establishes minimum wages, days of leave and mandatory insurance. It also prohibits the adoption of project contracts to hire fundraisers and promoters. Trade unions believe the agreement will bring more clarity and security to contract staff, but for NGOs it will increase personnel costs and mean significant changes to their staffing structure.

After coming into force on July 31, the document was however endorsed by the Association of Italian NGOs and Link 2007, two umbrella groups representing about 250 of the country’s nongovernmental organizations.

So what does this mean for the Italian aid community?

NGOs will no longer be able to outsource their fundraising activities without a proper contract, in theory to avoid possible exploitation, but some aid groups will have to reorganize their fundraising schemes in order to adapt, not to mention the added cost.

New rules

The new rules are expected to have a direct impact on approximately 5,000 professionals, 1,000 of which working in Italy.

According to Nino Sergi, Link 2007’s representative during the negotiations with the trade unions, said almost half of these contractors are women and the majority operates in Africa.

Under Italian labor law, any trade union agreement is binding for the signatories — so AOI and Link 2007 members will have to abide by it both in the country and abroad, regardless of workers’ nationalities.

NGOs that didn’t sign the document, on the other hand, just have to comply with the revised labor law of 2012.

“[It] adjusts the provisions of the general labor law so that they are more appropriate to the NGO sector. The general law allows [this adaptation only] through the agreement with the trade unions,” Sergi told Devex.

Gianfranco Cattai, president of AOI, said that NGO costs will grow because of the salary increases fixed in the agreement, but in any case the impact will be lower than if the NGOs would have adopted the non-negotiated provisions.

“Nobody wants to kill the organizations and who do excellent things, for sure. It’s just to let people work, even in this sector, with rights, some certainties, [such as] fair minimum wages,” explained Roberto D’Andrea, representative of the trade union NidiL CGIL.

The fundraising dilemma

But why did some NGOs refuse to sign the agreement? What do they want from trade unions? Can a consensus still be reached? These are the questions.

Union and aid group sources consulted by Devex said that in particular international NGOs backed out of the talks because the twelve lines of Art. 13, which regulate the outsourcing of fundraising and social marketing services.

Both sides will however meet again in September to try to resolve their differences.

Art. 13 of the agreement indicates what kind of employment contracts can be adopted by the contracting companies that provide fundraising and social marketing services. It requires iNGOs to include in the outsourcing agreements clauses that prevent those companies from employing staff without a proper contract — trade unions believe this will prevent exploitation of street and phone fundraisers and promoters.

CINI member Save The Children told Devex they are not challenging the document: “CINI is not a legal entity and cannot endorse any agreement … [Save the Children] didn’t sign [it] not because we are against that article, but because trade unions accelerated the negotiations [while] we were asking [for] a specific agreement [only] for [fundraisers],” noted Emilia Romano, Save the Children Italia’s chief research and development officer.

Some NGOs raise funds with in-house staff and volunteers, but many turn to companies specialized in debt collections.

“[Some of them] operate through pyramidal systems: multi-level marketing [or] subcontracting,” D’Andrea told Devex. “This is a job that […] often hides conditions of exploitation […] Whenever there is labor is always possible, [in any sector] … even when there great motivation like development work.”

These workers are usually young, with contracts that do not comply with the labor law or even with no contracts at all, paid on commission according to the donations they are able to collect, often with the addition of €2-5 euro flat rate per hour or €200-500 a month. They can make up to €1,500 a month or as little as €500.

Sergi explained that the aim of the rules is to stress that NGOs can’t wash their hands of this problem dumping the responsibility of workers’ exploitation only on third-party contracting companies.

Workers, in fact, many times wear their employer NGO’s t-shirts and promote their image. However, a NGO officer told Devex that iNGOs didn’t sign the agreement because they are precisely the ones that make most use of these companies and have the greatest problems with fundraising.

“Trade unions know that well and they are managing lawsuits of fundraisers against contracting companies,” said the source.

A trade union officer added: “We met those workers and the organizations involved are the international NGOs, among them Save the Children … We reported lawsuits almost everywhere in Italy — in Rome, Naples, Milan, Florence.”

Save the Children confirmed workers’ lawsuits against contracting companies.

Romano said that individual workers have filed lawsuits to Save the Children’s contracting companies and even if the NGO is not legally responsible for what its contractors do, she stressed the organization has been trying to address the issue for years, for example by terminating contracts with companies suspicious of irregular behavior, even if that increased the overall cost of fundraising.

Save the Children believes that Art. 13 doesn’t solve the problem because the agreement mixes apples with oranges, putting project contracts and outsourcing of fundraisers regulation in the same sack. The question should have been addressed in detail with a specific agreement and taking into consideration the different fundraising modalities, such as inbound and outbound, face-to-face and call centers.

“We are happy that the trade unions are dealing with this issue, but we want something different: We want to define the right type of contract [for that job] … For the other [NGOs] this question was a detail because they do not do very much [this kind] of fundraising, but for us it wasn’t,” said Romano.

What’s next?

The fundraising issue and the negotiations with iNGOs won’t be the only knot to untie in September.

The agreement prescribes a review of the contracts adopted within each NGO to verify if the staff is employed with a proper contract or if the ongoing project contracts must be temporary or permanent. Project contracts can be used only for staff hired to achieve a specific objective within a specific project and are not allowed to employ personnel that perform secretarial, accounting or representation jobs.

“Approximately 50-60 percent of the project contracts in Italy will be turned into temporary or permanent contracts, [but not most of the ones abroad],” said Sergi.

Andrea added that it will be harder for smaller NGOs to implement these provisions, while Cattai warned the new rules will translate into significant added costs for aid groups. A major issue will be that the trade union agreement requires NGOs to report an individual job description for each worker.

“We’ll have to adjust all the contacts … It is not an easy contract to write … It’s a hard job to do.”

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