Italy
Source of the series
Collective Labour Agreements (Contratti Collettivi di lavoro).
Title of the series
Numeri indici delle retribuzioni contrattuali (Indices of Contractual Earnings).
Organization responsible
Data collection, statistical processing and publication/dissemination of the statistics:
National Statistical Institute (Instituto Nazionale di Statistica - ISTAT).
Main topics covered
Contractual wages.
Periodicity or frequency of availability of the statistics
Monthly.
Reference period
The end of each month.
Coverage of the statistics
Geographical:
the whole country.
Industrial:
almost all branches of economic activity, including the Public Service, except fishing (Tabulation category B of ISIC, Rev.3), community, social and personal service activities, domestic services and extra-territorial organizations and bodies (Tabulation categories O-Q of ISIC, Rev.3).
Establishments:
all types and sizes of establishments taking part in, or covered by, collective agreements.
Persons:
full-time employees, excluding managerial staff in the private sector and apprentices.
Occupations:
all occupations represented in collective bargaining agreements are covered.
Concepts and definitions
Employment:
refers to employees with a regular full-time contract, excluding apprentices and executives in the private sector. In the credit sector, they may include civil servants, while in public administration, they include contractual and non-contractual managerial staff. Wage earners and salaried employees are identified separately. Employment data are used to determine the structure of the wage index in the base year.
Wage rates:
contractual wages are those fixed by collective agreements. They represent, each month, the amounts due to employees under the hypothesis that they are always at work during the hours fixed by the relevant labour agreements. They include general and regular pay items such as basic pay, special compensation payments (Indennità di contingenza), length of service premiums, premium pay for shift work and other regular, monthly payments specified in national agreements and payable to all workers, as well as those paid periodically (e.g. the 13th month payment and other seasonal and regular payments). Excluded are bonuses related to individual performance and individual working conditions, supplementary payment agreed at the company level, occasional and ad-hoc payments, amounts awarded through decentralized bargaining, back pay and retroactive Una tantum payments. However, these special payments are taken into account in the computation of annual contractual earnings (Retribuzione contrattuale annua di competenza).
Contractual wage rates are computed separately for manual and non-manual workers and by occupation.
Hours of work:
refer to normal hours of work for full-time work on an annual basis, after deduction of hours paid for but not worked, for public and annual holidays, other time off granted with pay (for reduction of annual hours of work, compensation for work done on public and other holidays, meetings and study leave, etc.). Statistics of contractual hours of work are not published, but are used in the computation of the index of contractual hourly earnings.
Classifications
Branch of economic activity (industry):
Title of the classification:
Classification of Economic Activities ATECO 91.
Number of groups used for coding:
not available.
Applied to:
all data.
Link to ISIC and level:
ATECO corresponds to the EU economic activity classification (NACE, Rev.1) at the four-digit level (only index per capita); the latter is directly linked to ISIC, Rev.3, at the two-digit level.
Occupation:
Collective agreements are not classified by occupation, but by employee category (manual workers, nonmanual workers, executives). The classification by occupation is done by ISTAT once a year, for the purposes of the ILO October Inquiry, by linking a set of variables and codes contained in collective agreements (employee category, level of qualification, tasks and duties, examples of occupations, etc.) to the ILO descriptions of occupations.
Other classifications:
according to bargaining sector.
Data collection
Size and coverage of the administrative system:
The wage indices are derived from a large selection of the most relevant collective bargaining agreements on wages negotiated between labour unions and employers’ associations. The current series uses 2,300 salary points laid down in 80 collective agreements out of a total of over 300 agreements.
Data collection method:
the basic data are derived from official records (laws, regulations) and collective agreements; for the agricultural and construction sectors, they are taken from the relevant provincial labour agreements. The statistical units represent a contractual pay level for a given group of functions, often combined with indications for seniority, age or skill in collective agreements. Their characteristics, as well as the number of employees, are decided at the time of constructing the base and remain fixed until a new base is constructed. A special survey is conducted to determine the structure in the base year with the help of employers’ and workers’ unions. The survey determines the collective agreements used and their distribution over the workforce groups. Several sources are used to calculate the number of employees by collective agreement and according to ATECO: the national accounts, the labour force survey and the Social Security records.
Each contract is updated when it is renewed. The weights are updated every five years.
Data processing, editing and consistency checks
In each unit which computes indices of contractual earnings, each official is responsible for 6 to 13 agreements (according to the level of difficulty). A code is assigned to each component of the remuneration (basic pay, compensation payments, length of service premium, other premiums, hours of work, public and other holidays, etc.). Three-hundred and eleven codes are used, which are recorded on computer. The results are checked against total of all categories of agreements. The data are processed by computer, using COBOL. ISTAT is working on the updating of the base period of the indices (December 2000=100) and the data will then be processed with ORACLE and viewed in PL/SQL language.
Adjustments
Seasonal variations:
none; the published index does not show any seasonality because the monthly gross rates for each group of qualifications in the collective agreement comprises all pay items, as listed under "Concepts and definitions", divided by 12, each month.
Types of estimates
Wage indices;
Percent variations with respect to the previous period (conjunctural variations) and the corresponding period of the previous year (trends).
Annual absolute figures of wage rates.
Construction of indices
The index of wage rates per worker measures the change in the contractually agreed annual rates. The index of collectively agreed hours of work measures the change in the hours of work that employees have to work during the year (excluding the holiday periods). The index of hourly rates is calculated as the ratio of the two indices. Each month, the gross rates for each group of qualifications in the collective agreement are divided by 12. The indices for each group of qualification (elementary cells) are obtained by dividing the absolute value of the current rates and the average rates by the base period figures (December 1995). More aggregated indices are calculated applying a Laspeyres formula to the elementary indices. The weights are the products of the average number of workers in the base year and the corresponding wage value in the base period.
Indicators of reliability of the estimates
Coverage of the administrative system:
all collective labour agreements are represented and the indices encompass some 90% of employees.
Available series
Monthly and hourly contractual wage indices, by economic activity and classification groups;
Rates of change over the preceding reporting period and the corresponding reporting period of the previous year;
Annual absolute figures on the composition of pay and labour cost for certain industries and jobs, as well as for working hours.
History of the statistics
Starting date of the statistical series:
1938.
Major changes and revisions:
the weights are updated every five years, so as to take account of economic developments.
Documentation and dissemination
Documentation:
Instituto Centrale di Statistica (ISTAT): Comunicato Stampa; press release provided to the media at a press conference held 30 minutes prior to the general release of the data, and subsequently distributed by fax and e-mail and posted on ISTAT Internet website; The data are usually released within one month and no later than one quarter after the end of the reference month, except for the January data which are available two months after the end of the reference month.
Idem: Bolletino Mensile di Statistica; contains monthly data for the period since 1992 on the total index and indices of sections and classification groups;
Idem: Collana d’informazione "Lavoro e retribuzioni" (Rome, monthly); contains, once a year, an overview of the methodology.
Methodological modifications or revisions are communicated through press releases. Detailed information on the methodological changes implemented is disseminated in Informazioni-Retribuzioni contrattuali, copies of which can be obtained from ISTAT.
Dissemination:
on ISTAT web-site: http://www.istat.it.
Methodological notes are also available on this site.
Data supplied to the ILO for dissemination
The following statistics are supplied to the ILO for publication in the Yearbook of Labour Statistics:
Indices of contractual hourly wage rates, for wage earners and salaried employees, by economic activity.
Data on contractual wage rates by occupation are published in Statistics on occupational wages and hours of work and on food prices - October Inquiry results.