May 1st, Workers’ Day: once again this year, we have decided to celebrate this important holiday in the only way we know how, and that is by providing Italians with concrete answers, in particular those Italians who roll up their sleeves every day and contribute to our nation’s prosperity through their work.

On May 1st last year, as you may remember, we held a Council of Ministers meeting in this very room, during which we approved a very detailed decree with various measures to support workers, the most important being the labour tax cut for incomes up to EUR 35,000. Thanks to that tax cut, workers received up to EUR 100 per month more in their pay packets. 
We then confirmed this measure for the whole of 2024 in our Budget Law. We made this choice in order to defend workers’ purchasing power, especially that of the lowest earners, at a time of high inflation. Over this last year and a half in office, we have dedicated several other measures to this same goal: the grouping together of the first two IRPEF [personal income tax] brackets, which lowers taxes for everyone (even though we then cancelled the benefit for the highest incomes); an exemption from social security contributions for employed mothers with at least two children, for up to EUR 3,000 per year; the tax cut on productivity bonuses of up to EUR 3,000; the raising of the tax-free threshold for fringe benefits, i.e. the voluntary payments employers can make to workers, favouring in particular workers with dependent children. Then there is also the increase in minimum pensions and full indexing of the lowest pension amounts.
All of this has been done with a view to redistributing wealth.

Ahead of this year’s May 1st holiday too, we decided to keep on in this direction: we have approved a decree that will enable us to add another measure to all the others, thanks to which, in January 2025, we will be able to pay an allowance of EUR 100 for employees in single-income households, or rather single-income households with at least one dependent child and a total yearly income of no more than EUR 28,000.
However, over the last 16 months we have also taken action to help companies hire people, because we must always remember that it is not the State that creates employment and wealth, but rather it is companies and their workers that do this. It is the State’s job to put businesses and workers in the best possible position to create that wealth. We have done also this with a series of very concrete regulations; I shan’t list them all, but they have allowed us to achieve excellent results regarding the labour market.

Since we came to Government, employment figures in Italy have risen by more than half a million. We have achieved a record level of employment and a record level of female employment, stable contracts are on the rise and job insecurity is decreasing. We are extremely proud of these figures and they have also been greeted with satisfaction by President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, whom I wish to thank for his very important words.

This does not mean, however, that everything is fine. It instead means we must keep on working, doing more and doing it better. This is why we also approved another important decree in the last Council of Ministers meeting. This very substantial decree reforms cohesion policies (which are the policies that serve to tackle the gaps and disparities between different areas of the country), the aim of which is to spend European and national resources in the best way possible for the nation’s growth and development, in particular in Italy’s Mezzogiorno. We are talking about approximately EUR 74 billion in total, EUR 42 billion of which are European funds. Too often in the past, however, these very precious resources were not spent or were not spent properly; this decree will instead make it possible to spend them within a defined and fast time frame.

As we were saying, the goal is to overcome the still too many disparities that exist in Italy, starting with the infrastructure gap that prevents the South in particular from competing on an equal footing with the rest of the nation. Hence why this decree contains a crucial measure for the Mezzogiorno: the establishment of an infrastructure equalisation fund and the obligation to allocate at least 40% of multi-year funds for investment to regions in the South. Today that percentage is significantly lower. 

But that’s not all. With this decree we are of course also taking further action to support employment. We are doing so with a package of measures that form part of a programme worth a total of more than EUR 5 billion, the aim of which is to create new jobs, especially in the Mezzogiorno.

The main one of these measures is the two-year exemption from paying 100% of social security contributions if a company hires young people under the age of 35 who have never had a permanent contract, on the condition that they are hired with a stable contract. In other words, if you hire a young person with a permanent contract, you don’t have to pay the State anything for two years, within the limit of EUR 500 a month. This applies throughout Italy. In southern regions, however, this measure also applies to over-35s who have been unemployed for at least two years. This exemption from social security contributions applies to women throughout Italy regardless of their age, with women living in the Mezzogiorno having greater accessibility to this benefit.

There are not just incentives for employees, but self-employment initiatives too, both in the central and northern regions and in the South, where we are strengthening the ‘Resto al Sud’ [‘I’m staying in the South’] measure, and providing a grant of up to EUR 200 thousand for those starting a new business.
Furthermore, we are providing for measures to retrain workers in struggling large companies, and we are also tackling problems that have remained unresolved for many (too many) years, such as the redevelopment of the Bagnoli area on the outskirts of Naples, for example. 
We have allocated EUR 1.2 billion to this area, which can play a crucial role with a view to the industrial revival of the entire Campania region, and beyond. At the same time, we have extended the same tax credit for investments and the same simplifications that are already provided for in the Mezzogiorno’s single Special Economic Zone (SEZ) also to certain areas belonging to simplified logistics zones in the centre-north of the country. We are allocating almost EUR 2 billion to incentives for the single SEZ (the single Special Economic Zone for the Mezzogiorno that was established by this Government and that provides incentives and simplifications for anyone investing in Italy’s southern regions).

There are many other things I could tell you about this important decree, which is a tangible and concrete response to those who claim this Government doesn’t care about the Mezzogiorno. Precisely the opposite is true. We believe in it so much that we don’t want it to live off government assistance; we want it to live off work and development, finally proving its worth. I preferred to focus on work-related legislation today, using our concrete actions to once again wish you all a happy Workers' Day.

[Courtesy translation]