The average gross annual salary of employees in Lombardy is equal to 28,354 euros, in Calabria, however, it amounts to just over half; or 14,960 euros. A figure that places our region in last place in Italy.
If workers in the northern regions earn an average gross daily wage of 101 euros, their southern colleagues earn 75: in short, the former take home a daily salary that is 35% “heavier” than the latter. This difference is essentially due to labor productivity; in the North, in fact, it is 34% higher than the figure for the South. In this ranking, for example, Calabria is second to last, just above Puglia.
Returning to the initial data, on the difference in average annual wages between Lombardy and Calabria, therefore, we discover that if in the first case the productivity of work is equal to 45.7 euros per hour worked, in the second it is just 29.7. These aspects emerged from the processing carried out by the Cgia research office on INPS and ISTAT data and bring up an old issue: the wage imbalances present between the different areas of our country, in particular between North and South, but also very evident between urban and rural areas. “A theme that the social parties – we read in the report – have attempted to resolve, after the abolition of the so-called wage cages that occurred in the early 70s of the last century, through the use of the national collective labor agreement. On the other hand, the limited diffusion of decentralized bargaining in Italy – an institution, for example, very widespread in Germany – does not allow real wages to remain linked to inflation trends, housing costs and local productivity levels, causing us to suffer from very significant average wage gaps with other countries».
