L’impiego pubblico in Italia: dallo stile consensuale a quello maggioritario

In the last decade of the twentieth century several reforms were adopted in Italy to improve the performance of public employment and the quality of democracy. Those reforms, approved in agreement with trade-unions, introduced a discipline of common law for civil service, weakening the differences between the public and the private sector. Consistently with this line, the new “Brunetta reform”, promoted in 2009 by the minister of Public Administration and Innovation, Renato Brunetta, provided new rules to manage civil servants, introducing procedures for performance evaluation and a system of rewards and penalties. However, it made a deep change in labour relations, bypassing trade-unions in the process of reform formulation, replacing the practice of consensual decision making with a majoritarian and adversarial style. This article focuses on reforms and analyses the elements of continuity and change introduced by the government led by Matteo Renzi.