In Italy no figure has been approved. An application has been ‘approved’. How much does a person have to earn for work to be not just hard work, but freedom?
The minimum wage is counted. A potential ‘fair’ salary is measured with life: with the rent that is due, the shopping cart, a child you would like to have, a parent to take care of, a tomorrow that shouldn’t be scary.
The reference is the legislative decree of 30 April 2026, n. 62 and entered into force as a law in definitive form on 24 June. The title talks about fair wages, employment incentives and the fight against digital gangmastering. It sounds technical. In reality it touches on a civil and spiritual question: can a society be said to be prosperous if those who work remain poor?
The first thing to understand is that there is no legal minimum wage that is the same for everyone. The law does not set an hourly threshold in euros; entrusts the parameter to the national collective agreements signed by the comparatively more representative trade union and employer organisations. Anyone who applies a different contract cannot go below that overall economic treatment; in sectors not covered, we look at the contract closest to the activity carried out. The advantage is evident: an attempt is made to attack pirate contracts, texts with the form of law and the soul of discount.
Here the law touches a decisive point: it is not enough to apply any contract to say that the work is paid fairly. If a company chooses a contract signed by small or unrepresentative companies just because it costs less, that contract cannot become the measure of dignity. It is, after all, the revenge of the intermediate bodies against the loneliness of the isolated worker.
But here also appears the first limitation: representation is not an abstract formula, it is a concrete presence. It is not enough to say ‘comparatively more representative’ if then, in the territories, in warehouses, in cooperatives, in procurement, in small and medium-sized enterprises, that representation struggles to really arrive.
There are workplaces, in fact, whereand large acronyms have long disappeared: broken supply chains, outsourcing, subcontracting, small and fragile businesses where the national contract does not exist. The law indicates the right reference, but does not fully resolve the most difficult problem: how to make the strength of representation reach where the worker is most alone. This is why the levee is important, but it can leak water. If fully certain criteria and effective controls are missing, the risk is that the ‘right’ contract remains only on paper while the real work moves, as always, in gray areas.
The second point is moral: public incentives are not granted regardless, but are linked to compliance with the right salary. It is a choice of principle: the State cannot reward any occupation, even when that occupation was born poor. Here the decree says something important: public money must not become the silent partner of underpaid work. You cannot fight poverty with one hand and subsidize it with the other.
Be careful though! Incentives can open a door but they do not guarantee that there is a house behind it. A reduction in contributions can make hiring more convenient, but it is not enough to transform that hiring into a stable, dignified path capable of lasting beyond the benefit. THEThe risk, otherwise, is that of a policy that photographs entry into work but does not follow the film of working life.
The third issue is the overall financial treatment. The conversion does not only look at the basic pay, but also considers the fixed and continuous items: additional monthly payments, stable allowances, deferred elements, generalized contractual welfare and other economic institutions envisaged by the contract. However, discretionary, occasional or variable items recognized to individuals remain excluded. This is an important distinction: it prevents salary from being artificially inflated with uncertain bonuses, bonuses granted from time to time or benefits that depend on the benevolence of the company. Dignity cannot be based on what exists today and can disappear tomorrow.
The law takes an important step when it clarifies which voices count and which do not; but wage justice must pass the test of the house, the expense, the care, the territory, the month. Two thousand euros is not the same life everywhere. But measuring the differences must serve to increase protection where living costs more, not to accept lower wages where an area is fragile. Only there can we see whether work really pays for freedom or just survival.
The same applies to expired contracts. The decree provides that, if the renewal does not arrive within nine months, an adjustment equal to 50 percent of the IPCA-NEI, the price index adjusted for imported energy, will be triggered, unless otherwise agreed. It is a step forward, because it recognizes that time consumes wages: every month of delay in renewal is not neutral, it is purchasing power that evaporates. But it is also a partial remedy: it arrives after months, recovers only a quota and uses a technical index that does not always coincide with the life perceived by families.
The last point is perhaps the newest: digital gangmastering. To understand this we need to move away from the ancient image of exploitation. The corporal is no longer just the man who recruits in a square or in a countryside. Today it can be a platform, a screen, a score, an account that suddenly freezes.
The law tries to say something simple but important: it’s not just what the employment relationship is called that matters, it matters how it actually works. If a rider or platform worker is formally autonomous, but in reality it is the app that decides when he works, which deliveries he receives, how much he earns, how he is evaluated and when it can be excluded, then that autonomy risks being just a word. In the presence of management and control, even exercised by automated systems, the relationship can be considered subordinate, unless proven otherwise. It is a change of perspective: the law does not stop at etiquette, it looks at concrete power.
Then there is a second decisive step: platforms must explain in an understandable way how the algorithms that assign tasks, change compensation, evaluate performance or limit access to work work. And when a decision really weighs on the worker’s life – a suspended account, a denied payment, a penalty, exclusion from the platform – the worker must be able to ask for an explanation and a humane review. This touches on the relationship between power and responsibility. Power, even when it passes through computer code, remains organized human power. And where there is power at work, there must be rights, transparency, the possibility of contesting.
The Constitution speaks of remuneration that is proportionate and sufficient to ensure the worker and his family a free and dignified existence. The Social Doctrine of the Church recalls with the same radicality that remuneration is one of the decisive tools for verifying justice in working relationships.. It is there, in the concrete pay, that the economy stops being theory and becomes flesh, house, bread, future.
This is why the law is relevant: it shifts the topic from pure efficiency to dignity. However, the effort will be insufficient if it remains without controls, without territorial safeguards, without ability to reach the least visible job or sector. Dignity doesn’t just ask to be paid: it asks to be recognized.
