Italian economy is still heavily reliant on traditional sectors with low innovative components, with the consumption sector gaining weight in recent decades—including many traditional, low-innovation activities. This is the productive fabric hosting an employers’ associations system featuring some distinctive points, such as fragmentation along many divisional axes, absence of functional specialization, weak development of economic functions, and strong territorial differentiation, leading to a model of bipolar representation in which large family businesses find their institutional interlocutor in national politics, while small businesses have their own reference in local actors. The article positions the original empirical findings of an EU Commission-funded project within this framework, also focusing on the different perspectives of unions and employers’ associations (EAs). Overall, we confirm the fragmentation of the Italian Industrial Relations (IR) system, although we allow IR agents to present nuances and even challenges to this hypothesis. Additionally, the hypothesis regarding the growing influence of non-traditional actors (such as business clubs) is disputed by the interviewees. Through further scrutiny of the empirical material, we provide several key insights into the declining appeal of EAs and the role of multinational companies in Italian IR.
Califano et al. (2026) studied this question.