Executives and Trade Unions: Collective Representation in Italy and the United States

Collective Representation, RSU Exclusion, and the Right to Strike:

The Executive’s Place in Italian Collective Labor Relations

For multinational corporations operating across jurisdictions, the intersection of executive authority and collective bargaining presents one of the more consequential structural divergences in comparative employment law. In the United States, corporate executives and managerial employees are severed from the collective bargaining protections of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), operating entirely within individual contract law and the at-will employment doctrine. They are treated as the employer’s representatives and, on that basis, hold no federally protected right to organize.

In Italy, the framework is materially different. The dirigente (executive) is not defined by a single statutory provision but by the functional content of the role as developed through collective bargaining and judicial interpretation. Under the CCNL for industrial executives, the role is characterized by high professional competence, broad autonomy, and decision-making authority, with functions aimed at promoting, coordinating, and managing the achievement of corporate objectives.

Under the CCNL for commercial and tertiary sector executives, the definition emphasizes elevated professional expertise exercised with wide discretion and initiative, combined with the authority to issue directives across the enterprise or an autonomous branch of it. Both definitions converge on a role operating at a strategic and autonomous level that fundamentally distinguishes the executive from every other category of subordinate employee.

That elevated status does not extinguish the constitutional right to trade union organization. Rather than being absorbed into the general workforce’s structures or excluded from collective representation entirely, Italian executives operate within highly specialized, parallel management unions. This architecture institutionalizes their representation and guarantees a sector-wide collective floor, while segregating them from the rank-and-file bodies that would otherwise create structural conflicts of interest.

This article examines the foundational architecture of the Italian trade union system, the structural basis for the dirigente’sexclusion from the Rappresentanza Sindacale Unitaria (RSU), and the jurisprudential balance between an executive’s right to strike and their statutory duty of loyalty. A targeted comparative section addresses the United States framework and the institutional void it creates at the executive level.

The Architecture of the Italian Trade Union System

To understand the specialized status of the Italian executive, it is necessary to first understand the general collective labor relations architecture from which they are separately governed. The Italian system operates on two distinct levels: national sectoral bargaining and decentralized company-level bargaining.

The foundational layer is established by the National Collective Labor Agreements (CCNL). These agreements are negotiated between national employers’ associations and the category federations of Italy’s three principal trade union confederations: CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro), CISL (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori), and UIL (Unione Italiana del Lavoro). The confederation sets the strategic direction; the sector federation is the actual bargaining entity. The CCNL establishes the normative framework for the sector, covering disciplinary procedures, notice obligations, working time arrangements, and minimum remuneration thresholds.

The second level operates at the enterprise or territorial level, designed to supplement rather than replicate the national agreement, typically through performance premiums and welfare provisions. The primary institutional actor at company level is the Rappresentanza Sindacale Unitaria (RSU), a unitary representative body elected by universal suffrage of the workforce within a production unit. Formally consolidated by the Testo Unico sulla Rappresentanza of 2014, the RSU holds negotiating authority for second-level agreements and exercises the rights guaranteed under the Workers’ Statute (Law 300/1970).

An important structural feature is that a single Italian workplace operates under multiple CCNLs simultaneously. Different categories of employee are governed by different agreements, negotiated by different parties. The executive does not occupy a lower tier of a unified system; they occupy a distinct and separately governed tier.

The Constitutional Foundation and Its Structural Consequences

The right to collective organization in Italy is not a statutory grant that ordinary legislation can withdraw. It is embedded in the Constitution itself, which means it carries a normative weight that supersedes ordinary law. Article 39 of the Italian Constitution enshrines the freedom of trade union organization as a fundamental right, available to all subordinate workers without categorical exclusion. Because this guarantee operates at the constitutional level, it cannot be removed or diminished by parliamentary legislation. A dirigente retains the right to organize, to join a union, and to participate in collective bargaining structures regardless of their seniority or authority.

The subsequent paragraphs of Article 39 provide a mechanism by which registered trade unions could acquire legal personality and negotiate collective agreements with mandatory, binding effect on all members of the relevant workforce category: the so-called erga omnes (binding on all) effect. That mechanism has never been activated. No trade union in Italy has registered under the constitutional procedure, and no implementing legislation has given it operational form.

As a consequence, the statutory pathway envisioned to confer universal coverage was never constructed, and the concept of rappresentatività comparata (comparative representativeness) had to be developed instead through autonomous interconfederal agreements and judicial interpretation. For executive collective bargaining, this matters directly: the authority of Federmanager and Manageritalia rests on accumulated institutional recognition and the comparative representativeness standard, not on a formal statutory mandate.

Article 40 of the Constitution recognizes the right to strike as a constitutional guarantee, delegating its regulation to ordinary law. For the private sector, that comprehensive regulatory statute has never been enacted. The limits of lawful strike action have therefore been defined predominantly by the Corte di Cassazione (Court of Cassation) and, to a degree, by collective agreements. Article 2095 of the Civil Code identifies four categories of subordinate employee: dirigenti, quadri (middle managers), impiegati (white-collar workers), and operai (blue-collar workers). The provision names the dirigentecategory but provides no substantive definition, which opened the space for collective bargaining and judicial interpretation to build the executive role as a structurally distinct tier of the workforce.

The Structural Exclusion: Why the Dirigente Cannot Join the RSU

The exclusion of executives from the RSU is not a single statutory prohibition. It operates through a convergence of structural, constitutional, and institutional factors, each reinforcing the others.

Institutionalized Representation: The Architecture of Executive Unions

Although excluded from the RSU, the dirigente retains the full constitutional right to organize. That right is channeled through dedicated, autonomous management federations. Federmanager holds bargaining authority for executives in the industrial sector, negotiating with Confindustria. Manageritalia holds the equivalent role in the commercial and tertiary sector, negotiating with Confcommercio. These federations provide a multi-tiered framework of representation.

At the macro level, they negotiate the binding parameters of the executive CCNLs. These agreements establish a collective floor from which individual contracts cannot be made less favorable to the executive. That floor covers:

• Trattamento Minimo Complessivo di Garanzia (TMCG) – the minimum overall guaranteed compensation package, encompassing base salary and supplementary elements. It should be noted that this mechanism is specific to the industrial sector CCNL negotiated by Federmanager and Confindustria; it does not apply uniformly across all executive CCNLs.

• Preavviso (notice period) – the contractually mandated notice period, which is substantially more generous for executives than for other employee categories.

• Indennità supplementare (supplementary indemnity) – the financial parameters for severance in the event of unjustified dismissal, which operates independently of the statutory protections applicable to other employee categories.

At the enterprise level, executives retain the right under Article 19 of the Workers’ Statute to constitute their own company-level union structures (Rappresentanze Sindacali Aziendali dei Dirigenti), operating separately from and alongside the RSU.

At the institutional level, through overarching bodies including CIDA (the Italian Confederation of Business Managers), executives hold statutory seats at the CNEL (National Council for Economics and Labour) and within public institutions such as INPS and INAIL, securing a voice in macroeconomic policy formation that has no equivalent in the United States.

The Right to Strike and the Vincolo Fiduciario (Fiduciary Bond)

The most complex tension in Italian executive labor law arises at the intersection of the constitutional right to strike and the statutory duty of loyalty.

Article 2105 of the Civil Code imposes an obbligo di fedeltà (duty of fidelity) on every employee, requiring the protection of the enterprise’s organizational and commercial integrity. For a dirigente, courts have consistently treated this obligation as giving rise to an elevated vincolo fiduciario (fiduciary bond) that reflects the scope of the role, the discretionary authority entrusted to the executive, and the degree of reliance the employer places in them.

Because Article 40 of the Constitution does not categorically exclude executives, a dirigentemay in principle withhold their labor. The Corte di Cassazione has, however, developed a body of jurisprudence that sets meaningful limits. The distinction drawn across its decisions is between a lawful damage to immediate production output (which is the inherent purpose of a strike) and conduct that crosses into unlawful interference with the fundamental productive capacity or institutional architecture of the company.

Anti-discrimination protection: verified case law

The case law protecting executives from dismissal for strike participation is clear and consistent. A dismissal motivated by a dirigente’sparticipation in a strike is void as discriminatory. This flows from Article 3 of Law 108/1990, which applies to the executive category, and Article 15 of the Workers’ Statute, which prohibits discriminatory acts connected to the exercise of union rights including strike participation.

The Corte di Cassazione confirmed in its decision n. 4543 of 6 May 1999 that this protection extends to situations where the dismissal is an exclusively retaliatory response to a lawful act by the worker, even where not all features of an expressly listed statutory ground are present, reasoning that the specific statutory grounds for discriminatory dismissal are specifications of the broader category of dismissal vitiated by unlawful motive. That reasoning was reaffirmed in ordinance n. 2603/2023.

In decision n. 11347 of 30 April 2025, the Court confirmed that the same protection applies to spontaneous strikes not formally proclaimed by a union, provided the abstention is genuinely collective and directed at workers’ shared interests, and that this protection operates regardless of company size.

Limits derived from the fiduciary bond: the doctrinal position

Italian legal doctrine, grounded in the general principles the Corte di Cassazione has established on the boundary between production damage and productive capacity damage, holds that an executive who holds exclusive administrative authority critical to the company’s legal and operational continuity cannot deploy a strike to deliberately trigger statutory defaults or paralyze essential corporate functions for which no alternative arrangement exists.

Where an executive holds, for example, sole signatory authority over a regulatory filing or payroll obligation falling on a non-extendable deadline, and withholds that function without arranging for delegation, the conduct may be assessed as a breach of the vincolo fiduciario(fiduciary bond) and the good faith obligation under Article 1375 of the Civil Code rather than as protected strike action. Whether any specific set of facts meets that threshold is a matter of judicial assessment in the particular circumstances. The observations in this article are intended as an introduction to the framework, not as a basis for action in any individual case.

The Comparative Contrast: The US NLRA and the Executive Void

The contrast between the Italian and American frameworks is best understood through their structural consequences for executive employment.

Section 2(11) of the NLRA defines supervisors through three operative elements: the function (authority to hire, fire, discipline, or direct other employees), the interest (acting in the interest of the employer), and the exercise of independent judgment. Under Section 2(3), any individual meeting that definition is excluded from the Act’s definition of employee and stripped of its collective bargaining protections.

The U.S. Supreme Court extended this exclusionary perimeter in NLRB v. Bell Aerospace Co.(416 U.S. 267, 1974), holding that all true managerial employees who formulate, determine, and effectuate corporate policy are wholly excluded from NLRA coverage, even absent direct supervisory duties sufficient to trigger Section 2(11). The underlying rationale closely mirrors the Italian conflict of interest concern. The difference is that in Italy the response to that conflict is parallel institutionalized representation; in the United States it is exclusion without substitute.

Organizations such as the Business Roundtable represent corporate interests in policy advocacy but do not engage in bilateral labor relations, negotiate employment terms, administer welfare funds, or create any collective floor for executive employment. The U.S. executive operates under individual contract law, with no mandatory notice period and no collectively negotiated severance baseline absent a specific contractual arrangement.

Major work stoppages in the United States, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for events involving 1,000 or more workers, remain structurally infrequent, reflecting a legal environment in which labor action at scale faces significant practical and legal constraints.

Conclusion

For multinational entities with operations in Italy, managing executive talent requires a structural understanding that differs materially from the Anglo-American model. The dirigenteoccupies a distinct legal tier: constitutionally guaranteed the right to organize, collectively represented through Federmanager or Manageritalia, and protected by a mandatory CCNL floor that no individual contract can diminish. At the same time, the intensity of the vincolo fiduciario(fiduciary bond) shapes how the right to collective action is exercised in practice and where its limits lie.

AdvaLux assists executives and multinational organisations throughout the entire lifecycle of the employment relationship in Italy, including the review and negotiation of employment contracts, collective entitlements, and termination arrangements. If any of the issues discussed in this article are relevant to your situation, our team would be pleased to assist.

By Janiya Fonseca Ocampo