From health care to vouchers for courses and services, but also contributions for children's education, payments to supplementary pension funds and work-life balance. Over the years, corporate welfare has expanded and transformed, both in policies and in the landscape of Providers.
On Wednesday 24 October, a workshop dedicated to these issues was held at the ALTIS headquarters, the first moment to share the results of a research on the development of the market of Providers, the main intermediaries of corporate welfare services aimed at companies. This is a fast-growing market, which has been analyzed in its socio-economic dimensions by Professor Luca Pesenti, Professor of "Comparative Welfare Systems" at Università Cattolica.
"Until a few years ago there were 3 operators, today there are 78. And they were all born in the last 5-6 years. This tumultuous development required an initial investigation and today we are starting to give the first results", comments Prof. Luca Pesenti
The research has mapped, in collaboration with the company Valore Welfare srl, the network of Providers and has obtained a typology. With ALTIS, the research was subsequently supplemented by a survey to begin to give an initial description of the robustness of this system and what it has generated in terms of welfare diffusion among companies.
The corporate welfare provider market employs 449 people, serves about 19,090 companies, mostly medium-large in size, and has a total of 1,691,652 employees who benefit from corporate welfare. These are the numbers of the research, with a focus on large companies that stimulate the adoption of a certain business culture and influence legislative interventions.
The speech by Massimo Bottelli, Director of the Labour, Welfare and Human Capital sector of Assolombarda, however, underlined how, despite its development, the provider market still has a lot of room to cover, in particular with regard to small and medium-sized enterprises, where its diffusion is still low in percentage.
According to Emmanuele Massagli, President of AIWA - Italian Association of Corporate Welfare, the main challenges for Corporate Welfare lurk in two phenomena: on the one hand, the risk that it will become a consumer good and a commodity, effectively distorting itself, and on the other hand, the risk that in this market the various operators will begin to compete by lowering the prices of the products offered, a choice that would inexorably also lead to a substantial lowering of quality. The question also remains open as to how the public sector will move to protect its many employees in this regard.
The workshop ended with a heated debate among the participants, representatives of different realities including Valore Welfare, Randstad, Zucchetti, Consorzio Sis and AON, on the challenges and opportunities of the sector, in particular on the social impact of corporate welfare, the future government choices on the subject of citizenship income and how this could impact on corporate welfare resources and, finally, on the ethical choice between "moral and voluptuous" goods.