Once upon a time there was a minimum wage — or rather, there wasn't one. Now, however, it's the turn of the fair wage. Just ahead of Labour Day, the Council of Ministers passed a decree-law that attempts to move beyond the minimum wage proposal that a united opposition has been trying to push through for a couple of years now, pegging it at 9 euros gross per hour. The concept being put forward is precisely that of a fair wage — but what does it actually entail, and what is the difference from the other proposal?

What is meant by a fair wage

In reality, the minimum wage is not exactly what the decree is about: its main purpose is to incentivise employment by allocating almost 1 billion euros in bonuses for hiring young people under 35, women and workers in southern Italy. The release of these incentives is, however, tied to one specific precondition: companies wishing to access these contribution relief measures must apply the economic treatment set out in the national collective agreements signed by the "comparatively most representative" trade union and employer organisations. In plain terms: no pirate contracts, no underpaying — otherwise, no incentives.

No fixed gross or net hourly rate is specified: the fair wage is therefore the one established by the most representative Ccnl (essentially, the most widely applied one) for each employment category. This is no trivial distinction, given that by the end of 2024 as many as 1,086 different types of national collective agreements were registered with the Cnel, the body responsible, across both the public and private sectors.

What is the difference between a fair wage and a minimum wage

The government had until now consistently rejected the path of a minimum wage, and the decree sets out its institutional reasoning: a minimum hourly wage, according to the executive, risks becoming not a floor but a ceiling. The argument runs as follows: if the law says "at least 9 euros an hour", a dishonest employer could use that threshold to justify scrapping benefits, thirteenth-month pay, seniority increments and other contractual elements, effectively reducing overall pay by racing to the bottom.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, presenting the measure, cited the case of the Puglia Region, where the introduction of a minimum hourly wage in a tender for concierge services is said to have produced the opposite of the intended effect: lower wages. The "fair wage", by contrast, is not measured by the hour but in its entirety: it encompasses all the economic components provided for under the contract — base pay, but also thirteenth-month pay, holiday entitlement, bonuses and allowances. It is a broader benchmark, one that refers back to collective bargaining rather than to a figure set by decree.

But one does not exclude the other — quite the opposite

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Salario giusto e CCNL scaduti: i nuovi obblighi per le imprese • Nel DL 62/2026 il salario giusto lega i bonus lavoro ai CCNL rappresentativi. Per i contratti scaduti da 12 mesi scatta l'adeguamento al 30% dell'IPCA.
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5 mag 2026 · Apri su X →

The crux of the legislation is therefore the centrality of collective agreements and of bargaining between trade unions and employer counterparts, removing the "minor" collective contracts that some companies use precisely to drive down labour costs. In reality, however, the minimum wage proposal was working along the same lines: for each category of workers, it took the most widely used national contract, provided that it guaranteed the minimum threshold of 9 euros gross per hour (adjustable year on year in line with inflation). For this reason, some trade unions (the Cgil in particular) and the opposition parties are not entirely convinced, and sum up their position in an effective slogan: "to achieve a fair wage, you need a minimum wage." The measure, they argue, does not guarantee all workers a universal minimum income: those employed in sectors with weak union representation, or covered by poor national contracts, risk being left below a dignified income threshold.