Italy mulls extreme weather furlough in face of heat wave

With conditions making work difficult, govt set to bring in stay-at-home payments

Workers in Italy's agriculture and construction sectors could soon find themselves on a furlough program similar to the one seen during the novel coronavirus pandemic, with the government covering their wages while they are unable to work because of the extreme weather conditions currently being experienced.

While much of southern Europe has been suffering from extreme heat, in Italy the weather has been even more chaotic, with the south of the country baking in high temperatures and wildfires, while further north there have been tornadoes, violent storms, and, in the most unseasonal incident, 100 people in the Veneto region were injured by hailstones the size of tennis balls.

In a Twitter posting, Italy's minister for civil protection and marine policies Nello Musumeci said Italy had lived "one of the most complicated days of the last decades: storms, tornadoes, giant hail in the North; torrid heat and devastating fires in the Center-South … I feel I have to thank the firefighters, the civil protection managers and volunteers, the police forces, the forestry workers and all those who are mobilized in the most difficult trenches."

In the southern coastal city of Reggio Calabria, just across the water from the island of Sicily, the fire brigade has reported attending 400 callouts for storm damage incidents, including flooding and fallen trees, and the country's Labor Minister Marina Calderone told trade unions that a weather furlough proposal was likely to be discussed at a meeting of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Cabinet on Wednesday.

Currently, under Italian law, companies can apply for temporary layoffs for no more than 52 weeks in a two-year period, or in the case of agriculture, 90 days per year, usually because of trade slowing down.

Because of workers in the two named sectors only being able to do their work on site, rather than remotely, the rules will be amended to give them special dispensation that any necessary lay-offs should not be counted toward that time allowance.

But trade union the General Confederation of Labor says the proposed measures need to go further. "Nothing is provided to help people working for delivery firms or seasonal workers, or other categories of employees," it said in a statement.

According to data published this week by the World Weather Attribution academic collaboration, which includes Imperial College London, Princeton, and the Indian Institute of Technology Dehli, the extreme heat currently being experienced across parts of the United States and Europe would have been "virtually impossible" without climate change.

The same analysis also said that climate change had made the current heat wave in China at least 50 times more likely to have occurred.