Abstract

This article investigates the «occupational welfare» that concerns welfare provision resulted of bargaining between social partners, or voluntary and unilateral initiatives by companies. The article firstly aims to analyze the main features of the Italian occupational welfare. The focus is on the protection of both «old» and «new» social risk. As regards «old risks», we consider the case of supplementary funds in pension and health care. As regards «new risks», we consider re-conciliation and vocational training. The second aim of this work is to analyze the relationship between occupational and public welfare. In particular, the purpose is to better understand whether occupational welfare promotes the correction of the three typical distortions of Italian welfare model (territorial, functional, distributive) or, on the contrary, occupational welfare schemes reinforce such distortions. The analysis point out that the occupational welfare is able to promote a «functional» recalibration, but it achieves more limited results if we consider both the «territorial» and «distributional» recalibration.