The coming month of August will represent an important stage for the problems of work-related stress which have been affecting the working category of the ISF for too many years.
In fact, the legislation envisaged by legislative decree 81/08 on health and safety at work will enter into force, subsequently amended by legislative decree 106/09, which assigns trade union organizations and those of employers the task of promoting the culture of health and safety at work and in the workplace, also obliging companies to produce a document assessing the risks associated with work, including those relating to work-related stress, according to the contents of the European framework agreement of the 2004, implemented in Italy on 6/9/2008.
The obligation to evaluate work-related stress will take effect from 1 August 2010.
One of the main problems that are posed by these new regulations is that of developing the indications necessary for the assessment of stress risks, which has always been particularly relevant for the ISF category, both for the variegated forms through which the activity is expressed of these workers (work in contact with potential sufferers of pathologies, management of the deposit of free samples, management of video terminals, significant annual mileage, non-ergonomic organization of work areas, bullying, attribution of responsibility for sales results not provided for by law) , and because in recent years due to the unscrupulous layoffs that some nonchalant drug companies have implemented against these workers, it has taken on connotations of serious social alarm.
For the elaboration of these indications, a "Permanent advisory commission for occupational health and safety" is already at work, within which special permanent and temporary committees have already been set up, which see the equal presence of representatives ministries, of the Regions and Autonomous Provinces, of experts of the major workers' union organizations (CGIL, CISL, UIL), and experts of the employers' union organizations (art 6 of Legislative Decree 106/09).
This is therefore a particularly important and delicate moment for the ISFs in the light of the recent renewal of the category CCNL which has seen the creation of yet another betrayal of the needs to protect workers from scientific drug information by the major trade union organizations themselves continued to maintain in the profile of the ISF the figure of the "employee with managerial functions" (which no law provides for), allowing drug companies to interpret it with the possibility of excessively extending working hours, well beyond the maximum limits that the law (and common sense) provides, burdening such workers with a company
