ROME It is a problem many a company faces in these tough times how to replace older - and costlier - workers with younger, cheaper ones.

A Rome bank has what it thinks is the solution to make the jobs hereditary. Under a deal signed with unions this week, 76 employees of Banca di Credito Cooperativo di Roma (BCC di Roma) must take early retirement but they will get a choice either take a payoff or leave your job to your son or daughter (or indeed any relative “up to the third degree”, which would allow the post to be left even to great-nieces and nephews).

Amid controversy that saw one of the unions withdraw its signature from the relevant part of the agreement, a negotiator for the workers defended it as favouring “generational turnover”. Another, Lando Sileoni, joint general secretary of the bank workers' union, FABI, suggested it could offer a model. “The big banking groups should take the deal in Rome as an example,” he said.

Others were unimpressed. The Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera called it an attack on “one of the most important means with which to try to build a more open economy social mobility”.

The three-year agreement, which comes into force on January 1, stipulates that those put forward by their relatives will have to be interviewed and prove “they possess the requirements” needed to do the work.

The BCC di Roma, which has 127 branches and 18,700 account holders, will get the last word on who is taken on. But that was not enough for Italy's biggest trades union federation, the left-wing CGIL, which announced on Nov 20 that it was overruling its local negotiators.

Italy is among Europe's least socially mobile countries, along with Britain. Figures compiled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that less than 18 per cent of people born into the poorest quarter of the population move up to the next-poorest 25 per cent.

Italy also fares badly in comparisons in what is known as “income elasticity” - the variation in earnings from one generation to the next. Among EU countries, only Britain scores worse.

One reason is the difficulty faced by Italians from poorer backgrounds in gaining a university degree. Another is that, whether formally or informally, many positions are handed from parent to child. As recently as 1992, the government in Rome issued a decree reserving a fifth of all the openings in the Italian postal service for relatives of employees and ex-employees.

A recent study found 44 per cent of architects and 42 per cent of lawyers were the children of people who had practised the same profession. It is next to impossible in Italy to own a chemist's shop unless your father or mother had one because the number of licences that can be bequeathed is controlled by the authorities.

Perhaps the most bizarre example of inheritable employment surfaced in Florence, where the legal entitlement to sketch tourists outside the Uffizi gallery was also hereditary. Talent for drawing, of course, may not be passed on. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service