Negotiating salary and benefits in Italy

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This is a helpful forum and this is a helpful subject.  The question is 'Do You Trust Your Employer?'  'How and Where do you go when your employer had traduced the 'Contract'.  The answer seems to be the 'Carabinieri' who often do not speak English and who more often do not want to be involved nor implement clear legislation.  So you go to a solicitor (no legal aid here nor a 'free half hour's advice from solicitors' as in UK).  Even when the solicitor might accept your case, you pay the money up front, nothing may be done and you have no legal address against the solicitor.  Solicitors. Accountants, Surveyors, Engineers ... are all 'free professional' = unaccountable by law.

My 'surveryor' for example took (stole) 2 blank cheques, falsified them for 7,000 euro, encashed the money and there's nothing I can do.
EU rights have almost 10,000 complaints against Italian lawyers/surveyors and over 20,000 against employers which they have upheld to be dishonest but will take over 5 years to come to court.  Meanwhile, your employer and your surveyor are showing their holiday snaps in Barbados in 5 star hotels in Barbardos and bragging how wonderful it all is.

Welcome any forthright advice .... Great question and sorry to be negative/real!

Negotiating a salary and benefits is a common practice. If you are an employee (contratto di lavoro a tempo determinato or indeterminato), please be aware that the contracts are regulated on a national basis (contratti collettivi) according to the industrial sector of the company. Of course you can negotiate better conditions!
Those contracts are a result of joint agreement bewteen industry sector associations and the trade unions and represent a framework of minimal rights and obligations for workers and employers. Although there are standard rights common to all of them, they might differ from sector to sector: banking / insurance sector contracts are usually more generous than the metalworkers contracts in terms of minimal wages, hours of week work (37 instead of 40) months of salary (14 months vs 13), and number of vacation days (25 vs 20) and work permit hours. Furthermore there might be additional contracts on company level (contratto integrativo), that usually imply more rights to the employees.

In the end, get help from trade unions to check if you are hired at the right level according to your qualifications and with full rights.

Of course if you need desperately a job, you will accept anything, even if at a lower level!! And employers know it...