MILAN. What have been the effects of the pandemic on employment and wages in Italy? This question was answered by the CGIL together with the Di Vittorio Foundation with its latest report «Occupational precariousness and wage problems». From the analysis, which put the wage issue in Italy from 2008 to 2020 under the lens, and where possible also for the first months of 2021, a worrying fact emerged: those employed with precarious, involuntary jobs and severe wage disadvantages have risen to over 5 million. These are fragile individuals who pay the highest costs of the crisis. To these are added the unemployed (2.5 million) and workers on layoffs.
As highlighted in the Report, between 2008 and 2020, precarious employment increased steadily and during the crisis phases it was further penalized as it was less protected by the deadline and by access to social safety nets. In this period, permanent employees grew by only 15 thousand units (+ 0.1%), while those at term of 413 thousand (+ 18.1%), but in the year 2019 – 2020 alone, the latter fell significantly. 365 thousand units.
The conclusions of the study show that the previous structural difficulties in our labor market, which emerged dramatically after the Great Recession of 2008 (slow recovery of employment levels, involuntary part-time growth, wage stagnation), were added to the pandemic crisis that it had a heavy impact on employment levels and the wage bill. The crisis caused by Covid-19 has in fact resulted in a worsening of numerous aspects of precariousness considering the multiple dimensions that define it. This intense decline was more contained thanks to the blocking of layoffs and the extensive use of social safety nets: two measures that made it possible to alleviate, even if only in part, further suffering at the employment and wage level that mainly affected the most precarious groups. .
The last carriage of fixed-term work
The analysis of employment dynamics has shown that fixed-term employment, especially part-time employment, suffers a double penalty and performs the double function of locomotive in moments of greatest employment growth and of last carriage in periods of greatest difficulty for the job market. A further aspect of the precariousness is highlighted by the balance of 2020 between hirings and terminations (- 116 thousand), which is the result of a growth for precarious contractual forms (+161 thousand) and a decrease for stable ones (-277 thousand) , and the share of all terminated employment relationships with a maximum duration of 365 days, which represents over 80%. In a nutshell, the most precarious workers paid for the economic crisis of 2008 and today they pay for the pandemic crisis of 2020. “The issue of precariousness and low wages has, as the data show, assumed a dramatic and unbearable dimension that must be addressed and resolved, certainly not by re-proposing dualisms or conflicts between the so-called “guaranteed” and “unsecured” – comments the president of the foundation Fulvio Fammoni -. It should be remembered that Italy generally has a lower salary among comparable European nations and that the solution, therefore, cannot be that of communicating vessels, since even the most paid typology still has a significantly lower salary than the average of major economies of the Eurozone. The problem to be faced and solved, both from an economic and regulatory point of view, is therefore, in a specific way, the area of precariousness and wage hardship that is condensed around the phenomenon of working discontinuity and involuntary nature ».
According to the expert, «as highlighted, there are simultaneously problems of both the quantity of employment and wages and the quality of work closely linked to each other. The amount of employed in Italy is too low, dropped enormously as a result of the pandemic crisis, but also previously much lower than the European average. The numerical growth forecasts estimated in the PNRR for the next few years are too low, it took ten years to recover the employment level of 2008, it is not possible that to recover the decline in employment in 2020 we have to wait until 2024 in the presence of more great investment phase never developed in Italy. It is therefore necessary to have greater finalization and greater constraints for employment compared to the use of European and national funds ”.