More and shorter term contracts. The labor market is growing, in line with the trend in GDP, but it is mainly fixed-term employment that drives it, which often lasts a few months or even days. And often the protagonists are still precarious young people. In the second quarter of the year the threshold is lowered and only one new forward contract out of 100 (rpt: 100) exceeds 12 months. On the basis of the mandatory communications of the Ministry of Labor, published in the joint quarterly note on employment trends with Istat, Inps, Inail and Anpal, in fact, 37% of new fixed-term positions foresee a duration of up to 30 days and among these there is also a 13.3% that counts only one day. Always a substantial slice, 36% goes from two to six months and only 0.5% is higher than a year. A percentage, the latter, increasingly lower (it was 1% in the first quarter).
But there are also those who stop much earlier. Overall, in fact, there is an increase in the activation of very short-term contracts: 23.7% is only up to a week. Those between six months and a year are placed at 15.4%. However, it is not enough to recover the vast majority (84.1%) which stops at six months. A situation that affects, albeit with uneven trends also linked to the seasonality factor, almost all sectors: from the sectors of public administration, education and health to services to the hotel and catering sector, from industry to agriculture. The growth of forward contracts is moreover widespread.
The data of the mandatory communications that are sent by employers at the time of hiring also confirm this for the period April-June: in the three months, there was an increase of 159 thousand job positions compared to the first quarter (+88 thousand per time indefinite and +71 thousand on a fixed-term basis). In the annual comparison, the gap is greater. Compared to the second quarter of 2021, in fact, the overall increase is 735 thousand contracts, given by an increase in the permanent contract (+310 thousand in one year). And, at a faster pace and for the fifth consecutive quarter, by the growth of fixed-term positions (+425 thousand in one year). A trend also emerged in the latest Istat data referring to the month of July, when temporary employees (almost 3.2 million) reached the highest value since 1977, the first year of the historical series.