The jobs preserved with the freeze on layoffs, decided by the Conte government, in the period from March 2020 to February 2021 can be estimated at about 330,000, over two thirds attributable to companies with up to 15 employees. The figure is put in black and white in the XX Annual Report of INPS presented on Monday 12 July, which shows that economic layoffs in the year of the pandemic were about half of the average 560,000 in the previous two years. “It will now be a question of how this balance will evolve following the removal of the redundancy block” warned INPS president Pasquale Tridico. Overall, considering all types of contracts, at the end of February 2021, the number of employees in private companies had decreased by 37,000 units compared to the same time of the previous year.
More generally, between the last quarter of 2019 and the first of 2021, the number of employees fell by 2.8%, the work units by 7.1% and the hours worked by 7.7%. “A part, albeit reduced also following the blocking of layoffs, lost their jobs, but many – reads the Report – have worked and earned less”. Inps underlines that in dependent work with the pandemic there has been a reduction in employed persons of 2.1% and in hours worked by 6.9%, percentages that for self-employed work rise to 5.1% and 9 respectively, 8 percent.
In the meantime, on the basis of provisional data updated to 30 June 2021 provided by the Ministry of Labor and Bank of Italy, it emerged that in the first six months of the current year 719 thousand jobs were created, up 12% from 2019. “The Employment dynamics – reads a joint note from Mef and Bankitalia – recovering since the end of April, has clearly strengthened in the following two months, favored by the progress of the vaccination campaign and the consequent gradual removal of restrictions on economic activities. In the first six months of the year, 719,000 jobs were created, more than 12 per cent more than in the same period of 2019. However, the gap between the employment contracts activated since the beginning of the pandemic and those estimates would have been observed in the absence of the Covid-19 crisis: approximately -270,000, based on projections compatible with the macroeconomic forecasts of the Bank of Italy, formulated before the health emergency ».
Returning to the numbers released by INPS, the average annual salary of employees fell from 24,140 euros in 2019 to 23,091 euros in 2020, with a decline of 4.3% and an average loss per employee of just over 1,000 euros, due to mainly of the average reduction in weeks worked.
In general, since wage inequality increases, according to Tridico, the introduction of a minimum wage between 8 and 9 euros per hour could represent “the first step” towards “an approach of fairness and universal protections”. According to the INPS president, “positive effects would also be found on public finance, with an increase in revenue of about 3 billion in the hypothesis of a minimum wage of 9 euros gross”.
«As soon as the emergency phase ends – added Tridico – it will be necessary to concentrate the resources, in the future scarcer, on the cases of greatest need. It will also be necessary to rebalance not only subsidies, but also the distribution of protections, in a context where the area of poor work and precarious work is dangerously widening ».
Moving on to the “pensions” chapter, the average incomes of men in 2020 were equal to 1,897 euros, higher than those of women by 532 euros. As for the 60-year pension advance plus 40 contributions granted by the so-called Quota 100, according to INPS data, it allowed 180,000 men and 73,000 women to leave work in the two-year period 2019-20 (112,000 men and 36,000 women in 2019 and 68,000 men and 37,000 women in 2020). The Report shows that the measure was mainly used by men, by subjects with medium-high incomes and relatively more frequently by public employees. While with regard to the employment impacts of the measure, the analysis conducted by INPS on company data “does not show clear evidence of a stimulus to greater hires by the pension advance”.
Quota 100 filed, among the measures under consideration by the government is that of allowing early retirement with 41 years of contributions, regardless of age. According to INPS calculations, this proposal would commit up to 0.4% of the gross domestic product, starting from 4.3 billion in 2022 to reach 9.2 billion at the end of the decade.
If Quota 100 does not seem to have worked, income and the citizenship pension during the pandemic have constituted, according to Tridico, “a powerful tool to support the most needy sections of the population and, at the same time, have contributed to reducing the risk of social tensions “.