“Nobody will lose their jobs because of the coronavirus“. A year has passed since the former Minister of Economy, Roberto Gualtieri made the famous promise that he could never keep. In the twelve months between February 2020 and February 2021, the number of employees surveyed by Istat is one million fewer, 945 thousand to be exact: a massacre. And without a quick turnaround, which passes through the national vaccination plan, the situation risks worsening further: on June 30, in fact, the blocking of layoffs and the Covid layoffs will end.
“The repeated economic downturns in employment, recorded from the beginning of the health emergency until January 2021 – reads the document from the Institute of Statistics – led to a drop in employment compared to February 2020 (-4.1% equal to -945,000 units). The decrease involves men and women, employees (-590,000) and self-employed (-355,000) and all age groups. The employment rate falls, in one year, by 2.2 percentage points, reaching 56.5% “.
In February, the unemployment rate fell to 10.2% (-0.1 points compared to the previous month) “interrupting the negative trend which, between September 2020 and January 2021, led to the loss of over 410 thousand employees”.
Employment is substantially stable both among women and men and even grows among permanent employees and among the under 35s, it continues to decline, however, among permanent hires (who are in fact renewed expired contracts), the self-employed and those in the over 35 age bracket.
However, insiders are worried about the number of inactive people, i.e. those who do not work or even look for a job: the rate is stable at 37%, but over the twelve months compared to 21 thousand more people looking for employment, there are 717 thousand more inactive. Today the “discouraged” are just over 14 million compared to 22 million workers and 2.5 million unemployed.
Among the few positive data that emerge from the Istat survey is the interruption of the negative trend that led to the loss of 410 thousand employees between last September and January with the peak of -184 thousand workers between the last month of last year and the first month of 2021.