Just an hour after its opening, the clickday of the flow decree has been overbooked. The website reported it Keep them in mind: at 10 in the morning the questions were 238.335nearly three times as many 82.705 quote envisaged by the new Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers (dpcm) for the transitional planning of flows. According to some, the lightning-fast adhesion would be the demonstration that the flow decrees have always been and remain a tool for the “emergence of workers already present illegally”. He is convinced of it Andrea Zini, president of Assindatcolf, the national association of domestic employers, a category excluded from the dpcm. More generally, the massive request to access the quotas demonstrates how much the demand for labor is actually “much wider than that estimated by the government’s dpcm”, he declared Coldiretti, which requests an additional decree. Hypothesis on which the government has said it is available. Much more complicated remains to find a solution to the shortage of organic of the one-stop shops for immigration of the Prefectures, where the entry clearance alone takes months if not a year. And from this year the government has made the transition from the employment centres, who will have to ensure that for the job offered to a foreign citizen there is not already an unemployed person available. Short numbers and long times, in short, in the country that only for projects of Pnrr it needs 400,000 new workers by 2026, the Bank of Italy has estimated.
Departure with a bang for the first day of submission of applications for accession to the latest flow decree, more abundant than the previous one, with over 82 thousand quotas of which 44 thousand for seasonal work. The requests were three times the availability estimated by the executive, which in the recent immigration decree signed in Cutro promised to expand the flow decrees. It is the only means of regular entry into Italy for work. Because a legal way does not exist. But decrees flows, remember Philip MiragliaArci’s Immigration Manager, “are used to bring people into Italy who already have a contract, a promise of employment from an Italian employer obtained while they are still in their country of origin: mostly it is a fake“. And he explains: “No one hires people that he doesn’t know, that he has never met. These male and female workers, apart from seasonal workers, are already in Italy and are forced to return home to pretend to enter for the first time at the request of their employer. In reality, everyone knows that this employer knows them because they have been working illegally for a period and the employer, having no other option, regularizes them as soon as he can”. Like dozens of other associations, Arci renews its request to “modify this impracticable mechanism and allow people to arrive in Italy with a job search visa“.
Not only that, the flows decree is aimed only at certain nationalities, which the government now hopes to expand on the condition that the states concerned reach agreements on the repatriation of irregular migrants. And it’s just about determined category. For agriculture, for example, there are only seasonal quotas. And large sectors of manufacturing and domestic work, marked mostly by undeclared work, remain completely excluded. “No click day today for domestic work employer families, left unjustly excluded due to a lack of planning that has been going on for over 12 years and which is making figures such as cleaners and carers untraceable on the labor market. To meet the needs of families would be needed 23 miles new non-EU workers a year”, explains Zini of Assindatcolf, who relaunches on the flow decrees as viaticum for people who “actually are workers already present illegally”. And he asks for “more resources but also simpler procedures, because families are not businesses and cannot think of turning to employment centers which, among other things, to date are not even the bodies responsible for employment in our sector , considering that it is INPS that manages the hirings”.
“In the countryside with the arrival of spring there is a need for at least 100 mila workers (the quotas are 44 thousand, ndr) to fill the lack of manpower that hit hard last year with the significant loss of crops”, says the president of Coldiretti Ettore Prandini, and calls for “an additional flow decree, also provided for by law”. In response, the government has opened up the possibility of additional quotas during the year: “We are aware that there are greater requests, but we are talking about activities other than seasonal or training quotas: we will monitor the situation and we are looking at a broader planning to understand if we will have to intervene again”, said the Minister of Labour Marina Calderone. Meanwhile, the oppositions attack: “The government navigates on sight not having absolute knowledge of reality. This is demonstrated by the fact that, on the day of click day, the requests far exceed the availability”, he declared Stefano Vaccari, Pd group leader in the Agriculture Committee of the Chamber. And he adds: “Instead of playing sheriffs along the coasts towards poor people fleeing wars and miseries, President Meloni and Minister Lollobrigida should commit themselves to defining an organic strategy for regulating the flows of workers in compliance with the indications and requests that come from businesses and companies involved in production cycles”
However, the crux of the public administration remains, which will have to deal with it, starting from Prefectures and from the one-stop shops, often still at work with the previous flows decrees, with questions that have been waiting for months and in some cases for more than a year, as happened above all in large centers such as Rome, Milan or Naples. Not only that, the same procedure for emerging from undeclared work, the so-called decree Bellanova, has not yet completed the practices also due to the non-renewal of temporary workers allocated to the Prefectures until 31 December last. Not only that: starting this year, the government has made it mandatory to verify “the unavailability of workers present on the national territory” at the employment centres. The rule has already existed since 2013, but until yesterday it was a question of slipping a form into the files of the flow decree, certain that it would remain in a drawer. Now instead the verification becomes preventive and it must be demonstrated. Apart from seasonal workers for agriculture and the tourism-hotel sector, all other job offers will have to go through the employment centers first. A further step which on the one hand, for those who are actually already in Italy, is useless given that the employer’s request is made to the person. On the other hand, it risks further lengthening the times of an already insufficient tool to respond to a labor market that by 2026 will have lost 630,000 residents of working age (15-69 years). While only for projects linked to the Pnrr, estimated by the Bank of Italy without counting any related activities generated, are needed 370 mila new workers in the next three years. The accounts do not add up.