The President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, inviting young people to participate actively in political life and avoiding taking refuge in the discouragement of anti-politics, however took care to break down some clichés that give a distorted and illusory idea of the road that must be taken to overcome the crisis. Without the rigor of the public budget - said the Head of State - we would have continued to make debts by offloading the relative burden on young people who are called to foot the bill for their fathers' cheerful expenses. And this is exactly the opposite concept to the more widespread one in the youth vulgate and beyond, according to which austerity is paid for above all by young people.
Even the Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco, speaking at the Quirinale at the presentation of the Arel report on young people and work, took the opportunity to break down another cliché according to which, especially in trade union propaganda, there is a tendency to confuse precariousness with flexibility. These are two different concepts and we need to discuss how to implement a well-regulated flexibility precisely to overcome precariousness.
Arel's powerful research entitled "Youth without a future?" and coordinated by Tiziano Treu and Carlo Dell'Aringa, it clearly clarifies the dimensions and terms of the youth question, offering ample food for thought to those who want to tackle a serious and complex problem without demagoguery. In the first place, Treu and Dell'Aringa demonstrate that young Italians are paying a high price due to the crisis, but not too different from what young people in other European countries are enduring. The real diversity lies not so much in unemployment which has risen a lot, but in the activity rate which in Italy is just 40% while in Germany it is 53%.
For young Italians temporary contracts are about 46% against 57% in Germany. Consequently, and this seems to us to be the first important statement contained in the report, it can be said that the high rate of youth unemployment in Italy does not depend so much on precariousness, i.e. on the diffusion of temporary employment contracts, as on deep-seated structural causes crisis has worsened, but which pre-existed the explosion of the financial bubble in 2008. We need to understand them well and remove them if we want to emerge from the crisis with a more efficient system capable of offering real integration opportunities for young people and not just false promises.
The most delicate problems of the youth situation are on the one hand the neither-nor young people, i.e. those who do not work and do not study, and on the other the spread of illegal working situations, i.e. internships, VAT numbers, etc. In addition of course to the real illegal work which naturally does not concern only, nor perhaps mainly, young people and which cannot be estimated with an acceptable approximation.
The Arel study also indicates a series of policies capable of tackling the youth problem which is not only linked to the crisis phase we are experiencing, but which derives from a progressive deterioration of the structures responsible for facilitating the entry of young people into the market work, which began at least 15 years ago and which was partially buffered in the last decade by the Biagi laws which increased entry flexibility. In fact, Arel's proposals start from the need to review and redevelop scholastic pathways and the quality of our education in general, linking it more closely to the world of work also through the intensification of school-work alternation which is little practiced by us compared what happens in other countries.
Then we move on to an improvement in apprenticeship which in Italy does not work mainly due to the difficulties of clarifying the competences of the State and the Regions which should participate in the support of this institution which in many other European countries plays a fundamental role in facilitating integration of young people in the workplace. It is also necessary to reorganize the employment services by placing capable and competent personnel in order to help young people in the selection of job opportunities. And this, combined with targeted and selective income support, could attack precisely those pockets of greater suffering constituted by the many young people who do not work and do not study.
Finally, Treu and Dell'Aringa make it clear in several points that it would be appropriate to unify, or at least bring closer, the protections between precarious workers and holders of permanent jobs and that this should not happen by reducing entry flexibility. This redistribution of rights also includes the age-old question of article 18 which the two authors, while making it clear that we are dealing with an outdated and harmful "law", prefer not to address it directly to avoid "social tensions", but propose some methods capable of mitigating its impact without formally undermining the taboos of reintegration which is increasingly a banner of trade union organisations.
Young people have a future. Offering it is in the interest of the country, including the elderly. To achieve the goal it is necessary to become aware that it is the context of the Italian economy that must change, open up to innovation, change behaviors that are now shells incapable of giving effective protection to the wearer, place oneself in a position to use the talents and the desire to make young people so as to resume the path of development all together.
