The increased complexity of changes in the labor market is not fully captured by traditional indicators based on stock data. Also for this reason, in recent times the analysis of flow data on the number of new employment relationships activated and terminated and on their characteristics has assumed ever greater importance.
With reference to the EU-28 countries as a whole, the picture that can be drawn from an initial analysis of the flow data is that of increased instability in employment relationships: on average, both permanent and full-time are 20% lower than in 2008.
According to some, the greater flexibility of contractual relations has had the merit of leading to a hint of recovery of the labor market in Europe, in the face of still intermittent economic growth. The reference is above all to the Spanish case. On the other hand, according to some commentators, the growth of temporary employment contracts reduces the incentive of workers to invest in themselves, and in fact represents a brake on productivity.
In Italy, according to the Ministry of Labour, 2014 new employment relationships were activated between January and September 7.610.050, involving 4.650.238 workers. This indicates that 1,64 contracts have been activated for each worker. Also during the first nine months of 2014, the number of terminated contracts amounted to 6.753.773, involving 4.081.734 workers. More than two thirds (68,8%) of the new relationships activated are "fixed-term", a type of contract that is constantly growing (62,9% of the total in 2011). In the same period of time, new permanent employment contracts fell to 1.246.657 (16,4% of the total, from 17,7% in 2011).
Most of the terminated contracts in Italy concerned very short-term employment relationships: in the first nine months of 2014 more than one out of three terminated contracts (37,5%) involved employment relationships with an effective duration of less than 30 days, 15,2% of these lasted only one day, and 16,1% between 4 and 30 days. As natural to expect, given the very short expected effective duration, most of the terminations of employment relationships occur due to contractual expiry (64,5%), while only in 9,3% it occurs due to a dismissal.
