Summing up for the La7 Tg the Datarooms (the usual Monday column in Corriere della Sera) Milena Gabanelli he drew a gloomy picture of the labor market, in his opinion dominated by the ''ttrap of precariousness''. In truth, photography, in my opinion, does not take into account some innovations that have emerged in recent years and which are generally recognized by all observers.
A trend reversal on the labor market
It is not true that the increase in employment to levels never seen before depends only on futures contracts. A trend reversal is underway, perhaps determined by the widening of the mismatch between labor supply and demand which induces companies to contend – even in terms of contractual guarantees – for hard-to-find manpower.
According to the Observatory on the precariousness of INPS in the first ten months of 2022, there were 6.935.000 assumptions, with an increase of 14% compared to the same period of 2021. Growth has affected all types of contracts: there were 1.196.000 hires for permanent contracts, which recorded the most marked growth (+24%). After 2015 – confirmed the Observatory – he had never registered, in the first 10 months of the year, such a large number of permanent jobs.
Land transformations for temporary contracts in the first ten months of 2022 there were 628.000, showing a very strong increase compared to the same period of 2021 (+56%). During the same period confirmations (98.000) of apprenticeship relationships at the end of the training period mark an increase of 6% compared to the previous year (and are permanent contracts). The growth of permanent employees and the self-employed determines – according to Istat – also theincrease in employment compared to December 2021 (+334 thousand), against a number of temporary employees that is 30 thousand fewer.
The Spanish reform of fixed-term contracts
But in the television version (certainly due to the need for greater synthesis) a more accentuated underlining (compared to the article written in the Corriere della sera with Francesco Tortora) of some aspects for which incomplete information ends up not providing a correctly representative picture of the situation. Also a great investigative journalist like Milena Gabanelli has contracted the ''Spanish'' and - as many have been doing for some time now on the political and trade union left - he invited us to ''copy'' (leaving Enrico Mentana perplexed too) the reform of fixed-term contracts launched by the government of Pedro Sanchez and entered into force at the beginning of the year. A reform imposed by the EU – subordinating it to funding from the former Recovery Fund because the Spanish labor market had a rate of precariousness deemed unacceptable.
What no one says - when the Spanish reform is heralded - concerns the regulation of individual dismissal which in Spain constitutes a cost known in advance because it is related to length of service (as it must have been with us with the contract with increasing protections, dismantled by the Consulta and repudiated by those who voted for it) and above all does not provide for reinstatement. These are elements that need to be evaluated.
In Italy when there was the ad nutum dismissal (pursuant to article 2118 of the civil code) the use of fixed-term contracts was limited to very few cases typified in a 1962 law.
The same consideration can be made now by reviewing the percentage of fixed-term work in the various OECD countries; you will find a inversely proportional relationship between fixed-term or precarious employment and rules on dismissal.
For these reasons, I do not find it appropriate to compare Italy's fixed-term employment rate - in line with European standards - with the OECD average, which includes countries in which there is a broad right to interrupt the labor market .
Finally - still on this subject - we must not confuse the flows (where fixed-term hirings prevail even if they are decreasing) with the stocks (where there is no comparison between stable work and other types), bearing in mind however that - even if the government intends to extend the terms provided in the decree dignity, (never applied because it created more problems than it solved) the use of fixed-term work will always have temporary limits.
Vouchers and part time work
A further consideration is appropriate regarding the reintroduction of vouchersin all productive sectors. If the problem is scams – i.e. the reporting of fewer hours than those actually carried out – it must be taken into account that the procedures have changed thanks to the digitization of requests, which allows greater control (even with respect to the ceilings envisaged for the use of occasional work) on regularity.
After all, the abuse of short-term contracts is not extraneous to the abolition of vouchers in 2017. It is also observed - it is written in the Technical Report to the budget law - that a wider recourse to the occasional job it should lead to less use of other types of contracts (e.g. fixed-term work, seasonal work), which, in the light of the greater benefits granted by the new vouchers (CPO), would lead to lower tax revenues.
Finally, I am aware that the voice involuntary part-time is foreseen in the official statistics, but I cannot find a justification for such a classification, except to point out that where there is a high female employment, in Northern European countries, the share of part-time work. 4% of women in the EU have a part-time job (2021). A share that in the case of men is equal to just 1,8%. Part-time work thus more than doubles among women. However, this figure varies widely from country to country.
In all member states of theXNUMX-XNUMX business days in the 2018 annual average, 181.4 million people aged 15-64 had a full-time job (110.2 million men and 71.2 million women), another 43 million were employed part-time (10.5 million men and 32.5 million women). In 2018, the highest percentage of part-time work was recorded in Netherlands at 50.1%, in Austria to 27.3% and in Germany to 26.8%; these countries also had the highest part-time employment rates of women. In the Netherlands this rate was 75.6%, in Austria 46.9% and in Germany 46.3%. In the European average, the percentage of men employed part-time was 8.7% and women 31.3%.
Full-time employment showed only moderate growth of an average of 0.5% in the decade 2008-2018, and was mainly attributable to the increase in full-time employment of women (+4.0%) as that of men is decreased by 1.7%. The number of part-time jobs in the EU Member States in 2018 was 2008% higher than in 12.6, whereby there was a clear relative increase of men of 24.5% to women (+9.2%). These are data that precede the tsunami of the pandemic. But they are equally significant of a consolidated and similar trend in all EU countries.
