All forecasting centers (public and private, national and international) now estimate that the weakness of the economic cycle will persist in Italy for the next two years as well.
In its latest monthly bulletin, the ECB confirms the prospect of a slow recovery, but also reiterates that unemployment remains high and that the lack of structural reforms, starting with that of the labor market, will continue to weigh on the pace of recovery.
The long phase of crisis and the double recession, with the deterioration of the labor market, have also weakened the potential for development: the serious uncertainties regarding employment prospects (above all for young people, women and in the South), the depressed expectations for the future demand, meager expectations in terms of real wage increases lead to a worse review of consumption plans for households and investment plans for businesses.
Strong actions are therefore needed to support the world of work and production because it is from here that energies and skills can first of all come to restore a future to our country: a profound and radical cultural change is essential in politics, in trade unions, among entrepreneurs, that recognizes to work, talent and merit the individual and collective value that is attributed to them by Western social models.
The harmonization of labor market rules and labor law with those of at least the continental European countries is a priority action in this sense.
In the last twenty years Governments, of whatever political or technical composition they were, unable to remove the obstacle of the flexibility of outgoing work (compulsory reintegration pursuant to art. 18), have tried, first with the Treu law, then with the Biagi and lastly with Fornero herself, to make the incoming work relationship more flexible by expanding the types of temporary or fixed-term contracts, the number of which is moreover difficult to quantify, ranging from fifteen counted by Confindustria to forty calculated by the CGIL.
However, a flexible labor market requires an efficient system of active policies for job seekers and job losers: otherwise, flexibility turns into job precariousness.
A flexible worker in the United States, even more so now that the crisis has passed, is a strong person in the market, a worker who acquires new skills every time he changes jobs, he is a person who can choose.
In Italy, a flexible worker, or rather a precarious worker, is a person who feels weak and who in changing jobs sees no possibility of growth but only the risk of not being able to.
If it is true that jobs are not created by decree, nor are companies kept alive with subsidies, but growth is necessary, as everyone says, then the pre-conditions of the labor market must be created which can not to miss the train of recovery, attracting investments again or stopping the desertification of our manufacturing system.
To make precarious young people lose the sense of uncertainty about the future and the belief that work is a place where luck or belonging count more than other things, it is especially necessary to rebalance a labor system today characterized by the duality between the temporariness of precarious workers, especially young people, and the overprotection of public or private workers with open-ended contracts, reducing on the one hand the guarantees of open-ended contracts and, on the other, improving the welfare safety net.
In this sense, in the field of work in the private sector, and why not also in the public sector, prevalence should be given to open-ended contracts, so as to give confidence and motivation especially to young people, but with the possibility of termination for justified typified reason (removing the judges' discretion) with the recognition of an indemnity proportional to the duration of the employment relationship. The real protection of reintegration would be provided only in the case of discriminatory dismissals.
The introduction of the new open-ended contract should also simplify or reduce, if not even eliminate, the various contractual forms of temporary work, with a few exceptions such as temporary work, apprenticeship or fixed-term contracts in specific cases, such as such as maternity leave.
But the transition from a fixed work culture to a flexible work culture can only be done if it is reconciled with precise choices that increase the sense of security in workers. It will therefore be necessary to define and apply active policies for those looking for work and for those who lose it, ensuring efficient information services and adequate training initiatives, income systems against unemployment and a modern framework of social safety nets.
In this context and with the announced simplification of that inextricable tangle of labor laws and related laws, regulations and circulars, our labor law will inevitably have to strip itself of the legacies of the past such as the right to the workplace to seek new ways such as to permanent training or employability, the only real protection that the worker will have to demand in a future increasingly characterized by a working life divided between work and unavoidable professional updating.
It is now the turn of Matteo Renzi and his government to follow up the words of his Jobs Act with deeds.
