In recent weeks, in which the "prise du pouvoir" by the yellow-green coalition is underway, I have read - I do it at every deadline, but this time I have paid more attention and broadened the horizon - the institutional reports on the situation in the country. I recall the main ones (which are added to the consultation of periodic monitoring on the performance of the labor market and the pension system): the XVII Annual Report of the INPS, the 2018 Report of the Court of Auditors on the coordination of expenditure; the eighth annual report on foreigners in the labor market in Italy. Lastly, I found a very recent Inapppolicybrief (n.9 of 2018) interesting on the use of ancillary work and the demand for discontinuous work.
Reading these documents, I got an impression that I think it would be useful to share: it was as if the institutions, study centers and researchers who drafted these reports did so for future reference. In short, to leave written to posterity how things really were in Italy before the yellow-green Big Brother was able to pass only the lies of the regime. Basically, as if the last "righteous" left to occupy their positions, before the guillotine of the spoils system de noantri, have taken advantage of the months of transition to insert, in bottles entrusted to the waves of the sea, the maps of the secret places - which escaped the devastation - in which future generations will be able to find precious documents containing the true history of their country, before the invasions and barbarian dominations.
The publication of the Inapp (formerly Isfol) is measured against one of the themes - that of the so-called precariousness - which has contributed most to the affirmation of the new dominant theories according to which it is not the facts, events and processes that count, but the "democratic" perception ” that the people have of them. The study examines the consistency of ancillary and discontinuous employment relationships on the overall structure of employment as a consequence of the effects of the recurring legislative changes of recent years, inspired now by permissive policies and now by actual persecutions of an ideological nature.
According to the different inspiration of the norms, the typologies of discontinuous and accessory work widen or restrict their sphere of intervention, they run after each other, they take the place of one another. It's a sort of game of the four corners where it's up to a form targeted from time to time to stay in the middle, before returning (see the case of vouchers) in vogue. But on balance, the brief comes to conclusions that invite reflection. The evolution of the use of discontinuous forms of work - the document claims - highlights an almost immediate reaction by employers to measures of limitation on the one hand and liberalization on the other, reducing their use in the first case and extending it in the second .
Above all, there is a transfer of the demand for discontinuous work towards the relatively less regulated forms, which certainly in part conceals the use of these forms as a legal cover for irregular or undeclared work. However, what happened after the introduction of voucher traceability in October 2016, when the use of on-call work increased, which also provides for stringent use criteria and traceability since 2012, leads us to believe that there is a demand for discontinuous so to speak genuine, that is motivated by needs of an organizational-productive nature rather than by the desire to use legal instruments to conceal undeclared work.
In fact, it is symptomatic - the point is important - that both before the 2012 reform, which limits the use of on-call work and at the same time liberalizes the use of vouchers, and after the abolition of the latter, there is a demand base of discontinuous work estimated at at least 10 million hours per month. This demand has distinct needs from those that legitimize the use of fixed-term or temporary work contracts, for which the amount of working hours is pre-established. The policy maker may deem that the consequences of discontinuous work for the worker, related to the unilateral power of the employer to establish if and when the performance will take place, are unacceptable.
The risk of this position is that the transfer effect, which Inapp's policy brief has highlighted, takes place towards "poor" forms of self-employment, or towards undeclared work, thus depriving the worker of labor law, social and social security (which are also provided for in all regulated cases). An alternative approach – here is the arduous sentence that condemns certain questionable abolitionist theories – consists in acknowledging the existence of the demand for discontinuous labour, and in deeming it acceptable (only) to the extent that the organizational and production needs of the employer can be reconciled with those of the worker to obtain certainty of a quantum of protection. This position leads us to consider the adoption of rigorous traceability of any form of discontinuous work as fundamental and unavoidable.
