After almost 2 years of pandemic in Italy the job offer is growing and employment is starting again. In the first quarter of 2021, the employment rate in the country started to rise again thanks to the 3,3 million new contracts activated. Of these, 37% are part-timers, most of the time "involuntary", or imposed by companies as a contractual condition for accessing work. But precisely this can become a problem for recovery.
Of the 3.322.643 contracts activated up to June, 1.187.000 were stipulated part-time while those drawn up for men are 2.006.617, those for women instead are 1.316.017. This figure therefore goes to underline serious gender differences: 49,6% of new female hires are part-time against 26% of new male contracts.
“Being under 30 and living in the South continues to represent a condition of further disadvantage”. This is what emerges from the anticipation of the policy brief "a part-time recovery" of the National Institute for the analysis of public policies (INAPP). “Reading these data tells us that the recovery of employment in Italy it risks not being structural because it is focusing too much on reducing costs by reducing hours worked. The prudence of companies risks increasing the group of poor workers and the participation and income gap existing between men and women” declared the president of INAPP Sebastiano Fadda.
If the trend of hiring fewer women, mostly part-time, were to continue, the gender gap in the occupation in Italy, continues Fadda. This is a consolidated phenomenon in many sectors, including financial-insurance, real estate and also in public administration. In the case of commerce, agriculture and real estate activities, fixed-term contracts represent the norm for women, where the incidence of part-time contracts exceeds half of the total contracts.
Among the most worrying data, the South also stands out, in particular the Sicily, Calabria and Molise, where the link between the number of contracts activated and part-time work is around 70%, reaffirming the instability and difficulty of the recovery of the labor market in Southern Italy.
Not even the hiring incentive seems to be able to reduce precariousness and part-time work. Of the 291.548 subsidized hirings of women, equal to 22,2% of the total, 60% were part-time, while of the 488.580 subsidized hirings for men, only 32,5% were part-time.
In conclusion, how do you get out of this boomerang effect on recovery? According to Fadda, it is important to restart the labor market through "a reflection on the ameliorative and selective role which, starting precisely from this restart phase, should characterize the incentive system."
