The ISTAT data on the labor market updated in July confirm a trend that has already been evident for some time: the increase in people at work brings employment close to the pre-crisis levels of 2008, as has already happened in Lombardy in recent months. The irrefutable clarity of the numbers also has the merit of directing media criticism towards real and serious issues, such as the quality of the new job from the point of view of professional content and salary, even if a certain inability to read the data still persists on employment referring to age groups, for which La Stampa headlines "only the over 50s find work" and Oscar Giannino on Radio1 claims the same thing.
It must be remembered that ISTAT does not monitor job placements, (not the new hirings which are inferred from the Mandatory Communications and which are instead illustrated by the reports of the INPS Observatory) but simply how many people are employed in a certain period, and compares this figure with that of the previous period, in absolute terms and dividing them by age group. These numbers are significantly influenced by demographic dynamics, whereby a worker who at the end of June has turned 50 in July is no longer counted in the 35-49 bracket (and therefore that bracket "loses" an employee) while the 50- 64 “earns” one. Since in our society the distribution of the population in the age groups is not equal but it is wider in the older age groups, the turnover (entry of new subjects in the younger groups) is not equivalent to the exit of young people towards the older groups . There is therefore an aging of the employed more or less equivalent to the aging of the overall population: the fact that companies mainly hire over 50s is an optical effect due to demographic dynamics.
After all, it would be enough to take the trouble to read the ISTAT tables to the end to discover the latest (and worthy) table "Tendential Changes Net of the Demographic Component", from which it can be deduced that in the 15-34 range the employed have increased by 1,7% and the unemployed decreased by 3,2%, in the 35-49 group, apparently penalized by the raw data, the employed increased by 0,9% (instead of decreasing, as in the "optical effect", by 1,2, 2,3%) and the unemployed drop by 50%, while in the 64-1,8 range, the "privileged" one, employment increases by 3,7% against 15,4% and, lo and behold, unemployment increases by XNUMX%!
After all, the report for the first half of 2017 published by the Observatory on Precariat (INPS) helps us to refocus things: here, as mentioned before, hirings and terminations are counted and this therefore allows us to observe the flows of the labor market and not just the final balance. As regards recruitment (i.e. recruitment of young people on their first job, the unemployed, workers from another company) there were (considering open-ended, fixed-term and apprenticeship contracts) 1.124.831 for the 15-30 age group years.
Two instructions for the use of this data: the age ranges taken into consideration by INPS do not match those of ISTAT, but those aged 49 and over correspond, and this is the range whose data serve our reasoning. Second: the numbers we are talking about concern job placements, not the employment balance (the one illustrated by INPS; therefore the million-odd job placements must be compared with the numbers of terminations (retirements, resignations, layoffs and, above all , term contract expiration).
That said, let's look at the hirings for the other age groups: from 30 to 49 they are 1,482,788; over 49 years of age, i.e. in the range in which, according to some media, recruitment takes place almost exclusively, there are only 529,169! Are they open-ended contracts, which confine the "precariousness" of fixed-term contracts to the younger age groups? Absolutely not: permanent hires are 26% of the total against 24% in the previous category. The "new hires" are not mainly made among the over 50s but, on the contrary, among the younger age groups. Employment among the over 50s is rising as a result of the aging of already employed workers and the extension of the working age,
The objections regarding the "quality" of the employment that has been created seem to be more well-founded. Obviously it is necessary to understand how to determine the quality of a job: we have not found data that take into account, if not for micro-areas or individual situations, the contents of the job description or at least the classification of new hires, and the simple breakdown between workers, employees, managers and executives does not say anything significant. The only objective data we can follow are those relating to pay and hours.
As for the first (here too we use INPS data for the first half of the year) effectively it should be noted that, while the remuneration of new permanent employees both compared to 2015 and 2016 is growing (+6,7% on 2015) that of forward contracts (-2,4%). As for working hours, it should be noted that 40% of new permanent hires are part-time (down from 42% in 2016), as are 39% of fixed-term ones (up from 37% in 2016). XNUMX). We do not yet have data on how many involuntary part-timers there are for this period, but they were decreasing in the previous quarter.
An immediate observation on these few parameters would seem to indicate that better paid and full-time employment is consolidating among permanent workers, while the trend is reversed among fixed-term workers. The fact that fixed-term hiring is on the rise (66% of new hires in 2017 against 62% in 2016) may lead us to think that we are dealing with the principle of a working poor phenomenon. In reality, this alarm needs to be scaled down: first of all, fixed-term work represents only 14% of total employment, exactly like the EU average, but lower, for example, than the figure for France, Sweden and the Netherlands.
However, this is an issue that deserves to be investigated also in relation to youth employment, given that for age groups up to 29, fixed-term employment represents as much as 75% of the total.
