The new way of measuring stocks and flows in the labor market leads us to reflect on the real job losses and not on the one masked with the abuse of social safety nets. And to think about how to have updated administrative data as a function of effective active policies. With the new criteria introduced by EU Regulation 1700/2019 we have discovered that employees who have been absent from work for more than three months are no longer classified as employed, and therefore also the layoffs, nor the self-employed who have not carried out any work activity for more than three months, even if the suspension is considered temporary and not definitive. This forces us to consider how about 700 unemployed people to whom, for the moment, no one is thinking in terms of proposing active policies.
Now it happens that the vaccination plan is sweeping the elderly population: but soon it will also be necessary to vaccinate the active population, i.e. those who can be included in an individual path to job placement. This could allow the active population to be traced thanks to a simple questionnaire to fill out at the time of vaccination – or immediately before, even online – to be sent to ANPAL which could thus have it in a very short time the census of all those who are not employed or inactive at the moment but are able and available for work. The survey could start from the class of 1961 who is preparing to be vaccinated, at least in some regions: those who belong to them and are unemployed could, for example, be placed in public utility jobs. This would also put ANPAL in a position to manage the registry of people to be activated at a national level according to a timetable established at the Conference of the Regions: based on the number of people identified, it is possible to segment users and evaluate the workload for each public employee who has to take charge of the citizen. Every citizen who is unemployed or unemployed according to the criteria dictated by the European regulation must stipulate a personalized service agreement and be included in an activation process according to an agenda of appointments agreed between ANPAL and the Regions for the provision of essential levels of services in a uniform way throughout the national territory: on a par with vaccines. For regions in difficulty, ANPAL can intervene in subsidiarity through navigators or by strengthening the system of cooperation between public and private.
Active policies can also be disbursed during an employment relationship with reference to people who are on extraordinary redundancy fund due to reorganisation, company crisis or cessation of activity by anticipating the disbursement of the redeployment allowance or professional retraining training policies; or by using the New Skills Fund which guarantees 250 hours of training both to keep the job and to be accompanied in out-of-company relocation paths. In the end the “expansion contract” can be used which provides for retraining paths for workers who cannot be accompanied to retirement with a slide and, for this reason, are placed on layoffs. These are instruments financed with many millions of euros which often remain unused. In this regard, the individual Regions could finance both the FNC and the expansion contract for companies with a number of workers below the 250 units currently envisaged by the law.
These workers, who are easier to intercept, can be added thousands of people left to their fate who have never entered an Employment Centre or they have stopped doing it, becoming inactive. Even for these people it is possible to think of active policies that aim at reactivation also through the provision of all the services available in the area: I am thinking of professional training, apprenticeships or the various vouchers made available for services at accredited bodies. In the meantime, we are still waiting for the interministerial regulation to be activated the GOAL project, established by the law n. 178/2020, a national take-over program aimed at introducing employment through the provision of specific services of active employment policy, financed by the latest budget law with 500 million euros. The Minister of Labor could give a strong signal by allocating this fund to the blanket activation of the entire active population taken over by ISTAT, which we now see in disarray.
After all, according to the European rules on the free movement of workers, he retains the quality of worker, subordinate or self-employed, whoever he is temporarily unable to work due to illness or injury; who, finding themselves in a state of involuntary unemployment duly proven after having carried out an activity for over a year, has registered with the competent office in order to find work; or those who have terminated a fixed-term contract of less than a year and registered to find work; finally, those who attend a training course consistent with the activity previously carried out. Anyone who remains inactive is not a worker and loses the prerogatives of free movement.
At present our services work for us we are certainly able to identify the active unemployed, i.e. those who have signed a declaration of immediate availability for work (DID): instead we are not able to intercept all the others, i.e. all those who have not signed a DID but who must be recovered and placed in an activation circuit in order not to end up permanently registered by ISTAT as unemployed or, worse, as inactive.
°°°The author is Full Professor of Labor Law at the La Sapienza University of Rome and was (technical) councilor for Labor in the first Zingaretti regional council of the Lazio Region from 2013 to 2018
