WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Umanita Nova #8-25 - Lying with statistics: ISTAT data and employment (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In December 2024, employed people, according to ISTAT data, were higher

than those of a year earlier, with an increase of 274 thousand units and
a percentage growth in the employment rate equal to 0.3%. For some age
groups, especially young people, employment was substantially decreasing
and this data alone should lead to reflection on the failure of training
and orientation paths, of active policies in general. ---- But it has
always been known that statistics alone are of no help, especially if
they fail to distinguish between stable and precarious employment: very
few days of employment per year are considered the same as a fixed-term
contract of 3 months and even an indefinite one.

But to be fair, the end-of-2024 surveys spoke of a small contraction in
self-employment, a significant drop in fixed-term contracts and a
recovery in permanent contracts, so in light of these data, is the
Meloni government right to claim victory?

The first observation concerns the number of elderly people who find
work after having lost it, which leads us to reflect on how the search
for specialized personnel to be promptly employed in the production
sector is still the preferred option to the long and costly processes of
direction, training and updating. In short, jobs are increasing
especially in the over-49 age group or among the under-30s where hiring
has decidedly advantageous costs for companies, including tax breaks,
apprenticeship contracts and more.

A bit like what happens with mobility in the Public Administration, in
the end new employment is not promoted and the unfair spending caps on
personnel remain, which then condemn the PA to have the oldest
workforce, and among the lowest paid overall, in the EU.

There is then a further consideration that would be worth studying,
namely Italian salaries that have been falling for over 30 years
compared to other EU countries, a decline in purchasing power with
contract renewals always below inflation. After decades, by losing
purchasing power, the Italian salary gap compared to the EU is starting
to become worrying but this news is not reported because it does not
increase the popularity of the executives.

And so to justify failed fiscal and labor policies (the flat tax, the
decontribution,    contracts in line with the IPCA code that in times of
rising energy prices reveals all its limits) resources equal to a third
of inflation are allocated to the Public Administration, economic
increases are exchanged for benefits and continuous recourse to
corporate welfare, everything is focused on second-level contracts that
in the long run represent a double-edged sword because they increase
productivity, fuel derogations from already inadequate national
contracts and exchange wages for services to private structures, which
fuels the spiral of dismantling public services.

Let's return, in closing, to the employed but not before having
highlighted two critical issues, namely the imminent reconversion of
part of the industry for war purposes that will certainly lead to an
increase in employment, as happened in the USA and Germany a century
ago. And even if we assume that producing weapons is a solution, it is
not explained that the ones who will benefit will not be the workers but
the multinationals in the sector who have seen their stock prices grow
by 50% in a few months, confirming that the speculative-financial spiral
is complementary to the militarization processes.

A year ago, when we talked about reconverting the economy for green
purposes, analysts and statisticians took it for granted that the loss
of employment would be significant, the singers of the new world are
often unaccustomed to dealing with real life.

According to the report by Exclesior and Unioncamere "Forecasts of
employment and professional needs in Italy in the medium term
(2024-2028)", in the next three years the most sought-after jobs will be
high-profile ones, such as managers, specialists and technicians. But
between limited numbers for access to many university faculties, lacking
and ineffective active labor policies, training business with few
positive repercussions, are we sure we are capable of responding
positively to these challenges? The trend in recent years, with
school-work placements, has often been to employ students for weeks in
low-skilled jobs (taking them away from teaching hours), when a new era
had been praised in which the very young would learn a job, acquiring
skills to be used after graduation. Few jobs have been created in recent
years by school-work placements and often for a fixed term.

We close with the relationship between immigration and employment: there
are approximately 2.5 million foreigners in Italy and they represent
approximately 10 percent of the total employed, with an employment rate
identical to that of the natives but with countless lower-paid jobs. In
a country where the residence permit is linked to an employment
contract, it often happens that undignified pay conditions are accepted,
and it is for this reason that a growing number of migrants today have a
greater class consciousness than Italians, especially in logistics
warehouses.

The so-called gender disparity also remains: migrant women have
employment (47.5%), unemployment (15.2%) and inactivity (43.8%) rates
that are significantly worse than men. The same argument, albeit with
different percentages, also applies to Italian women and men, it is
sufficient to remember that the places to be filled for nursery schools
are equal to 15% of boys and girls under 3 years old when the European
average is above 33 percent. And the ones who suffer the most are women
looking for a job: here other factors come into play such as the
inadequacy of welfare, stuck to single-income families and with an
increasingly aging population. But we will talk about this, and much
more, on another occasion.

Federico Giusti

https://umanitanova.org/mentire-con-le-statistiche-dati-istat-e-occupazione/
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