Demography, 150,000 workers missing

Between now and 2030, as a result of demographic dynamics, an average of 150,000 workers, 70 per cent of them men, will be missing each year, as the balance between inflows (more than 450,000) and increasing outflows (more than 600,000 on average).

This is the other side of the mismatch between labour demand and supply highlighted by the Monitor's analysis 'The labour market in Italy, between record and mismatch' carried out by the Legacoop and Prometeia Study Area, which is not only due to the difficulty of finding the skills sought by companies, but also to the progressive ageing of the population, which every year reduces the number of employable people.By 2030 it is estimated that there will be 805,000 fewer of us, but while the number of individuals aged 65 and over will increase by about 1.5 million, those of working age (15-64) will decrease by almost the same amount. Additional pressure comes from the retirement of baby boomers, which is set to increase in the coming years. All this against a backdrop of, on the one hand, the more than 2 percentage points drop in the unemployment rate between Q1 2020 and Q2 2024 (from 9.1 % to 6.9 %), when the lowest level of jobseekers since July 2008 was reached, and, on the other hand, the concomitant increase in the vacancy rate, which almost tripled from 0.6 % to 1.7 %, another alarm bell of a mismatch between supply and demand. The result of this dynamic is the increasing difficulty for companies to recruit workers: in 2023, 40% of companies in the service sector and 9% in the manufacturing sector reported a lack of workers as an obstacle to production.

In 2023, 45% of planned recruitment was difficult to find, with differences by level of education. For workers with a low level of education, the problem is one of numbers: they are more than 50% of the demand, which has grown a lot in recent years. In contrast, supply cannot keep up with demand, partly due to demographic transition. While for highly educated workers, the problem is the mismatch between their specialisation and that demanded by the market. If for economic disciplines, engineering and architecture, and education sciences the supply of new graduates does not cover demand, for medicine and pharmacy the mismatch is almost nil, the ratio is reversed for the humanities, political sciences, foreign languages (supply is almost three times greater than demand), in psychology (supply four times greater than demand). Then there is the problem of Neet, after Romania Italy has the highest percentage of young people who do not study, work or train (21.25%), almost one in two in Calabria.

'The lack of labour for more than a third of our cooperatives is the number one problem for business development,' explains Simone Gamberini, president of Legacoop, 'well ahead of the cost of raw materials, in some sectors and territories it reaches 60%. We need a change of mentality: education, training, active labour policies are the solution to both the problems of people and the production system. We need action to adapt skills and a different management of migration policies'.