Elderly people, care for parents enters the paycheck: how companies take action

67% consider it important to have health services available to support their health, 57% have a strong interest in having support services for parents. These two figures refer to the Generation Z and are two percentages that mark an unprecedented. For two reasons: because the target group covered concerns, precisely, the youngest segment of the labour market and because for the first time the demand for health services for oneself and, even more importantly, for one's parents enters the wage bargaining. Not only day care for children, therefore, to emphasise, but also residence for elderly parents.

This trend was intercepted by the HR Innovation Practice Observatory of Polimi in Milan. "Companies are looking for these services because there is a perception that the public is absent," explains Martina Mauri, Director of the HR Innovation Practice Observatory. "This is a demand that will grow more and more, and of which we register a growing awareness on the part of companies. What is perhaps still missing on their part is customisation. Companies often rely on providers for package management, which for them constitutes a simplification of procedures, but at the same time reduces the customisation of interventions'.

As a sign of the times, the numbers released by Istat show us that about a quarter of the population (24.7%) is at least 65 years old. Among these, the number of eighty-year-olds or more is growing in particular (4.591 million). A trend that will bring the share of the elderly over 65 up to 34.6% of the total population in 2050. People are living longer, therefore, but the number of years lived in good health is decreasing, especially for women. If in fact in 2024, men could expect to live an average of 59.8 years in good health, in line with 2019, for women, on the other hand, the figure dropped to 56.6 years, the lowest figure in the last decade. This is a change that redraws the needs, those linked to age itself and those linked to the conditions in which people pass through this age. A transformation that finds public welfare unprepared: in the face of a growing number of 65-year-olds, the average expenditure per elderly person has dropped from 107 to 93 euros per year.

Adding to the already negative figure is the fact that there is a wide territorial divide and that access to care services for the elderly still depends very much on where one lives: the North-East has the highest expenditure (174 euro per elderly person), while in the South it is only 40 euro. More concretely: for the management of municipal residential facilities and the integration of fees paid by families for private facilities, municipalities spent 525 million euro in 2022. A breath of fresh air, albeit indirectly, could come from the availability of the 257 million in funds to support the various measures for non-self-sufficiency provided for in the Budget law currently under discussion and announced by the Minister for Disability, Alessandra Locatelli.

This explains the recourse to private welfare. In two respects: the inclusion of care services in company bargaining and in welfare packages. As far as the first aspect is concerned, the latest Confindustria survey on labour clarifies the picture: starting from the fact that in 2025 28.1 per cent of member companies applied a company contract, i.e. signed with Rsu/Rsa or territorial representations, it is found that in 2.4 per cent of cases company contracts envisageactive ageing initiatives. Thus, what was already evident from 2020, when 5.2 per cent of the companies envisaged contributions for assistance to elderly or dependent family members, is being stabilised by including it in the contracts. What is relevant here is not the percentages, which are still small, but the very fact that the topic has become the subject of second-level bargaining.