Non-EU workers, new rules to overcome the click day funnel coming soon

Changes to the rules governing the entry of non-EU workers into our country are beginning to take shape, aiming to make the system more flexible and reduce fraud and malpractice.

The core of the revision is the overcoming of the click day mechanism, which concentrates the annual applications of employers on a single date and creates a bureaucratic funnel, as well as representing a kind of lottery, since the available places are sold out within minutes.

The new regulations being studied by the table set up at the Ministry of the Interior - with the aim of adopting a measure before the summer break - should also exclude from the entry quotas provided for by the flow decrees the requests for conversion of seasonal residence permits into permits for subordinate work. The quotas would therefore not be valid for another substantial slice of workers (for agriculture alone, more than 7,000 applications for conversion have been submitted this year), which would be added to that of non-EU workers trained abroad (see article above).

The pressure on the farewell to the click days comes from all the employers' associations heard by the table led by the undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council, Alfredo Mantovano, who is working on the revision.

The click day is expected to disappear for all applications of non-EU workers submitted through the business associations that signed the memorandum of understanding of 3 August 2022 with the Ministry of Labour (others may be added), while it would remain for applications sent directly by employers.