Labour, employment record but Italy lags behind EU results

For women, the gap in the employment rate compared to the EU is over 12 percentage points.

Looking at younger workers, the unemployment rate in the 15-24 age group stands at 20.2 per cent, although it has decreased year-on-year. In the EU-27, the unemployment rate for those under 25 stands at 14.5 per cent and in Germany it is 6.6 per cent.

The so-called Neet (neither in employment nor in education and training) are decreasing, also by virtue of the programmes dedicated to them by the EU (such as Youth Guarantee in the past), but in the 15-29 age group they are still 16% of young people, about 1.5 million, compared to the EU-27 level of 11.2%.

Italy records slower growth than European countries also on the wage front. In the last 10 years, according to ISTAT, Italian wages have grown by 15.3%, against an average of 30.8% in the EU27.

In its Employment Outlook 2024, the OECD certified that in the first quarter of 2024 real wages in Italy were 7% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019, the last quarter before the pandemic. The decline was also highlighted in 15 other OECD countries, but for Italy it is more pronounced: only the Czech Republic fares worse (-8%).

'Let's say,' explains Stefano Scarpetta, director for labour, employment and social policies at the OECD, 'that the drop in real wages has affected all G7 countries except France. The Italian figure is more marked because in other countries contracts were renewed earlier than in ours'. Added to this is the fact that wages in Italy have been substantially stagnant for about thirty years. 'The other countries also have a minimum wage,' he adds, 'which in situations of sudden inflation growth has to some extent protected low-income workers'.

In addition to wages, the issue of women also seems to have specific connotations in the Italian case. The starting point is positive: the trend is up, in line with the rest of the European countries. However, Stefano Scarpetta further points out, 'there are still very few areas, including the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano, that have a female employment rate above the European average, while on the contrary there are several regions, especially those in the south, where the gap is still enormous'. Added to this is another element: if in almost all countries in the age range between 30 and 40, i.e. the one in which one can imagine opting for parenthood, a gap opens up between female and male employment that then closes again later on, in Italy this gap no longer closes. 'In Italy, that is, if a woman leaves the labour market, she does not re-enter it afterwards. So the real problem is not helping families to have more children, because this is a choice that cannot be imposed, but instead helping them to reconcile personal and professional life'.

According to Stefano Scarpetta, another major critical issue Italy has to deal with is that of human capital, or rather the underinvestment in initial education and adult training is a long-standing problem. "We are in 41st place out of the 42 countries for which we have data on education expenditure and spending on continuing training is low, although the GOL and the new targeted measures are going in the right direction," he explains.

Numbers that cannot but have implications for our country's growth potential. The data of the index OECD Pisa on the competences of thirteen-year-olds are worrying: we are, in fact, well below the European and OECD average. "The Invalsi results," he continues, "show us a cross-section of our children's and young people's knowledge at eight, ten and thirteen years of age that is horrifying. In some regions we have rates of functional illiteracy that should immediately trigger an intervention. In some regions, such as Calabria and Sicily, one in two 13-year-olds have difficulty understanding a text appropriate to their age'.

The picture is worrying because inadequate skills do not produce innovation, the absence of innovation creates a production environment with little innovation, which in turn lowers the bar of quality in the demand for profiles. So, a circle of distortions that should be broken "as, for example, South Korea has done, which has invested massively, or as France has done, which as soon as it saw the results of the OECD Pisa index signalling a drop in the skills of young people, immediately labelled this drop as a national emergency," Scarpetta concludes.