The short-circuit of ageing: now even domestic helpers and carers are elderly. '2.2 million will be needed in 2029'

There are not only Italy's demographic trends, such as the life expectancy of 83.7 years, which now places us third in the EU and which will rise to 84.3 years for men and 87.8 years for women in 2050; or the reduction of the active population bracket, which will fall from the current 63.5% to 54.3% in 2050. Now there is the added alarm of the ageing category of domestic workers. Due to the combined effect of the two elements, to cover family care and assistance needs in 2029 in Italia at least 2.211 million domestic workers (domestic helpers and caregivers) will be needed, 69% of them foreigners, mostly non-EU. This is the new estimate contained in the Paper commissioned by Assindatcolf (National Association of Domestic Workers) to the IDOS Study and Research Centre, as part of the 2026 Family (Net) Work Report, presented this morning in Rome and entitled: "Indispensable but underestimated: the need for foreign domestic workers in ageing Italia".

The study reveals that the share of over-65s in the total foreign population has almost tripled since 2012, settling at 6.9 per cent in 2026 (a percentage that would be much higher if one considered the more than 2 million foreigners who have acquired Italian citizenship). But the most interesting data concerns the proportion of foreigners doing domestic and care work, for which the process of progressive ageing is much more accentuated than for the general population: in 2024 more than 11% of the work in this sector was carried out by foreigners over 65 years of age, a figure that prompts the report to speak of a labour market 'characterised by poor generational turnover and a growing dependence on 'elderly' workers, often still active due to economic necessity and the poorly protected nature of careers in the sector'.

Specifically, it is female carers who show the most accelerated trend: those over 65 years of age have risen from 4.3 per cent in 2015 to 16 per cent in 2024. And it is obvious to expect that 'many female workers will have to leave this sector in the coming years if not for 'age limits' at least for 'physical reasons''. A quite extraordinary turn-over, on the basis of which the report calculates that, to fill the gap, as many as 81.6 per cent of those 122,000 extra workers needed over the next three years will have to be foreigners, three quarters of them non-EU.

"The figure of about 24,000 non-EU workers clearly indicates the family needs expected for 2029," Assindatcolf vice-president Alessandro Lupi observed. - This is a quota that we hope will find space in future flow programming, which currently stops at 2028. If it is not continued, the risk is a real implosion of the family assistance system, a pillar of public welfare, with increasingly elderly families unable to find an available workforce on the labour market, which is also increasingly elderly: with the paradox of having family assistants called upon to take care of the elderly when they themselves approach a condition of care need'.

"In a sector of vital importance for national welfare, such as family care and domestic work, which is massively dependent on foreign labour, especially female labour,' says IDOS president Luca Di Sciullo, 'it would be desirable that, once the foreign quotas have been aligned with actual needs, a serious revision of the entry and recruitment mechanisms follows, effectively combating abuse, exploitation, irregularity and evasion, which have plagued labour relations in the sector for decades.