Those three million fragile and forgotten

The employment data give us very positive news: not only for the crossing of the 24 million employed threshold, but also for the growth of all the most significant indicators (the employment rate, the number of women in work, the number of permanent contracts). The optimism induced by these numbers is, therefore, entirely legitimate, but it must not overshadow a problem that exists even within such a positive picture: there is an important part of the production system trapped within working conditions that do not respect the rules.

It is not easy to quantify the number of people in this situation: we can assume, by cross-checking the various available data, that about three million people work on the basis of 'poor' or irregular contracts. We are not talking, let us be clear, about fixed-term workers and those employed by employment agencies on temporary contracts: these people, although they face the uncertainty linked to the expiry of the contract, enjoy all the legal and contractual protections.

We are talking about that variegated world made up of different situations - simulated part-time work, false VAT numbers, irregular coordinated and continuous collaborations, chains of illegal contracts, and even outright undeclared work - that have in common the violation of that 'constitutional minimum' of rules that protect the dignity of work: regular working hours, the application of a collective agreement signed by truly representative trade union and employer associations, correct social security regulations, and protection against unjustified dismissal.

A phenomenon that affects all economic sectors and all age groups, although it has young people and women as its privileged victims, who share the fate of being the main protagonists of labour exploitation.

Problems that are accentuated by the imperious development of the digital economy; the great - and now indispensable - opportunities that platforms and the sharing economy offer us are possible thanks to the work of people who have not yet found the right and definitive contractual arrangement, not least because of the undeniable difficulty of reconciling a system of rules born in the last century with completely new methods and forms of work.