MILAN (ITALPRESS) – “Today one of the serious problems in the labor market is finding the right people with the right skills.” Moreover, “we are one of the countries with the highest rate of inactivity: we have an extraordinary potential pool of employed people, which we do not exploit. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why in Italy there is, more than in other countries, this mismatch between supply and demand. Surely one of the weak links has been to abandon the structure of vocational training.” Maurizio Del Conte, professor of labor law at Bocconi University in Milan and president of AFOL Metropolitana, a public agency that provides citizens and businesses with vocational training, guidance and employment services, says this in an interview with Claudio Brachino for the TV magazine Italpress Economy. “We have taken a bad turn” by finding “the balance point on the low end of supply and demand: we place ourselves as subcontractors, as subcontractors, but we don’t go to produce where the real added value is,” Del Conte stresses. When we place ourselves on the low end, we inevitably go and invest little in R&D and labor, we compete with developing countries, cutting wage growth and career growth prospects. We should not be surprised if our young people look around and go where they get paid more, because those companies have more marginality,” he explains. “The real problem with the wage structure of Italian labor is not so much on the minimums,” which “are more or less aligned: the problem is that we have too many people concentrated on the minimum band, we don’t get ahead,” stresses the president of AFOL Metropolitana.Black labor “is very problematic, it affects more than 20 percent of labor and GDP: it’s a gigantic problem and it competes unfairly with those who hire regularly instead. This chasm of undeclared work is hurting us a lot. “The numbers on employment “are positive, the trend is positive: within a decade or so we have increased the labor participation rate by 78 percent,” Del Conte explains. The quality of work, however, continues to be non-European: we have more people employed, but we have not made the leap that we should be making in terms of added value, that is, the quality of work. “This happens because “we have an entrepreneurial fabric that does not make critical mass. If in other countries they invest billions in new technologies and we have small businesses that cannot make that kind of investment, the problem of growing in quality exists. How much can policy affect this? Partly,” because “it’s not only a question of how much we spend, but also how we spend it. “With the Pnrr “we have never had so much money for vocational training as in the last two to three years. I would expect to see a turnaround, but how come nothing has happened? The money is coming, the problem is that it is not being spent well,” Del Conte concludes.
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