The damned of part-time work: “Involuntary in one case out of two”
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Rosaria Amato
ROME — Almost one worker in five in Italy has a part time contract. But it is not always a question of good flexibility, of conciliation between private life and professional commitment: the incidence of involuntary part time, denounces the CGIL, is equal to 57.9%, the highest in the entire Eurozone. This is why the union led by Maurizio Landini has just launched the campaign “Precarity has too many faces. Let’s fight it together”: the objective is to “expose” all the situations in which part-time contracts are imposed, without leaving the worker even the possibility of supplementing his salary, which is always too low, with a second job.
«If some workers prefer or choose part time as an opportunity – underlines the CGIL – the reality highlights how for the vast majority of involuntary part time workers the conditions of extreme flexibility in the use of timetables make workers people who have to adapt to the company cycle and timetables”. Or worse: «As also emerges from the inspection activity conducted by INAIL, an irregular full-time relationship often hides in a regularized part-time relationship». The hours that exceed those foreseen by the employment contract are sometimes paid illegally, and often not even in full.
Also raising the alarm Cisl, which in the March Work Report notes a negative trend reversal in the fourth quarter of 2023: if in the previous period growth had in fact concentrated exclusively on full-time, while part-time workers “had decreased for the first time after several years of growth”, in the fourth quarter the trend was reversed. And therefore, in comparison with the fourth quarter of 2022, part-time contracts grew by 3.4%, while full-time contracts by 2%. Part-time workers thus reach 4.3 million, but with a very different incidence on the total employed for men (7%) rather than for women (31.1%). With the aggravating circumstance that even women who voluntarily choose part-time work do so because it is often the only means of conciliation, in a country that offers few childcare services and an extremely limited number of full-time schools.
The average annual salary of a part-time worker, calculates the CGIL, is 11,451 euros, and is even lower in the South, but if the fixed-term contract is added to the short-time working hours, and therefore discontinuous employment, the salary average annual gross is reduced to 6,267 euros. Poor workers then necessarily become poor pensioners and, above all, poor pensioners, and the moment in which it is possible to retire from work is postponed much later. This is why the unions have long been asking for the introduction of a guarantee pension, and also for part-time workers to exceed the minimum contribution required to reach social security seniority.
The CGIL also claims for cyclical part-time workers (which therefore involve work periods for only part of the year) the extension of the social safety net introduced with the 2021 budget law, but not refinanced by the Meloni government.
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