Livio Caputo
At
the dawn of the year two thousand, humanity has to tackle a problem our
own survival, as far as certain aspects are concerned, depends on. How
is it possible to guarantee a still fast growing world population a remunerative
activity? How is it possible to prevent the scourge of structural unemployment
from extending to the industrialised ones too?
Unemployment isn't certainly
a new problem, and there have been periods in our history, such as the
one of the great depression of the 1930s, in which it was far more acute
than now. The cure in those years was represented by the Keynesian theories
on public intervention in economy and an artificial boost to growth resorting
to the States' indebtedness and to public investment. Today the situation
has radically changed: unemployment is not the outcome of a deep economic
crisis but it coincides with an upswing period in which economies are in
a positive trend, consumption is at a very good level, Stock Exchanges
(with the exception of Asian ones) are setting records and the industrialised
countries' growth rates are progressing again. Employment continues to
be stationary despite several political initiatives undertaken in the last
five years both by national governments and by the European Union itself.
A distinction, to tell the
truth, needs to be made here: the crisis is mainly involving countries
having a labour market in which employment and dismissal are strictly regulated
by the law, whereas it affects little or not at all those countries whose
sector is wholly or at least partly liberalised, such as the United States,
Great Britain, Ireland and Holland to a certain extent.
The reason for which the
old rules, enforced by the trade unions in the 1960s and '70s that we codified
in the statute of labourers, today represent an objective hindrance to
employment are very well known.
In a rapidly transforming
world, where the companies' survival depends on their innovation capability,
entrepreneurs hire people only when they cannot avoid it because they know
that dismissing a worker is extremely complicated. Furthermore, they prefer
to resort to employees with time bargains or training contracts, because
they can be easily dismissed. Besides, especially in the most advanced
sectors, the new technologies make production increase by resorting to
a reduced, and not increased, labour force.
In reality, obligations
are becoming progressively less rigid even in countries having a less flexible
labour market because the young unemployed are so eager to find a job that
they accept to work under any condition set by employers who want to avoid
lasting obligations. As long as this happens in the tertiary sector, or
in one of the new jobs created by the development of services, it may still
represent a necessary transition phase before the shakedown. However, when
this happens in traditional sectors, it creates a huge unbalance between
those who are guaranteed, that is employees protected by the statute of
labourers, and those who are not . Besides dividing the population in castes,
this unbalance also creates some sort of parallel discrimination among
enterprises: those who respect the law are definitely at a disadvantage
with respect to those who employ workers illegally, do not pay contributions
and maybe even evade taxes.
If trade unions were not,
in most industrialised countries, a retro organisation with a rather limited
presence in the production classes and an increasingly higher percentage
of pensioners, they would give due consideration to this evolution and
would accept to change the rules of the game. Their resistance to all kinds
of innovative contracts, instead, is obstinate and wilful. When Berlusconi
took office at Palazzo Chigi and promised his famous one million jobs,
he should have had the courage to liberalise immediately the labour market
by decree, following the example of the English laws. In this way he would
have probably been successful: what happened instead, was that his government
bogged down in the ritual negotiations with the Federations of Italian
Trade Unions. Today, furthermore, three years and two governments later,
advances in this field continue to be very limited. In addition, the novelties
introduced by the so-called “Treu's plan”, few and certainly not revolutionary,
are often ignored by labour lower court judges who systematically continue
to agree with the workers and disagree with employers.
Clearly, the so-called Anglo-Saxon
method requires flexibility and a spirit of sacrifice that are currently
lacking in many EU countries, with Italy on top of the list. First of all,
it is necessary for the unemployed to accept job offers also far from the
places where they live, and in sectors they do not particularly like. Instead,
all the public opinion polls carried out in “mature” countries with a high
unemployment rate show that such conditions do not exist. Thus, it is easy
to explain why many companies in the north-eastern regions of Italy do
not find workers, while Campania and Sicily have hundreds of thousands
of unemployed, and even why there is more than one million workers coming
from countries outside the European Union who did not steal jobs to anyone
but who work as street-cleaners or domestic help, jobs that the Italians
tend to disdain.
The tendency towards mobility
can clearly be promoted, and this not happening in Italy. If an Italian
from the South wants to move to the North, on the other hand, the passage
is today far more complicated than it used to be forty years ago, at the
times of the great emigration.
The need to move, furthermore,
isn't often so acute as to entail radical decisions because the young can
live and be supported by their families for longer periods of time and
grown-up men can rely on social measures that did not exist in the post-war
period.
A generation improvement
as well as a radical change in the school policy would be necessary to
change the present frame of mind. The academic as well as psychological
training of the new recruits throughout Europe and in Italy in particular,
has never been, and still isn't, in agreement with the needs of the labour
market. Another negative - albeit inevitable - characteristic of
the countries who have found a more efficient solution against unemployment
is the gradual reduction of the average wage.
The new jobs created
by the increased mobility tend to involve the lowest brackets and often
do not include some of the items the most protected categories normally
benefit from: year-end bonus, production bonus and so on. On the one hand
this has some positive effects as it spurs “precarious” workers to increase
their diligence and productivity so that they can eke out their own salary.
On the other hand, it triggers uncertainty and neurosis in many people.
On the whole, however, the
tendency seems to be ineluctable because if the countries intend to maintain
the full employment also when they are faced with the Third World increasingly
fierce competition, they must accept a gradual levelling of incomes.
Left-wing parties in Italy,
France and in other industrialised countries as well, proposed to lower
working hours down to 35 in order to tackle structural unemployment: if
a country needs a specific number of working hours per year, it should
be possible to include a certain number of unemployed in the production
cycle. Things, however, are rather different. In the first place, it would
be necessary to change the social legislation that today entails a high
fixed cost for each employee thus inducing countries to have as few as
possible. In the second place, if we want to avoid that our products are
discontinued, a reduced wage should also correspond to reduced working
hours. The trade unions neglect this aspect, instead. And the 35
working hours plan, if actually developed, would finally destroy and not
create jobs, as entrepreneurial organisations are striving to prove and
as proved by some experiments carried out.
In theory, the demographic
evolution should ease the pressure on industrialised countries: with the
current low birth rate, the number of people who will reach the labour
market in ten, fifteen, twenty years will considerably be lower than today's.
In this way, however, immediate problems are not solved and the needs of
the social security system, which requires a balance between employees
and retired workers, are not taken into consideration. Thus, it has been
estimated that an increase of manpower from countries outside the EU will
correspond to a decrease of employees of Italian (or French, German) nationality.
The other side of the employment issue now begins to loom up: that of developing
countries. Today the globalisation of the economy, in fact, makes it possible
for a positive or negative evolution of every economic system to have external
repercussions.
A higher mobility, furthermore,
triggers increasingly large migration movements of the poor countries towards
the rich ones.
Needless to say, the unemployment
rate is far higher in Africa, Asia and Latin America than in industrialised
countries. But there is a basic difference: in these continents it is endemic,
that is it has always been there and, somehow, it is deeply rooted in the
social structure. In most of these countries neither widespread social
security systems, nor social measures, nor reliable statistics exist.
A couple of weeks ago, newspapers
reported that the Chinese public industries had fired 11 million workers
all at once within a reorganisation plan. Yet, nothing happened, and nothing
would probably happen even if 30 million people were fired, because dictatorial
regimes are far less subject to popular pressure. In South Africa, where
no strong union trades exist, such operations would be much more difficult
to carry out, and in Argentina or Venezuela they would be impossible. Everywhere,
though, in Pecking, Caracas, Algiers or New Delhi, there is the problem
of somehow guaranteeing the survival of huge masses of have-nots having
very precarious job opportunities: agriculture tends to dismiss rather
than hire manpower even in Third World countries, the manufacturing industry
cannot compensate this process and the service sector is not yet developed
enough to perform the functions it has in Europe. Even foreign investment
fails to have a large incidence because, although with some exceptions,
it involves relatively limited areas.
Is it possible for countries
like India or China, even in fifty or one hundred years, to reach
the growth rate, the unemployment rate and the welfare of the OECD countries?
Many experts question it, also because the resources the planet offers
might be insufficient and environmental problems might create insurmountable
hindrances.
Conclusion: unemployment
probably is destined to stay with us forever. It would be very dangerous
to believe that it can be fought by decree or with international conferences.
It is necessary, on the other hand, to let the market work at best instead
of hampering it to try to defend what cannot be defended. Governments,
however, are unlikely to be convinced of this because it would require
the capability of looking at the immediate future as well as at the prospects
of the next fifty years. And a political class able to do this has never
been seen.
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