Elena (not her real name), a 33-year-old graphic designer, has been working for a leading advertising agency in Rome since October 2019. The company’s clients include local institutions and political representatives, for whom it produces communication strategies and visuals for election campaigns. The company is so close to the public sector that Elena was speechless when, on being hired, she was offered a trainee placement, without signing any kind of agreement, for an initial sum of €400 a month, paid in remuneration for the provision of ‘occasional services’. Yet there was nothing ‘occasional’ about her work. This hiring arrangement was completely unlawful, as Elena was working full time, with fixed working hours, the obligation to be in the office every day and under constant supervision.

“After eight months, they finally offered me a contract,” says Elena. “But it was a false part-time contract. It said that I would work 16 hours a week for a salary of €600 a month.” She was, in fact, working full time and the rest of her salary, another €600, was paid under the table.

It was not until 2021, two years after she was hired, that Elena secured a full-time permanent contract with a net salary of €1,450 a month, that is, €9 an hour.

“At first, the boss refused to regularise my situation, saying that he would have had to pay too much tax and that if he had done me this ‘favour’, he would have had to do the same for everyone else.”

Still today, only three of the 10 graphic designers who work for the company have a contract. “The others are very young. They come and go. The staff turnover is constant.”

Despite being employed under irregular hiring arrangements, staff have to work at high intensity in an oppressive climate. “The boss gets angry if we leave just when the working day is supposed to end. It’s something that makes me feel anxious,” admits Elena. “I can’t even leave when I have nothing to do. It’s like being at school. If anyone leaves too early, the boss gathers all the employees and gives us a telling off. We often have to work overtime, even at weekends, without any additional pay.”

Elena prefers to remain anonymous, as she still works for the company. Why does she stay there? “As far as I know, it’s worse elsewhere,” she says. “The biggest and best-known advertising companies are terrible. A young colleague who worked for one of them told me that she lost 40 kilos because of all the stress. Others were quick to leave because they were working very long hours, in a climate of terror, having to put up with constant humiliation and mockery.”

A job jungle for young workers

Elena’s story is representative of the everyday struggle that young workers face in Italy. In her case, it ended unusually well – with a permanent contract. For most young Italians, working without protection or union rights, the labour market, far from being a means of emancipation or personal development, is a jungle where the employer is king. According to Eurostat figures, Italy has the second lowest employment rate for young workers (15-29 years) in Europe, at 31.1 per cent, a level that falls to just 26.4 per cent for women. These figures testify to how difficult it is for a young person to find a job or to look for a better one and suggest a high percentage of informal work. In a study by the Fondazione Unipolis, 35 per cent of young people aged between 15 and 35 stated that they are or have been engaged in undeclared work.

The situation is not much better for those who are declared but are faced with a high level of job insecurity. Almost half (47 per cent) of young workers aged between 15 and 29 are on fixed-term contracts, compared with only 13.7 per cent of those over 35 (Eurostat). Then there is also the morass of so-called ‘grey employment’, a term that covers employment relationships that are declared but incompletely or irregularly: employees disguised as contractors or freelancers, false part-time contracts, contracts that do not correspond to the actual work duties... the list is long. And it is something young Italians are unfortunately all too familiar with.

Young Italians occupy a very vulnerable place in a labour market that is already very poor. Italy is the only European country where wages are lower than they were in the 1990s (three per cent lower), while in countries like Germany and France they have increased by almost 30 per cent.

And it is the young people who suffer the most severe consequences of such poorly paid work. Nearly 50 per cent of workers aged between 30 and 34 in Italy have an income of between €8,000 and €16,000 a year, an income bracket that ranges from ‘absolute poverty’ to ‘near subsistence’. It is a generation that has experienced crisis after crisis, having entered the labour market with the 2008 crisis, lost the most jobs following the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and which is now being faced with a rate of inflation that is further eroding their income.

Such conditions make it very difficult for young people to become independent of their families and explain far better than the stereotype of the Italian ‘mama’s boy’ why young people do not leave home until the age of 30, on average. It also explains why so many young people decide to move abroad to make a better living. A study by employers’ association Confcommercio reveals that 345,000 young Italians between the ages of 15 and 34 have moved abroad in the last 10 years. Others have remained in Italy but have lost all hope of building an independent life. In 2021, NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) accounted for 23.1 per cent of Italy’s young population aged 15 to 29, by far the highest figure in Europe.

The Chambers of Self-Employed and Precarious Labour

How did it come to this? We ask Salvatore Corizzo, labour lawyer and activist at the CLAP (Chambers of Self-Employed and Precarious Labour), a grassroots union founded by a group of lawyers and activists from various social centres in Rome that offers free legal and tax advice to workers with irregular contracts.

“The Italian labour market, instead of being driven by technological innovation, has always tended to compensate for lost profits with lower labour costs. Meanwhile, the crisis of the political and trade union left has sapped mobilisation,” says Corizzo. “That’s why the European Employment Strategy, built on the fallacy of ‘flexicurity’, has taken hold in Italy, with a series of regulations that, since the 1990s, have introduced an infinity of precarious contracts, without any social cushion to compensate. In short, flexibility has been imposed without any regard for security. Flexible contracts mean new workers can be treated like commodities, picked up and discarded as and when required.”

The CLAPs emerged in 2013, shortly before workers’ rights were dealt a final blow by the infamous ‘Jobs Act of the government of Matteo Renzi (centre-left Partito Democratico) “which wrote precarious contracts into law and legalised dismissals without genuine grounds, in exchange for financial compensation,” explains Corizzo.

Since then, the CLAPs have established themselves as self-organising instruments that combine the union struggle for better working conditions with the individual legal defence of workers.

“We also have a specific helpdesk for women, run by women who specialise in workplace harassment issues,” Corizzo continues, “because the forms of exploitation vary according to the worker’s skin colour and gender.”

In 2018, this service helped two young women working at the Hard Rock Café in Rome find the courage to report the harassment being perpetrated by their manager. “It was all connected to having our contracts renewed,” said one of the workers at the time. “He would harass us and try to justify it by saying that he was doing us a favour in return. The physical abuse went on for a year and a half, and everyone kept quiet about it. Everyone knew, including our superiors.” The company responded to the complaints with an internal investigation and the manager was dismissed.

Serious as it is, this case, according to Corizzo, is only the tip of the iceberg. “The most striking feature of youth employment today is the total control over young workers’ bodies, achieved by destroying their self-esteem, by placing them under relentless psychological and emotional pressure. We receive a lot of calls for help from young people who are treated like slaves, even those working in sectors that require a high level of qualification, such as lawyers or architects.”

What can be done to change this situation? After a long sigh, Corizzo answers decisively: “In Italy, we have lost the habit of fighting. Strike action needs to be updated, to make it an effective means of defence against these new forms of exploitation.” That is why the CLAPs are planning to launch a mobilisation campaign this autumn, starting with the demand for a minimum wage, which does not yet exist in Italy. “It is vital, at this juncture, that we press for new rights and purchasing power for workers, with the energy and economic crises on our doorstep, and with the radicalisation of the social conflict set to be triggered by the extreme right-wing government that is about to take office.”