It is the workers who choose the company, who evaluate salaries but also career paths, company welfare, distances from home.
12/02/2023
In Verona, bus routes have been cut: there is a shortage of drivers. There are open competitions, no one shows up. In the Veneto region the Region has put up for grabs over 150 emergency room doctors: the competition was essentially snubbed and the staff shortages remain impressive. On the nurses and social and healthcare staff front, we are experiencing drama especially in retirement homes.
In Emilia, Lombardy and the Northeast there are many companies that are implementing expansion projects. The difficulty is not so much that of realizing them, but of finding personnel of any kind.
On the Adriatic coast , but also in Liguria, in the mountain tourist resorts and in the cities of art there is a frantic race to get hold of cooks, waiters, cleaners, room attendants, but also lifeguards, ticket collectors, administrative staff… the greatest difficulty in the car market is not that of building or selling them, but of… transporting them: there is a shortage of truck drivers throughout Europe, who drives car transporters to dealerships?
But the situation – paradoxical until a few years ago – is also affecting the public administration: total shortage of mathematics and language teachers; many public bodies without staff in the technical offices, from engineers to the most humble tasks.
In short, there is work, Italy at the moment has the lowest unemployment rate for many decades. There is a shortage of workers. And what the labor law expert Pietro Ichino had prophesied in a book a couple of years ago is happening: it is the workers who choose their company, who evaluate salaries but also career paths, company welfare, distances from home.
The number of people who have changed jobs in the last two years is simply impressive. Were there fears of layoffs? Resignations arrived en masse, changes of uniform if not of work paths. This situation, among other things, is emptying that group of workers that the sociologist Luca Ricolfi had defined as “the new slaves”: all those who deal with tiring and/or underpaid tasks. Fewer and fewer “foreigners” arrive from abroad, Italians find it easier to free themselves. And so there is not only a shortage of specialized engineers, but also of supermarket workers, carers, shop assistants, couriers for parcels or food, cleaners.
The technology that would replace us with robots had to arrive. Meanwhile, this shortage of workers has arrived which can only be resolved by convincing that (large) segment of Italians who by choice do not work: best wishes. And if we then limit ourselves to counting on younger people and demographics, we will finally begin to understand firsthand what the birth rate entails.
