Resuming a discussion started last week (i.e. what works and what doesn’t work in Italy) I am returning to the topic of new generations of workers.
Anyone who knows me, or whoever reads what I write, knows only too well
my opinion on young workers: they are our future and I recognize in them a great deal of potential that I think should be encouraged and exploited much more than is actually the case.
On this subject Italy is full of like-minded people, but also of people who have a very different vision. An opinion that probably stems from direct experience that is perhaps negative and which therefore must be respected.
That said,
I still struggle to understand an attitude that I often notice in terms of internships, apprenticeships or trainee opportunities (which then ultimately have the same objectives). An attitude I see from both the parties involved.
To explain what I mean, I will start with a specific case. Think, for example, of Holland (a country that I am learning to know quite well thanks to direct personal experience).
Exactly as in Italy, in the Netherlands also, students have the opportunity to conduct these internship periods in local companies for limited periods, receiving a fee that is little more than derisory (say in the order of a few hundred Euro a month). The same happens in Italy, but – from what I can see – with a fairly substantial difference.
While in the Netherlands this training is seen as a great opportunity both by students and by the firms that host them, in Italy they are often highly viewed (and perhaps excessively) with a negative attitude.
Therefore, both by students who feel they are paid too little and are partly exploited, despite being – for the most part – their first work experience and therefore in fact not yet able to hold down a job independently, and by companies that, instead of accommodating young workers as an integral part of their training process, end up taking advantage of them, dumping on them – in fact – all the activities that no-one in the company wants or has time to do (as if it were free labour). I refer, for example to our industry and to mechanical students hired through the project Alternanza Scuola-Lavoro [School-Work Alternation] who are then actually used to offload trucks instead of focussing on the areas they are studying.
But if this is the case, I ask myself: who stands to gain? The answer is nobody.
Surely not the students, who actually waste an opportunity to learn a trade or otherwise to gain work experience (which in any case will always be useful in life). Neither do the companies, which miss out on the opportunity to train new generations of workers who will then be useful both to them and, more generally, to the Italian economic system.
And why does this happen? Always for the same reason: there is a lack of civic sense, there is a lack of respect for the rules and there are no controls.
Simply refer back to the topic of the post. Quite often, students are asked to fill in the documentation required by schools and universities to finalize the internship (documents which are then countersigned by the tutor to guarantee the work perform), giving them maximum freedom on the list of activities to be included, regardless of whether they have actually been carried out or not.
