We live in a country where unemployment is 11.9%, rising in fact to 37.9% for young people. Millions of people are inactive, not to mention the uncertainty and the prevalence of zero-contracts etc. and especially the black market economy. I therefore find it absurd that with all the problems linked to the Italian labour market, it feels as though all that’s been talked about for months is vouchers and the fact that they were “the new frontier of uncertain work” and should therefore be abolished. And then, last Friday, the decree law entered into force that permanently repealed them involving a transitional phase of their use only until the end of the year.
First of all I think that the issue of vouchers at this time should not be one of the major problems of our parliament as they represent a very small percentage of the total work of Italy (in 2015 this was just 0.23%).
If, however, we need to talk about them then all the necessary considerations should be taken into account. The data shows that from 2008 to the present there has been a sharp increase in the use of this instrument in the past nine years 347 million vouchers have been sold (+27.000%), especially in the most industrialized areas of Italy such as in Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia Romagna. This can only mean one thing:
Job vouchers were a tool that was needed but which were absent and when they were introduced they helped reveal and eliminate a lot of the illegal work practices unfortunately present in our country.
We are in fact talking about a system that for the first time has in fact succeeded in taxing most of the casual work that was previously outside of the tax system. I personally have never needed to use it but they are many people around me who have been paid in this way.
So I wonder: what are the consequences of abolishing job vouchers? There is a very high risk that it may once again increase the black economy. Not to mention the fact that many people will be out of a job.
Have vouchers completely eliminated the problem of illegal work? No, that’s not what I’m saying.
And I also recognize that unfortunately this system had limitations and was often abused or used illegally. I think for example of the occasional waiter paid for two hours with vouchers and the other six “under the table” thereby appearing to be legally compliant in case of checks while working for much of the time on a cash-in-hand basis. And I could give many other examples.
Using vouchers illegally is not right. There is no doubt of that.
So where does that leave us? Is this system lacking because it has several limitations or grey areas? Well, we could try to improve it but not remove it directly, not having to hand an alternative and definitive solution. Do you agree?
Currently in fact the abolition of vouchers is leaving a legal vacuum.
Two possible solutions have recently been discussed, though both have limitations. On the one hand the so-called French employer chequebooks (the chèques emploi), a system that should be able to limit abuses but which at the same time could risk being overly cumbersome and therefore used less. On the other hand are the German mini-jobs, which are fairly similar to the job vouchers just abolished in Italy and which at the moment are much criticized in Germany because of the abuse made of them.
Moral: we have just abolished vouchers that worked (even if not perfectly) and we have no real practical alternative. Let’s wait and see what happens.
* The Italian voucher system was set up to provide a payment scheme that formalizes employment and contributes to state-funded programs. Instead of providing employment contracts to workers, employers can purchase vouchers from the government, giving them to workers as payment. Workers can then redeem them for 75 per cent of their cash value, with the remaining 25 per cent funding the administration of social security and industrial injury insurance.
