CREMONA – The unemployment rate in Cremona is 2.6%, the second lowest in Italy. And the employed population in 2023 marks an increase of eight thousand units, reaching 154,400, the highest figure in the last ten years. The Istat data presented yesterday in the Ptsclas report developed in collaboration with the Cremona Chamber of Commerce widely promote the Cremona area. But now, second Andrew Gianniproject manager of Ptsclas, the consultancy company that developed the annual report on the performance of the Cremonese labor market, “the real challenge is the quality of the work”.
Reflections at the center of the meeting dedicated to Cremonese high school students, to whom the President of the Province, Paul Mirko Gentlemenaddressed his invitation to look at the job market with enthusiasm: «From the privileged point of view in which you find yourself, also through the tools that our Province makes available to you such as the employment centres. The encouraging numbers we present today are also thanks to the growing activity carried out in recent years by all the bodies involved. Today more than ever I feel like wishing you a ‘good job’.” Then the word passes to the technicians who reel off the data relating to the territory, providing a very positive picture on the employment front and, conversely, the unemployment rate, among the lowest in Italy.
«In 2023, employed people will reach 154,400, an increase of over 8,000 units compared to 2022 (when they were around 146,000) and recovering compared to pre-pandemic levels, taking into account that in 2019 they were approximately 152,000». Positive numbers in particular regarding the activity rate (bringing together currently employed and employable people looking for work), which reaches 70.9%. Looking at employment specifically, the rate is 69.1% and places Cremona in thirty-fourth place in Italy where in 2022 it was twenty positions lower. Of these workers, the majority, 91,200, are employed in the service sector, 48,100 in industry, 7,900 in agriculture and 7,300 in construction. «Even in the ratio between the active population (reached 158,522) and the so-called ‘non-work force’, with 63,529 people who neither work nor are looking for employment, we have returned to pre-pandemic levels».
Objectives that were set in the dramatic times of Covid and which were achieved at the end of last year, confirming the positive trend of 2022. «But the jewel in the crown of the data relating to our territory – continues Gianni – concerns the unemployment rate: if in 2024 Cremona stood at 5.4% of the unemployed population, in 2023 something unpredictable happened, reaching 2.6%. A real collapse, which keeps us at the top of the Italian ranking, second only to Bolzano which scores a round 2%. But the numerical data must be accompanied by a critical reading, which looks at the quality as well as the quantity of the work in the provincial territory. «We must always ask ourselves some doubts in the awareness that the data must be placed in a complex reality. The challenges are in particular related to the gender gap, which is still strong, and to the type of working relationships that are established.”
On this last front, in particular, Cremona is the third to last province in the region looking at the percentage of permanent starts on the total contracts. As demonstrated by the positive relationship between contractual starts (51,472) and terminations (49,309), hiring is back in the province, but without the necessary stability. «In 2023, permanent contracts were 19.2% of the total, compared to 54.5% of fixed-term contracts and an alarming 18.1% of super-flexible supply contracts».
And another theme remains that of commuting for work reasons: «The lack of attractiveness of the area is linked on the one hand to the collapse of the fertility rate (number of children per woman), which last year fell below the alarm threshold of 1.3, and to the growth of the seniority rate which reached 211.3 (which means 211 elderly people for every 100 young people)”. A phenomenon that determines an impactful commuting out of our province towards other cities in Lombardy and beyond, equal to 41.7% of the contracts started in 2023. A difficulty for the territory and in particular for businesses as illustrated by the figure of the percentage of expected revenue that is difficult to obtain. In Cremona it is 49% (out of a requirement of one hundred workers the companies estimate it will be difficult to find 49), four points above the regional average.
