On the Day dedicated to workers the Christian Associations of Italian Workers (ACLI), alongside CGIL, CISL and UIL, they call for peace thinking above all of the increasingly numerous victims due to ongoing conflicts. Acli and the unions start from the observation that The work often does not give enough to live on or to those who work (especially to young people and women, but not only) nor to the country.
Compared to 2019 there is positive growth in jobs+ 700,000, which however is low if we consider the huge increase in public spending to relaunch the economy and employment: compared to 2019, in 2023 alone public spending without interest was higher by around 157 billion, i.e. the cost of more than 4 million average full-time salaries.
Furthermore, after the 2023 cuts, calculating inflation, for 2024 in the Def, compared to 2021, a decrease in spending of 6.2% in Healthcare and 15.2% in “Other welfare without social security” is expected, risking thus also nullifying the continuity of the choices made with the PNRR such as the Community Houses, fundamental for innovating social and health services.
“Meanwhile – declares Daniele Manzolillo, provincial president Acli Salerno Aps – we persevere in bringing the tax system further and further away from the Constitution, which requires contributions based on one’s abilities, guaranteeing progressive taxation. A system increasingly full of amnesties, as well as loopholes and privileges for the very rich and unproductive incomes. A vision of the country is missing and no progress is seen on the PNRR either. For people and families, employment, in many cases made up of involuntary part-time and irregular forms, means less and less that free and dignified existence that the Constitution with art. 36 asks to insure them and the wealth that work produces is increasingly unequally distributed in favor of speculation and dizzying extra profits of very few”.
The number of working poor or at risk of poverty is growing. It is estimated that almost one in two women under 35 is employed and in thirty years wages have fallen in Italy.
“The only case in Europe, where elsewhere they have risen by at least 30%, with a further reduction of 7% after the pandemic (OECD) – analyzes Manzolillo – Together with the absence of social welfare such as nursery schools, policies for the elderly, families, people with disabilities, we have reached low female employment and, irremediably, to demographic decline. We are in a vicious circle where the impoverishment of work fuels and in turn suffers the impoverishment of the economy, welfare and demographic decline with an expected decline, in 6 years, of 1 million people of working age. Ours and the previous one are the only generations that, apparently, seem to spoil their children and grandchildren, even going into debt to give them the superfluous, while the truth is that we are giving them a future worse than our present.”
Finally Manzolillo states that “it’s time to give value back to work, to stop putting problems off until tomorrow. Only thinking truly in a European dimension, from a political, economic and social rights point of view, will be able to save us, first of all, from our fear of the future, from our inability to understand it and from our laziness in governing it. We will never resign ourselves to this involution, we will never resign ourselves to having a poor job because, as it is written in the first article of the Constitution, if work is poor, democracy is also impoverished“.
