The ACLI celebrate May Day, alongside the CGIL, CISL and UIL, invoking Peace and thinking first and foremost of those who are worse off and, among these, in particular the victims of the increasingly widespread piecemeal global war, to many people and families fleeing conflicts, dictatorships and poverty.
Work often no longer provides enough to live on, neither for those who work (especially young people and women, but not only) nor for the country. Compared to 2019 there is a 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 non-interest public spending was approximately 157 billion higher, 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 of 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 tax progressivity); a system increasingly full of amnesties, as well as loopholes and privileges for the very rich and unproductive incomes.
A country vision is missing and no progress can be 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 (art. 36) asks to ensure them and the wealth that work produces is increasingly unequally distributed in favor of speculation and dizzying extra profits of very few.
Work in the poor or at risk of poverty is growing (almost 1 in 2 women under 35) and in thirty years wages have fallen, the only case in Europe, where elsewhere they have risen by at least 30%, with a further reduction of 7% after the pandemic (OECD). Together with the absence of social welfare (nurseries, policies for the elderly, families, people with disabilities…) this has led to low female employment and, irremediably, demographic decline. We are in a vicious circle where the impoverishment of work fuels and in turn suffers from 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.
It’s time for real choices – concludes Manzolillo – Of give value back to work, to stop putting off problems until tomorrow: only starting to really think 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.
