AGI – The impact of the pandemic on the income of Italian families was significant, but it was distributed in a different way, especially in relation to the restrictions on production activities imposed by the measures to contain the contagion. This was revealed by the AGI / Censis report entitled: “Inhibited work: inheritance after the pandemic”. According to the research, on average 3 out of 10 families suffered a reduction in income during the pandemic.
More precisely, 5.5% of households saw their income fall by more than 50% compared to before the pandemic, 9.1% said a reduction between 25% and 50%, 16% a reduction of less than 25% .
The study highlights that 43.2% of self-employed workers declared their income unchanged compared to before the pandemic, against 66.5% of employees. If we add up the families that have in any case experienced a loss of income, those of employees reach 27.9%, but the percentage doubles among those of self-employed workers (54.7%).
According to the research, “poor work” in Italy, net of the pandemic, involved almost 3 million employed people, of which 53.3% were men and 46.7% were women. The threshold below which a job is to be considered “poor” was set at 9 euros per hour.
The size of insufficient earned income was also attributable to over one million workers aged between 15 and 29 and around 1.4 million aged between 30 and 49. 79% belonged to the category of blue-collar workers (2.3 million employed) and 12.3% to that of managers and employees.
But that of poor work – the research points out – is not the only dimension from which to start to better understand the collective psychology that is forming around work in the post Covid. Another element that has been dragging on for some time in the sphere of dependent work is also given by the progressive polarization of labor income between different sectors and different categories. The persistence of the pay gap that separates men and women in employment is perhaps the most macroscopic aspect, but not the only one.
Taking as a reference the average gross hourly wage set at € 14.04 in the industrial and tertiary sectors, the gap between the various components of work highlights a negative difference of 6.6% for women, 13.9% for those working on a fixed-term basis, 16.2% for those employed with a blue collar qualification. In the case of the apprentice, the qualification that by definition marks the entry into the world of work by young people, the negative gap reaches 35.0%.
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