Housekeepers and caregivers: Italian women are making a comeback. And the majority work illegally.

RETURN OF ITALIAN CARERS

Let's go back to being housekeepers and carers. Jobs considered uncomfortable, which we had completely transferred to foreigners and which are now bouncing on the horizon of Italian job applications. Women, Italian women in fact, who work as housekeepers and carers are more than doubled in less than ten years. We continue to get help with housework and caring for the elderly from Eastern Europeans (which had reached 74 percent of the total, now we are at 60 percent), and Asians (7,5 percent), but the real novelty highlighted by the annual research of the Leone Moressa Foundation is the return of the Italians.

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ITALIAN MAID

The reasons for this return are not difficult to explain. First, two. The long wave of the Great Depression has not yet passed, and Italians they retrace their steps, even in jobs they thought they'd definitively discarded. The number of doormen is increasing, as is the number of housekeepers and carers. Or rather, they're returning. Secondly, there's an ever-increasing need for women to support families who struggle to make ends meet in their income bracket, where perhaps the man has been laid off and put on furlough. And it's the women who are picking up the slack.

ITALIAN DOMESTIC WORKERS

The return to jobs we had abandoned is not a phenomenon to be viewed with a critical and fearful eye. It is yet another sign of how energetic the resilience of Italians, their ability to adapt to the continuous shocks of the Great Crisis, the neo-sobriety which we're all dealing with, more or less. The downside, however, is another: while the number of Italian women increases, the contributions paid decrease. Why? According to Assindatcolf, female workers in black They are the majority, 53 percent of the total. And this means only one thing: domestic work, whether it be housekeeping or caring, is increasingly aligning itself with the parameters of the gig economyThe economy of odd jobs. Often paid under the table, with increasingly low wages and no insurance or social security coverage. A disease of the new economy.

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