South Working: How Young People Are Returning to the South

For Southern Italy's brains, it's no longer time to flee, it's time to return. In 2020, thanks to the sudden spread of agile work and smart working, digital nomads in the South were able to return home while continuing to work remotely. A veritable counter-exodus with significant numbers: 100 young people returned to their home countries to work in smart working for companies in the North.

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SOUTH WORKING

Great crises also bring great opportunities, and so towns, cities, and cities in Campania, Calabria, and Sicily have revitalized with young professionals who have decided to spend the lockdown surrounded by their loved ones, preferring to work remotely. The demographics define them quite precisely: young, qualified, accustomed to the pace of modernity, demanding users and consumers who are demanding that the South adapt its service offerings, especially with regard to the digital divide.
The counter-exodus of brains from Northwest and Central Italy already has a name: they've called it South-Working. Forty-five thousand workers have cancelled their rents and started working from home, repopulating the South. And getting organized.

Demanding that Southern Italy adapt to the new economic climate and the new needs of its young people. Without further ado. The first to do so were a group of professionals from Palermo who coined the catchy neologism "south-working": working, or studying, from home, without being forced into an unresolved exodus. For this reason, they designed and established a nonprofit organization that believes in agile working as a tool to reduce the country's social and regional divide, stimulate the growth of new job opportunities by leveraging remote working, and shake up the apathy that has become entrenched in the southern regions, often overlooked by decision-making powers.

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SMART WORKING IN THE SOUTH

Born in collaboration with the Fondazione per il Sud and the Global Shapers Palermo Hub, South Working is a project designed to study the phenomenon of smart working in Southern Italy, analyzing its pros and cons, but also, and above all, to launch concrete proposals to support workers who opt for this work modality, facilitated and forced by the ongoing pandemic. All the good that can be learned from the Coronavirus experience must be projected into a future that rethinks the economic fabric of the South, stimulating its growth and, above all, offering a new perspective to young people who have stopped actively seeking work and even studying: the NEETs, who in the South make up 33 percent of young people between 15 and 29, who need clean air and to fight against apathy and the absence of institutions.

In addition to its smart-working observatory in Southern Italy, South-Working maps co-working locations, organized spaces available for use, companies willing to embrace this agile working model while rethinking work-life balance, and all initiatives aimed at promoting awareness and understanding of "smart" working from home. A true advocacy movement whose strength is networking. A strong network of all stakeholders: workers, companies, and public bodies, a robust digital community exchanging information, ideas, and insights, connecting professionals, managers, and academics, united by having been forced to leave their homes and loved ones to pursue their professional ambitions. United, now more than ever, by the desire to return home.

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