Youth unemployment in Italy: the worst waste of our country.

We are not a country for young people. Not only because of a natural demographic effect, with families shrinking in number of children and the average life expectancy rising, but above all because of a vital issue affecting our dimension as a national community, as Italians: there are no jobs and no opportunities for young people. The doors are closed, barred, to the boys and girls who should represent our main investment, and instead we are pushing, step by step, down the path of a life without goals and without certainties. An absolute waste of human resources, of fresh energy, of the desire for modernity. And of a future to dream and build.

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YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT IN ITALY. ISTAT ( National Institute of Statistics) reports that youth unemployment in Italy has skyrocketed to 41,6 percent, a historic and all-time high since 1977. What has happened in these 35 years to find us at this precipice, in a Bella Italia tailor-made only for the elderly? To simplify—the story would be much longer—we can say that the mass youth unemployment certified by ISTAT is the result of three phenomena, which must be explained not by sheer numbers alone.

1. RIGIDITY OF ACCESS TO THE LABOR MARKET. The first phenomenon concerns training and job access. Resting on our own well-being, we've seen fit to de-skill professions, even though we're a country of excellence, schools, and universities. Once upon a time, a young person would attend a nautical school and find a job, even a well-paid one, or graduate from a technical school and simply have to choose a company to work for. During the 35 years of the downward curve, however, we have, almost scientifically, killed vocational training, reducing it to a cesspool of waste and cronyism, with the usual stamp of regional administrations, especially in the South. And now we're paying the price.

In Germany, the youth unemployment rate is 7 percent, and 61 percent of industrial workers have a technical diploma : more than 50 percent of unemployed young Germans find a new job in less than three months, and only 12 percent wait a year. Is the difference clear? Germany is growing, looking to the future, and despite the Great Recession, it doesn't have a structural youth unemployment problem. We still have thousands of young people pursuing fake and useless degrees, with no real job openings . Half of German young people attend a genuine, not fake, vocational training program, offering 340 different careers, from nursing to banking, from mechanics to electronics; half of Italian young people are left to their own devices, both in terms of their studies and their jobs.

Deskilled training then went hand in hand with the rigidity of the labor market, especially regarding entry mechanisms. Once we realized, again over a 35-year period, that we couldn't continue like this, fixed-term hiring of young people increased, through the familiar door of flexible entry. And between co.co.co, co.co.pro, and so on with the acronyms, we went too far, with the most casual companies confusing flexibility with lifelong precariousness. Starvation wages, on which it's impossible for a young person to plan a family and buy a house with a mortgage : it's no coincidence that ISTAT, regarding the 15-24 age group, speaks of 924 young people "participating in the labor market." They participate because working in a call center, paid a few cents per successful call, cannot be considered a permanent job; if anything, it should be the first step on a professional path.

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2. THE RECOMMENDED. The second phenomenon lies at the intersection of anthropology and the social sciences: in Italy, parents have eliminated their children. And the latent generational conflict has been resolved entirely to the advantage of the former, that is, the elderly, or let's say , the mature ones of today. Fathers are locked into their jobs and careers, sometimes with exorbitant salaries, and covered by the blanket of a welfare state that instead skimps on resources to encourage the entry of young people, their children, into the labor market. In Italy's decline, the social ladder has thus stalled, and we have created a flat society, stuck in the present, while the future has disappeared from the horizon of the new generations. Only the usual suspects have escaped this diabolical mechanism: the children of Mr. Someone. Thus, the data are from Alma Laurea , 44 percent of architects are children of architects, 42 percent of lawyers are children of lawyers and 40 percent of doctors are children of doctors: these are the numbers of Italian-style familism.

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3. THE NEW EMIGRATION. The third phenomenon that helps us understand how we are rapidly approaching a 50 percent unemployment rate can be seen through the lens of the new emigration. Today's young people lack the driving force their grandparents had when they rebuilt Italy; they don't feel the rush of opportunity, and so they prefer to emigrate abroad. A young person with talent, a desire to study and work, and ambition today does something very simple: pack a suitcase, and bye-bye Italy. Forever, not just to earn a good degree from a university highly ranked in international rankings, or to go on a work-study experience in cities around the world where life, for young people, pulsates. We are now around 60 young people who have left Italy to study abroad , convinced that in our country there is no possibility of a good, well-paid job, let alone a job. They left, never to return. Maybe they'll do it later in their old age, and then they'll discover how beautiful Italy is, and how high our quality of life is from Bolzano to Palermo. For now, they've been forced to accept that there's no place for them, for young people, here. In no way.

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