Employed: An Update

4 April 20262 weeks babelfish

On a slightly more serious note, the provisional monthly labor force survey data were released yesterday, confirming stagnation in employment in February, with a -0.1% decrease on a quarterly basis (i.e., compared to the previous month), although it is still up (0.1%) compared to the previous "rolling quarter" and compared to February 2025. Perhaps the best way to read these data is to put them into perspective, as we did here using the quarterly data:

Indeed, observing the series over a broader horizon, we see that while the employment rate growth we recorded two years ago remains a historic record, it is also experiencing a slowdown. This might be expected, were it not for the fact that this variable, despite its progress, remains 9 percentage points below the European average in Italy (Italy ranks twenty-seventh out of 27). This relative stagnation in employment is somewhat consistent with the relative stagnation in real wages we recorded here :

The two things go hand in hand, and obviously neither is a good thing. It should also be said, for the sake of completeness, that the overall picture isn't great.

However, the consolidation of job positions continues, with an ever decreasing incidence of fixed-term ones:

which had been growing steadily throughout the austerity period, from a low of 11.42% of the total in 2004-01, reaching a pre-COVID high of 17.27% in 2018-12, surpassed only by the post-COVID high of 17.31% in 2022-02. Today we are at 12.89%, back to the pre- subprime crisis period, but there is still a long way to go.

I only record data.

Let's meet up for a more relaxed analysis, and if we don't see each other: Happy Easter!

This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/04/occupati-un-aggiornamento.html on Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:06:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.