After the vouchers, will the internships also sink?
Internships: facts, analyzes and controversies. Claudio Negro's study of the Kuliscioff foundation
Gabanelli's Data Room on internships is well done and documented, even if the data are not exactly "preview" as the article states: they can be easily found here .
However, it deserves some clarification, in relation to a "background music" which, evidently influenced by the opinion of the Minister of Labor, tends to give the internship a thoughtful and alarmed note in carrying out the analysis.
In the first place, we are by no means faced with an uncontrolled spread of training as an instrument of intensive exploitation, as the union constantly denounces. As the tables published by Data Room show, in 2021 we are still significantly below the number of internships, trainees and companies involved in the years prior to Covid. No wild growth, then!
Secondly, the employment outcomes of the internships (nb in this context internships and internships are interchangeable terms): the positive outcomes reached 58.5% in 2018, slightly decreasing the following year which, however, was already affected by the Covid crisis. We do not have the 2021 data, but it is likely that they are rising towards the 2018 quota. It is quite rare that an Active Policy (this can be considered an internship) has a success rate of almost 60%.
Just to give an idea, the success rate of Dote Unica Lavoro of the Lombardy Region, considered the most effective among the Active Policies implemented by the Regions, reported in the same period (monitoring of September 2019) a success rate of 60 ,2%. With all the observations that can be made, it is difficult to deny that internships are an efficient tool for matching job supply and demand.
However, the suspicious eyebrow raises when noting the "precariousness" rate inherent in the data: however the 2014-2019 cumulative data show that 46% of the recruitments made within 3 months of the end of the internship are permanent (including, of course, the apprenticeships). Well over 10% presented by DUL Regione Lombardia.
It should be noted that there is a positive direct relationship between the company hosting the internship and the hiring of the intern: in 30% of cases the hiring takes place at the same company, and in most cases within 10 days from the conclusion of the internship. internship.
Even the duration of the contracts is not so precarious: after 12 months from hiring, 52% are still employed, in particular for more than two thirds with the same company, with the same type of contract. Another 22% have changed contract types, but are still busy. A result entirely consistent with the general data that on average one third of permanent contracts is closed within 12 months, due to voluntary resignation or dismissal.
One last observation seems to be of particular concern to the Ministry, and to call for measures: the positive results of the internships are largely proportional to the level of education of the interns, the duration of the internship and its training contents. At the top of the recruitments are by far the industrial enterprises and the technical professions and skilled workers. This leads Minister Orlando to argue that these recruitments would still have been made without the need to undergo an internship, and he concludes that the internship should be reserved for individuals with social inclusion difficulties.
It is quite typical of the bureaucratic-dirigiste mentality of the Italian left to think that an employment policy that works without the need for public obligations or interventions is in reality useless, and perhaps even fraudulent: if they hired them it is because they needed them, they would have hired anyway. A paleonovecentista vision, wary of the market, confident in administrative intervention.
Let us not dwell here on what model of employment policies can produce this point of view; let us limit ourselves to pointing out how it rejects a labor policy precisely because, paradoxically, it works, favoring the employment of professionals, education, innovative manufacturing sectors.
Could the interns be hired right away, without going through the internship? Do we mean that the internship is a surreptitious trial period imposed by companies?
But the alternative, since there is no "insertion contract", is the professionalizing apprenticeship contract, which lasts much longer, probably redundant if not useless in terms of training; and in any case less attractive also for the trainee, who only takes a few months to be hired.
As we have already noted, a labor market is beginning to take shape that works, with useful tools, including internships, for the highest supply-demand brackets; less efficient for the lower bands. Certainly, however, the option of penalizing the higher bands, creating difficulties and obstacles to the meeting between supply and demand, will not automatically produce an improvement for the lower bands. Like the abolition of vouchers, it did not lead to any improvement for occasional jobs.
But this unfortunately belongs to an ancient prejudice (and Marx, poor fellow, has nothing to do with it) that hitting the rich means favoring the poor …
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/tirocini/ on Sun, 19 Jun 2022 05:26:58 +0000.