What will happen to the navigators?
Speech by Alessandra Servidori, professor of labor policies, member of the Steering Council for programmatic activity in the field of economic policy coordination at the presidency of the Council
The so-called "Recovery Decree" approved on Christmas Eve with the vote of confidence, born as a support to the Recovery and Resilience Plan, during the parliamentary process, already rather accelerated, has actually become burdened with many measures that with the National plan financed with European resources do not have much to do. We are looking for highly professionalized personnel to ensure the objectives of active policy and the targeted use of public spending. The renewal of the contract of the 2500 so-called navigators, whose relationship with Anpal expired in December, was renewed until April 30, 2022.
The average salary of a navigator is 1730 € net per month (about 30.900 € gross per year), while the employees of the employment centers (CPI) receive an average monthly salary of about 1250/1300 euro net per month. and must have high training, required qualifications such as that of the expert in organic professional training at the CPI. Navigators hired with the role of supporting citizenship income earners to find work risked being fired, given the very unsatisfactory results on the labor market front, they mobilized on the initiative of Nidil-Cgil, Felsa-Cisl and Uiltemp -Uil, to obtain an amendment to the budget law, relying on the explicit political support of the M5S.
Anpal Servizi hired them with a coordinated and continuous collaboration contract expiring last April, a contract already extended once until the end of the year. This so-called amnesty perpetuated for another four months is an operation that was born badly: when in 2019 it was decided to bring these new professionals from another administration, Anpal Servizi, into the regional employment centers, with the risk of overlapping of tasks.
Today navigators remain the way of regional competitions for permanent positions in employment centers, knowing that the extension has an economic impact on the state coffers, of which, however, coverage has been found but not in the Budget law.
The fact is that competitions at regional level are slow and despite foreshadowing the plan to upgrade the 551 employment centers, due to delays in competitions announced by the Regions: out of 11,600 scheduled hires in the three-year period 2019-21 (latest available data ) only 1300 had been made. The Regions had committed to reach 4500 recruitments within the year, a failed goal, and it is true that currently the centers will remain underpowered: 7772 including the so-called navigators against 61.369 in Germany, 51.208 in France , 20,067 of Poland. In the meantime, navigators can, and if there will be a concrete inversion of active policies, also be employed in the implementation of the national program of Active Policies, Gol (guarantee employability of workers), or the Fund for new skills which in the meantime has been considerably enriched and it would already be necessary to have a consistent team of highly qualified personnel to proceed quickly with training and retraining courses. But this is the problem: who does the higher education?
Aware of these limitations, it was also decided in the Recovery Decree to hire personnel from the State General Accounting Office (a department of the Ministry of Economy and Finance) for the establishment of a "Scientific Committee for activities relating to the review of expenditure", with the recruitment of another 40 people, to strengthen the tools for analyzing and monitoring public spending and the processes of reviewing and evaluating expenditure. At the same time, the “Nucleo Pnrr State-Regions” was established, an organism that will have the task of ensuring the coordination of relations between the state administrations, owners of the Pnrr interventions, and the local authorities.
However, the risk for Anpal remains linked to the hiring of navigators who have been given a collaboration assignment renewed twice, or with an autonomous relationship, even if the question from a legal point of view is very complex. In fact, it is not excluded that there are also questions of constitutional legitimacy of law no. 96 of 9 August 2018, the so-called Dignity Decree which allowed the hiring of navigators.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/navigator-futuro/ on Tue, 28 Dec 2021 07:54:10 +0000.