Business

Self-employed: record-breaking Italy, but the choice to "go it alone" has fewer and fewer followers

November 19, 2019

MILAN – A record-breaking army in Europe, but which is rapidly losing its appeal and strength. In no other country (apart from Greece, but we speak of absolute values even remotely comparable) as in Italy there are so many self-employed: there are over 5 million, 21.7 percent of our total employment. Yet in the last decade this patrol has contracted significantly: -5.19% is the balance between 2009 and 2018, against a growth in the order of five percentage points of dependent employment in its various forms.A dynamic that, to tell the truth, has affected all of Europe with rare exceptions (the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom), which according to the analysis of the Labor Consultants Foundation "seems destined to be accentuated in perspective". Experts say: "Although Italy preserves even among young people the highest incidence of self-employment out of the total number of employed (after Greece), however, in the last decade a more pronounced decline in the propensity to" go into business "can be observed" .
In practice, in the last decade – "complicit in the demographic reduction of the youth population but also and above all the greater employment difficulties of market access" – the autonomous young people have been in decline (-31.9%) more than has happened in general with the number of employees between the ages of 25 and 34, which fell by 21.4%. If you look at the motivations for which you take the path of independent work, for the majority (39%) the choice is due to the appearance of the right opportunity, while for one in four (24.2%) comes from the possibility of continuing a business family already started. Minority (10.4%, in line with the EU average) the slice of those who are autonomous because they found the door of the dependent job closed.

Given these trends, the research also allows us to outline the figure of the autonomous person today. It is a figure that has a propensity to work alone: 72.3% of them have no employees or collaborators. But it is not a considered choice: less than two out of ten of these individual workers are satisfied with the situation. The others would appreciate employees or collaborators, but they do not have enough work to afford to bear the additional costs. Having said this problem, another possible distortion lurks behind a high figure: almost 14% of Italian autonomous (high figure on the EU average) has only one customer, another 3.1% has a "predominant" one. Situations in which autonomy fades towards a real dependency.Among the variables analyzed, the research shows that – despite the spread of low-skilled professions, such as riders, for example – the Italian self-employed are on average more educated than their European colleagues. Transposed into the pyramid of work, this feature can help explain the massive presence at the top of the professional pyramid: 12.3% of independent employed in Italy are managers or business owners, 20.4% highly qualified professionals and 17 , 1% technical figures. The remaining part is mainly found among the sales figures (18.3%) and small artisans and traders (16.7%). Yet not all self-employed people are satisfied: more than a quarter (27.7%) would want a job employed, while only ten employees out of a hundred would do the reverse.

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