Housework in Italy? A job for foreigners (representing 69.5% of workers) and women (86.4%), but above all for the irregular majority. The snapshot of the sector comes from the latest report from the Domina Observatory (National Association of Family Employers of Domestic Workers), which also uses INPS data to monitor a sector that is becoming increasingly important in Italy.
The figures show that domestic work has one of the highest rates of irregularity among various economic sectors: 51.8% compared to the national average of 11.3%.
The irregularity takes various forms: there are so-called “gray areas”, that is, employment relationships that are only partially regulated: flexible or atypical forms of contracting tend to disguise the real employment relationship, or contracts that only cover it. A portion of the working hours actually performed.
There are also cases of incomplete classification; that is, all contracts stipulated to be of a lesser nature than the original contract, with the aim of paying less to the employee.
Fewer workers in the industry, especially in the south: new trends
Among the data in the report, it is revealed that there are approximately 900 thousand domestic workers in Italy: 80 thousand fewer than in 2021, a decrease of 7.9 percent. However, the number of Italians doing this job is increasing and now represents 30.5% of the total number of employees. In some regions they are not only strong but also have a majority presence: this is the case of Sardinia, where Italians represent 82.2% of domestic workers.
Domina explains that the decline in the number of workers in the sector is physiological and is partly due to the end of the effects of the “amnesty” (the rule that allowed the regulation of many foreign domestic workers) and partly to the increase recorded in 2015. The two-year period 2020-2021 is associated with further regulation of employment relations during the pandemic.
However, the number of workers does not decrease at the same rate. Campania, Basilicata and Calabria were the regions that most recorded the effects of the end of amnesty, while the decline in other regions was less pronounced. For example, again in Sardinia, domestic workers decreased by only -1.9% compared to 2021.
Source: Today IT
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
