After the peak reached with the pandemic and the decline recorded with the production recovery following the end of Covid tredundancy payments are on the rise: in July companies asked INPS for 36.6 million hours of redundancy payments, an increase of 3.71% on June and 27.9% on the year. If the July data could be linked to the decision of companies that are in difficulty to stop near the summer break and to the use of the reason for weather events (you can have the shock absorber in the face of temperatures of at least 35 degrees even just perceived), the data for the first seven months of the year still records significant growth.
Between January and June 2024, requests were received by INPS for 292.77 million hours, an increase of 20.12% compared to the same period in 2023 and a significant growth especially for ordinary redundancy payments with over 170.5 million hours requested (+44.08%). Requests for ordinary redundancy payments, which can be granted when the company crisis depends on temporary events (lack of orders, weather events, etc.) and the recovery of production activity is certain, decreased especially for industry with 166 million (+51.30%) while construction reported a decline (with 13.55 million hours requested, -9.08%). On the other hand, the request for extraordinary cash falls by 3.73% when the company has to face restructuring processes (change of technologies), reorganization (change of company organization), reconversion (change of activity) or in the event of a company crisis, to just over 105 million hours.
«We have already reported the presence of important crises since January – he explains Rossella Marinucci CGIL’s labor market area – large companies are at the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy, the others, as soon as their workloads collapse, rely on the fund. From the performance of the Regions, we see that the sectors suffering the most are the automotive and fashion sectors”. In Piedmont, in the first seven months, ordinary redundancy payments increased by 66% from 10.9 to 18.2 million, while in Tuscany they grew by 84.8%, from 6.9 million to 12.75. Companies appear cautious and ask for hours of redundancy payments that will then largely not be used. The draw, or the actual use of the redundancy payments, is still falling and in the first five months it was at 21.56% of the total hours requested with just over one hour out of five requested actually used. But there is concern with industrial production which, according to Itstat, in the second quarter fell by 0.8% compared to the first.
«It is evident – explains the confederal secretary of Uil Ivana Veronese – that companies do not consider the market stable and have uncertainties about their futureClaiming that employment is doing very well without investigating its quality starting from the multitude of fixed-term contracts that then lead to unemployment and telling that the economy is doing very well without grasping the signs of uncertainty and the difficulties that businesses are experiencing are the fairy tales that are repeated to us but that do not represent the real country”. Signs of uncertainty also arrive on the unemployment claims front: in June, INPS received 177,365 unemployment claims between Naspi and Discoll with an increase of 9% compared to the same month in 2023, while in the first six months of the year, unemployment claims received by the Institute were 843,635 with an increase of 5.5% compared to the same period in 2023. “We need to bring the table on industrial crises back to Palazzo Chigi – Marinucci said again. We need to find answers together. There is no discussion on industrial policy now”.