EUROPEAN PAPERS ON THE NEW WELFARE

4. Defensive Strategies: Bridge to Employment

Policies for activating elderly workers in the labour market include people of 50 years and over in the ‘disadvantaged category’. This is hardly an appropriate definition for dealing with the subject of employment in old age, since recorded age, if not accompanied by other dimensions of social stratification, is only of generic significance. Therefore among oldest members of the labour market, we should distinguish a group with less to offer and who are still more disadvantaged in the labour market. This group is made up of those with little schooling and with professional qualifications for which there is little market demand (obsolescence), or who are seriously exposed to competition with others seeking work (replacement between peripheral numbers in the labour field). It is also useful to distinguish between white and blue collar workers. The relationship between age and productivity in relation to psychophysical abilities is more important to manual workers when it comes to the subject of obsolescence of competences, but is common to both labourers and clerical workers when it comes to product processing innovations and organisational models.

It is also necessary to distinguish between people who, have had a stable working career over their life cycle, but have had limited professional training and have now experienced a significant obsolescence of their competences, and another type of worker who having had fragmented and unstable working paths, find themselves in a situation of professional de-qualification, resulting in progressive occupational marginalisation with the advance of age, until the point that that there is no alternative but exit from the labour market. This type of worker can be included in the number of disadvantaged elderly workers for whom there is a very limited market demand, because of the operation of selective mechanisms and replacement processes within companies. The barrier to participation on the part of this type of elderly worker in the labour market is based, firstly, on company cost containment strategies. Businesses in this scenario are rarely prepared to invest in professional updating (in general, but more particularly, on the elderly, cf. Folini et al., 2004) and they seek to offer work to components who guarantee lower labour costs. Secondly, the ‘barrier’ is strengthened by the presence of a system of prejudices linked to age which promotes the notion that with the advance of age there is a reduction in productivity and less adaptability to business needs on the part of the elderly worker. For blue-collar workers this prejudice is linked to the lower rate of unionisation among elderly workers, while for white collar ones it can be attributed to bureaucratic structuring that is more rigid than more slimmed down organisation models. In the case of elderly workers, with unstable employment careers behind them, companies bewail the low level of employment discipline. In the active ageing perspective the public player with this kind of situation should meet two needs: delaying the final exit from the labour market, at least until the minimum requirements for retirement are met, while safeguarding the worker from the risks of social exclusion resulting from loss of employment and earning capacity. From this point of view the public player must take on a ‘defensive’ perspective. It is well known that the Italian welfare system lacks both a universal minimum income guarantee, and a non-categorical protection plan against unemployment (the institute of mobility itself follows a categorical plan) (Boeri, Perotti, 2002). Existing tools, principally the insertion contract and the easier hiring of older mobile workers guarantees a reduction in labour costs, partly restoring the balance between the economic advantages of the company and hiring. The problem of professional reconversion and re-motivation (important to the success of training activities directed at professional reconversion) is more complicated.

Being involuntarily unemployed at career end, above all for current elderly workers, represents an unexpected event contrary to their personal expectations regarding career end. For these workers the main concern, indeed, is how to benefit from the pension both in terms of defence against employment uncertainties and the more restrictive redefinition of pension income, and of arrival at the retirement ‘biographical threshold’, a necessary stage of the working career, to which most aspire and towards which one’s efforts in the economic field have had to be channelled for one’s whole life (Sennett, 1999). In order to re-motivate and train workers to seek new employment the public player, at a local level where there are employment centres, has to be committed to creating personalised pathways directed at projects for transition to retirement through bridge jobs (Doeringer, 1990; Geroldi, 2000), i.e. forms of employment lasting long enough for the attainment of the requisites for retirement. We are talking here about actions that provide a complete governance of the relations between workers’ representatives and public institutions, based on the use of outplacement procedures¹² (individual or collective). Only after having identified, through a process of territorial collective bargaining, the employment opportunities for a person over 50 years of age, is it possible to set in motion a directed training and motivational programme with the involvement and participation of the worker himself.

5. Promotional Strategies: Self-Employment

Various strategies should be adopted with regard to elderly workers dismissed from employment, but who have a professionalism that is sellable on the labour market. This is a numerically restricted group of ‘strong’ workers, strong either because they are less at risk of early dismissal from employment, or because they have the superior schooling and professionalism requisites less commonly found among the current ranks of elderly workers. Included among these are technicians with a basic professional training, but with a store of technical-operational competences acquired through work experience and, therefore, either difficult to find on the market, or difficult to train within producing organisations. To these can be added the employed professionals who have attained a high level of human capital in terms of work experience and high level of social capital in their own work sector and who can easily adapt to new professional tasks. There are niche market spots for this kind of worker. Often there is a labour demand from companies engaged in the same industry in which the worker has previously worked and which are interested in acquiring experience accumulated in the field in similar activity or one functionally linked to it. There is moreover, a readiness on the part of businesses and workers to agree on mutually favourable employment terms (often risking sliding into the black economy). The main difficulty one finds in these cases is the ‘matching’ of demand for and offer of work, either due to a problem of information asymmetry, or a problem of trust which, together bind matching to personal relationships. These are basic themes on which employment services, through the system of employment centres and employment information services could work more efficiently. In the event of large numbers of older workers the role of the public player, in relation to active ageing, is not only that of promoting employment up to the point of attaining the minimum prerequisites for the pension, but also, more ambitiously, that of creating incentives for prolonging working activity well beyond retirement, including through the promotion of forms of employment other than work as an employee. From a promotional perspective employment services could take more action to inform older workers about the mechanisms for moving to self-employment (particularly as professional consultants) or, if conditions are right, to running one’s own business, despite the lack of ad hoc tools for people of advanced years. Through agreements with worker’s representatives it could prove appropriate, in some businesses, to plan for spin offs among more professionalised groups of employees, different from the weaker pathways characterised by so-called “second generation self employment” (Bologna and Fumagalli, 1997; Bologna, 2007) and substantially independent of the mother-business. There might also be a place for strong entrepreneurial pathways which are more generally open to the market.

With regard to the first type of pathway one can refer to a recent analysis on those registered with Gestione Sperate INPS (Di Nicola, et al., 2008) from which it appears that in 2007 workers over 50 years of age represented 27% of VAT registered professionals who do not have a professional portfolio and a specific category pension system (49 thousand people), 38% of typical ‘para-subordinate‘ workers (187 thousand people) and 17% of atypical ‘para-subordinate workers (17 thousand people)¹³. In these cases the public player can aim at a promotional strategy for self-employment on the part of the more elderly with the objective of delaying retirement and prolonging their stay in the labour market. For those who fit this typology the motivation to continue in their own professional activity, already satisfying in its content, is to be found in the freedom from the coercive elements of being an employee and in the possibility of independently organising one’s time for life and for work, according to one’s own preferences.

6. Innovative Strategies: The Second Career

Not all mature workers can be made active in the labour market since they have lost interest in the professional activity that they had carried out and have no immediate need to work, because they are protected by the welfare system, or because they have accumulated sufficient resources to allow them to leave the labour market early. In many cases they are people who have developed an alternative vocation, sometimes professional, but for the most part social, political or simply personal. The common feature of this type of person is that they have acquired resources and multiple identities during the central phase of their life cycles, both within and outside the market; alternative resources of a professional or identifying character to be used for a simple biographical reorientation in the ‘third age’ (Laslett, 1989). From studies on the subject (Gaullier, 1998) so-called so called ‘second careers’ can be observed i.e. the start of a different professional activity, carried out as a business activity after the end of the working cycle as an employee that has lasted through the central life phase. Second careers are distinguished from freelance work carried out by individuals in advanced age, by the fact that they involve more of an identity rather than professional re-invention, and the instrumental component of work is replaced by one of self expression and fulfilment. In these cases the role of active ageing policies can relate back to those included in promotional strategies.

Room for deeper innovative strategies emerges when one concentrates on second careers taking place outside the market. Adopting the comprehensive perspective of active ageing (Calza, Bini, et al., 2008) we find important innovation processes that concern not only the elderly, but social organisation in its entirety. Indeed, taking the ‘substance’ view of work, as opposed to that of employment for work we must understand the totality of activities that individuals carry out in relation to their needs, independently of whether or not there is a corresponding income (Mingione, Pugliese, 2002). In this sense the concept of work goes beyond the confines of a market exchange mediated by money, but also considers non paid activities, carried out within reciprocal relationships, such as, for example, activities carried out within the family or as a volunteer.

Following Massimo Paci’s lead (2005), with this approach, we can analytically identify three distinct spheres of activity: (1) that of market based work, (2) that of non market based, but socially important work, and (3) that of personal, non economically based, activities. With a view to active ageing the sphere of non market based, but socially important activities is of special importance, particularly care work carried out within the family and voluntary work performed in the non-profit sector. What holds the attention of scholars and policy makers, however, is the question of social acknowledgement of this type of activity carried out outside the market, whether as part of a broader active ageing strategy or under a pluriactive society perspective (Gorz, 1980; Gaullier, 2003) in which everyone freely combines their personal time with market work and non market activities. To this end, however, there is a need for a process of formal recognition of activities based on social and civil commitment, as suggested some years ago in the European Union with the “right to social withdrawal” mechanism for the acknowledgement and financing of activities carried out outside the market (Supiot, 2003).

Adoption of this perspective overturns the negative stereotypes affecting the elderly and reduces the view of ageing as a threat to society. The appropriately activated old person, so long as he remains healthy and independent, is transformed into a resource for the community, particularly for the building of a more solid municipal welfare system. In the family circle, in particular, the elderly are not always in need of care. In fact a sizeable number of them actively contribute to the informal family support of their children, in a complex system of intergenerational solidarity (Facchini, 2009). For example, the elderly are busy as grandparents taking care of their grandchildren and the home, with positive effects in terms of reconciling their free time with their work as parents, particularly in the case of working women. In 2005 52.3% of children were entrusted mainly to grandparents when their mother was at work; moreover, in 25% of cases women who were working received help with their domestic work from grandparents (Istat, 2007a). In the Third sector too the contribution made by the elderly is increasingly important. In particular the participation of mature individuals in volunteer work is constantly growing, both because of demographic reasons and because of a cultural climate that favours civil commitment. From available data released by Istat it appears that between 1995 and 2003 the number of volunteers in Italy grew significantly, from 482 thousand to 826 thousand. It is particularly the case that the incidence of volunteers among those over 54 years of age increased from 30.4% in 1995 to 36.8% in 2003 (equal to 303,951 individuals). It also appears that the number of volunteers in retirement increases. In 2003 these represented 29.5% of the total, more than 11.3 percentage points higher than that recorded in 1995. These examples show how it is possible to set up virtuous activation pathways for the elderly which guarantee them social inclusion (offering new sources for identity, roles and collective recognition) and which increase resources of solidarity within local communities, with positive effects even at the economic competitiveness level.

12 In this regard see, in particular the territorial SPINN of Italia Lavoro experimentation (Mirabile et al., 2006) and the monitoring experiences from Isfol (2002) (translator’s note: Institute for the Development of Workers’ Professional Education).
13 Included among the “typical” are administrators, mayors, company auditors, committee members, who though belonging to the para-subordinate group carry out a typically professional or managerial activity. All the others are ‘atypical’.

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