What if Briatore had understood young people better? – Corriere.it

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16 years have passed since the famous big babies of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, a generation. And yet, the late economist will always be remembered (also) for the joke he made in October 2007, while, as Economy Minister of the Prodi II government, he presented the Budget Law: The maneuver contains measures such as aid of a thousand euros a year planned for twenty-thirty year olds who rent a house: let’s send the big babies out of the house. Nobody liked the phrase, not even its majority, and that word served for a few years to define the gap between the ruling class and the reality of a youth grappling with the crossroads between emigration of all kinds (even very intellectual, according to the another overused cliché of the brain drain) and the abyss of neet (no study, no work, no training: the social paralysis that burns life).

Young choosy

Six years later, it’s up to Elsa Fornero update the technocratic vocabulary of the condition of youth, passing from the more home-made term with which the predecessor had failed the attempt to give himself a tone accessible to all, to the opposite one of the Anglo-Saxon lexicon: speaking at a conference of Assolombarda, the Minister of Labor of the Monti government invites young people to don’t be too much choosyin English, and take the first offers and then look around from inside, because you can no longer wait for the ideal place. Clarifications followed (young Italians today are willing to take on any job. So much so that they are in precarious conditions), translations – choosy stands for picky, demanding, fussy, insatiable, ultimately spoiled – and inevitable controversies, with the good and generous minister since then in the crosshairs of Italian populists, who have made her their ramshackle propaganda nemesis.

Brain drain, Italian trouble

The outputs of the ministers are therefore important, a word can mark an era and, above all, give an idea of ​​what the mix of programmatic intentions and ideological tics that characterizes governments can produce. This is even more true for the less technocratic and more political ones. It is no coincidence that the current government, ultra-political and post-technocratic by definition, moreover led by a former Minister of Youth, is particularly concentrated on the issue because stopping the brain drain has made a decisive feature of its mandatewith the intention of stopping the alleged substitution underway between Italians who leave in search of work – or who remain but without work – and foreigners who arrive to do the jobs that Italians no longer want to do.

The Lollobrigida case

The most explicit in the assumption the Minister of Agriculture Lollobrigidawho repeated at Vinitaly that the countryside needs manpower e young Italians must know that it is not demeaning to go to work in agriculture. Indeed, what is not a model of civilization is not going to work, staying on the sofa and burdening the shoulders of others with the basic income. However, today it was the prime minister herself who insisted on the concept by announcing the agrarian education reform, with the revelation that we are thinking of a made in Italy high school to enhance paths that explain the link that exists between our culture, the territories and our identity, and the proposal of a series of measures concerning, for example, tax deductions for those who hire under 36 in agriculture, and for activities and businesses mainly made up of young people. From this point of view, the government should find truly fertile ground if, as you write Republic quoting the data from Coldiretti last year, out of the million workers who entered agriculture with an employee contract, one in three was represented by under 35s. To these must be added the over 55,000 young Italian entrepreneurs who, again in 2022, had chosen to invest in the land, from cultivation to breeding, from agritourism.

The decree flows

The point is to understand if this vocation, if this return to his grandfather’s farms as Matteo Salvini says, is enough to satisfy the real need for manpower in the sector. The trade associations themselves say no, that the 44,000 entries authorized by the latest flow decree should at least be tripled. And here the government’s approach to the whole issue, reiterated by Lollobrigida, must be considered. Who on the one hand hypothesized a new decree for 500,000 new entries, adopting the idea of ​​the Mantovano undersecretary (the most strategic mind of the Melonian team), on the other, however specifies that there is a will to organize them seriously on the flows, countering illegal immigration, and training in the migrants’ countries of origin. But before doing this we have to get all the Italians who are in a position to work to do it. A reminder of the obligation for employers to check the availability of an Italian before hiring a foreignerjudged by the categories as a bureaucratic obstacle in contrast with reality, which leads to hiring employees who are already known, and mostly foreigners: The Albanian or Moroccan who come to our companies every year have a certain professionalism, consolidated over time, says the Employment manager of Coldiretti Romano Magrini. After that, that of the seasonal who comes and then goes is largely a well-known fiction: they are now settled migrants without whom, as explained by the producer of Barolo Bruno Ceretto, we would be selling clods, not wine. Our earth would stop suddenly. The workers who come from abroad are indispensable, and there are almost no more seasonal workers who arrived in March and left in October, toiling and making do.

The government’s agrarian enthusiasm

In short, the government’s agrarian enthusiasm is shareable in itself, and the ideological approach claimed by Meloni – we want to enhance paths that explain the link that exists between our culture, the territories and our identity – has nothing regrettable (the ideological term often has a negative connotation but it shouldn’t: it expresses the way in which the values ​​stated are combined with the programs announced). The problem will be to really be able to convince more and more young Italians to do agricultural work now covered by foreigners, and above all to convince Italian employers to give higher wages (as young Italians would expect) in the face of a greater job offer (which is not foreseen by economics textbooks, unless the offer is reduced encouraging foreigners to return to their countries). In short, we will see, in these Melonian years, how choosy the Italian boys are in the impact with the clods or how unrealistic the idea of ​​enlisting them en masse is.

Tourism

If you look at other sectors, for example tourism, the operators are less deluded on the basis of the data. Starting with Minister Santanch, who points out that in Tourism there is a great job opportunity but for young people working on Saturdays or Sundays is tiring, are more attentive to the quality of life and free time; and for this reason we are thinking, and I believe we will put them on the ground in the next 15 days, of incentives so that those who work on holidays earn much more than on normal days (even if, the unions point out, everything is already provided for in the collective agreements national and it would be enough to apply them). The interesting aspect of the minister’s words for the anthropological-generational one is the fact that Santanch has grasped the prevailing mood, according to which young people are now more attentive to the quality of life and free time.

Briatore on young people: Strange, they agree to live on little

It is certainly no coincidence that your colleague and partner has the same feeling Flavio Briatore, that I may not be a sociologist but he has a certain flair for making, undeniably. When asked by Antonello Caporale for the Everyday occurrence “How’s it going with the waiters now?” Do they accept your offers? — the clear answer: Macch, these guys have a strange, distant, different lifestyle. They agree to live on little (honestly they live on shit, let’s face it) but not to do demanding jobs, many hours a day and have a respectable nest egg. They want more. Here, this other thing that needs to be investigated: if Briato’s input may seem crude, it should be collected and processed by scholars able to tell us what is in this apparent update of biggies and choosysmos. And perhaps it will be discovered that he does not want to sit on the sofa waiting for welfare benefits, but something different: another sense of priorities and needs, for example, a pragmatic declination of precariousness to strip it of its most alienating aspect. Living with little, but remaining at least free (above all to choose).

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