Flessibilità del lavoro e formazione dei lavoratori. Il caso italiano.

The economic pressure of globalization and the cultural pressure of liberism led most industrialized countries over the last two decades to deregulate the labor market, under the stated assumption that it was rigid and that it was responsible for high unemployment rates and low firm performance. This path generated segmented labor markets and decreased incentives to invest in workers’ human capital, making cost reduction strategies more appealing. Italy is a paradigmatic example of this evolution, coupling high formal protection of incumbent to null protection of entrants, high perceived employment rigidity to high workers’ flows, high and increasing profit shares to low demand for graduate and skilled workers. We interviewed human resources managers and entrepreneurs, labor consultants, workers’ and firms’ unions, lawyers and a judge of the labor court. We have analyzed the data both in the economic perspective of adjustment costs and with the sociological method of distributional statistics of lexical co-occurrences. We obtain two main results. A scant empirical evidence on the size of adjustment costs emerges from a thorough analysis of the literature, hinting that deregulation of the labor market has been pursued based on - at best - anecdotic evidence. At the firm level we highlight a clear correlation on the one side between open ended contracts and structured workforce training; on the other side between temporary contracts and cost reduction strategies, including unstructured and short on the job training.