Citizenship income, the right's plan is not the solution we need

Citizenship income

Citizenship income did not come out of nowhere. The roots can be found in the Rei, the inclusion income, introduced at the turn of 2017 and 2018 by the then government of Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. An insufficient tool that was incorporated the following year by the banner of the 5-star Movement: that income which, however, in these three years has completely lost the pars construens of the pact between state and citizens. A side that in reality was already present also in the Rei, whose goal was to launch beyond a mere unemployment allowance. In addition to the current subsidy, there is (or would be) to build a personalized social and work reintegration project with people. Nothing, from this last point of view, has been done. If not to give work to those who (the navigators, also ended up, as we had foreseen, in very bad waters) would have to find it to the beneficiaries. There is no more news of the father of those measures, Mimmo Parisi. The Court of Auditors, on the other hand, returned several times to his management of Anpal Servizi. This is the extreme summary.

The new government, led by Giorgia Meloni, keeping faith with an election campaign commitment on which it took votes, now intends to cancel the citizenship income. We are at the first steps of the construction site, but the general plan is to keep it only for those who are unable to work, basically people with disabilities and the elderly whose pensions are obviously below the poverty line. For the others, the first estimates say almost 700 thousand people out of the total of 2.5 million earners, a leap into the void practically from one month to the next is envisaged. The prime minister, as she stated in her speech of confidence to the chambers, thinks that the measure "represented a defeat for those who were able to make her part of her for Italy". It is therefore necessary to "maintain and, where possible, increase the necessary economic support for those who are truly fragile not in working conditions". For all the others, "the solution cannot be citizenship income, but work".

What does the new Minister of Public Administration Paolo Zangrillo, brother of Alberto, Silvio Berlusconi's personal doctor, think of smart working? entered politics in 2018. His adventure in the Meloni executive began with an error that had assigned him to the Ministry of the Environment. On agile work he is said to be more open than his predecessor Brunetta. It is a pity that work, apart from public work, is not created by decree or by law, but by investing exactly on the front that has remained uncovered in recent years: precisely that of the notorious active labor policies. Achilles' heel of an Italian system based on the vast and nauseating world of recommendations, on a frozen "social elevator", on poor work and on absolute insecurity. social revenge that foams intolerance from the mouth of the new majority and that will find convinced support in the pole of Matteo Renzi, will not lead to anything good or constructive. Because it will tear down a piece of the building that must certainly be renovated - indeed, it is urgent to do it as we have written several times - without building the buttress it desperately needs. By eliminating citizenship income - even though it often ended up in the pockets of false poor people, the mafias or at the center of vast fraud against us - the problems that in these three years have mortified its application are not eliminated, dirtying with waste and with the starvation of a machine that has never really set in motion a principle, that of supporting those who cannot make it, sacrosanct.

What the electoral programs of the parties say about work From the introduction of the minimum wage to the fight against insecurity, from the incentives for hiring to the cut of the tax wedge up to the interventions on smart working: the ideas are well explained, the resources to finance them are less clear. in a state of need but thieves, punishing them as expected), increase controls for example on the usual crafty ones and limit the offers linked to the forfeiture of the benefit (an aspect already touched by the Draghi government). The point is that those job offers - with or without income - must arrive and the Italian recruitment system, if that is the objective of the Meloni executive, must refocus on the employment centers that instead find work every year. just a few tens of thousands of people, totally insignificant to the needs of the labor market.

In short, you can also abolish income, but if you do not reinvent a decent public recruiting system, and on a training network, even the one today largely in the hands of private paths with standard doubts, you will perhaps save the citizenship income funds - maybe to put them on early pensions, how wrong are you? - but you're going to throw a lot of people back under the poverty line. From evening to morning you will sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people on the altar of social conflict and electoral satiety: satisfying your electorate and saving money is simple, to propose quick and convincing solutions to the grip of poverty, in the heart of an inflationary crisis and work more serious than ever, the neo-nationalist rhetoric and the grave frown of the premier are not enough.