Bangladeshi Migrants in Italy: An Analysis of Survival Strategies and Job Segmentations

Abstract

In the Italian labour market a new segmentation emerged and is still developing, which added to the traditional cleavage between insiders and outsiders. The new phenomenon for Italy is the internal division within insiders, among decreasing permanent workers, well protected by the welfare regime, the first segment, and unstable workers, with high risk of being entrapped in flexible contracts and/or going to and turning back from unemployment, without any form of public protection, the secondary segment. The Italian process of new segmentation shows a distinctive feature, too. As the classic theory on segmentation assumes, but also some core activities. It make even harder to create a trust relation with external professionals or collaborators and therefore it makes the risk of a productivity’s decrease higher than in the case of the standard pattern of segmentation. Moreover, the positive relation between economic development and job supply, on one hand, and quality of flexibility, which is one of the few points of general conciliation among scholars, worsens the traditional fracture in Italy. The positive effects of work deregulation give benefits only to more developed areas, whereas the flexibility in the concentrated in agriculture and construction has mainly bad effects and become a supplementary form of exploitation beside black employment. Thus, other innovative policies are required in order to fight the discouragement effect and consequently the exclusion from labour market; indeed, the deregulation of contracts isn’t enough. Therefore, more funded and more efficient employment services and training programs would be very important: active labour market policies should be also addressed to unskilled and low skilled temporary workers in order to reduce social inequalities in relation to working opportunities.