Labour Market Segmentation, Flexibility and Precariousness in the Italian North East

Since the late 1970s, inequality has been on the rise in a number of OECD countries. One of the main causes of economic inequality, in Italy as in many other European countries, is rooted in the segmentation of the labour market. The Italian labour market is currently described as deeply segmented between an insider ad an outsider market. In the Italian manufacturing sector the quota of stable workers has declined through time and the number of unstable workers, low qualified and low paid, has increased and represents a non-marginal quota of total employment. Frequently a young worker experiments a succession of temporary contracts at the beginning of his career and develop into a more permanent position But temporary workers have, several times, a different destiny: the situation of precariousness extends to the workers’ entire career and are to be considered as an extreme case of outsiders, who operate in bad working conditions and receive low wages compared to workers hired with an open-end contract. In this research workers in manufacturing are divided between movers and stayers. Both categories show signs of instability. The quota of tenure workers over total workers decreases and movers increase through time in a significant way. Among these are permanent movers whose work histories, fragmented and chaotic, are identified and are compared with those of workers having more stable careers.