Who will attend us tomorrow?

The aging of domestic workers in Italy raises serious questions about the future management of home care.

They assist our elderly and our children or take care of our homes: they are the people who work in the domestic sector, a sector in which there are more foreigners than Italians and which is getting older over time. Of the approximately 920,000 regular domestic workers in Italy today, more than half (480,000) are now over 50 years of age: a progressive aging that does not promise anything good for the future and that risks having serious repercussions on the very future of assistance. home. That is, ultimately, about the future of our families.

A situation photographed by Assindatcolf, the National Association of Domestic Employers, together with the IDOS Study and Research Center. In just ten years, everything has changed: the young people who take up this profession have almost disappeared and as many as 260,000 workers will retire by 2030, with another 220,000 coming very close. Physiological that this happens, less physiological that there is neither today nor on the horizon an adequate generational change. From 2012 to today, the number of people under 30 employed in domestic work has fallen by over 60%, and workers between 30 and 39 have decreased by almost 50%. A trend that mainly affects foreigners, who are the clear majority of domestic assistants (overall seven out of ten).

The gist of the problem then lies in the words of the president of Assindatcolf, Andrea Zini: "With the gradual aging of the workforce, the lack of generational turnover and the closure of regular entry channels for non-EU citizens that we have been witnessing for years and that the pandemic has practically stopped, we risk in the near future not to have enough staff to assist our elderly, children and take care of our homes. The biggest bill could be paid by women, on whom most of the care work still falls, in a historical moment in which, on the contrary, also thanks to the funds of the PNRR, the focus is on female empowerment ". "In 2020 - adds Luca Di Sciullo, president of IDOS - Italy experienced the lowest number of births since the unification of Italy, just 404 thousand, and a number of deaths comparable to a post-war period, 746 thousand.

At the same time, for 12 years the regular entry channels for young workers from abroad have been closed, even in sectors of activity with increasing demand, such as the domestic one, and for economic sectors in labor crisis. In short, the country is aging drastically and we are preventing the necessary rejuvenation and the replacement of productive levers ». Ultimately, when today in the public debate we talk about entry flows with quotas dedicated to domestic work, when we talk about training activities to make the sector more attractive to young people, when we talk about tax measures such as the deduction of the cost of domestic work, we are talking about very concrete things. Which could affect our home and our family, already now or in the future.

We risk in the near future not to have enough staff to assist our elderly, children and take care of our homes.
 

Stefano Carerdda
NP Dicembre 2021