BUT DOES ANYONE UP THERE LOVE WOMEN?

by ANNA DI GIANANTONIO

The interesting report on poverty by the diocesan Caritas of July 2026 entitled Stories of offline faces. Profiles not displayed should have aroused a great debate among the city’s political forces, but this did not happen. Perhaps because it is taken for granted that poverty is a natural fact of human societies, where “there have always been rich and poor”? Poverty, therefore, is an unchangeable fact of every type of civil society, also the result of the wrong choices of individuals who have not studied, or have done so too little, or who are lazy, not very adaptable, alcoholics, lying on the sofa, unable to value their “human capital”. In reality, poverty – as we will see – is the result of political decisions, therefore of power relations and laws. Caritas says that it has analyzed an Isonzo sample of 1672 units and has detected the growth of poor workers, who, with the low wages they receive, do not make it to the end of the month, also because they are forced to pay rent at market price. Poverty mainly affects those who have dependent children (one is enough) and those who live alone, and affects Italian families more and more.

Unfortunately, the diocesan report does not include the gender variable in the statistics, which we then look for in other publications, such as those of the Di Vittorio Foundation and the Equal Opportunities Commission of the Region.

In the meantime, it is worth taking a step back and remembering how in recent years the labor market has undergone legislative “reforms”, the result of political choices, which have created greater precariousness and insecurity. Analyzing the laws that have followed one another over the years, one notices a pulverization of the interventions, a plethora of rules that make it really difficult to orient oneself among the various types of contracts. The impression one gets is that the permanent contract with few exceptions belongs only to the first republic, during which there was talk of full employment and the right to decent work. All this has been dismantled in the name of the need for maximum flexibility in the labor market.

From the Treu package that in 1997 allowed temporary work, temporary work through private agencies, apprenticeship contracts (up to the age of 24) and internships, incentivizing part-time and fixed-term contracts, to the Biagi law of 2003 which introduced new precarious forms such as on-call work and entrusted placement to private agencies, to the Renzi reform that in 2014/15, with the abolition of Article 18, further facilitated fixed-term and fixed-term contracts and amended the procurement and cooperative code, pushing them to compete at the lowest possible price, to Draghi and Meloni’s questioning of the 2018 Dignity decree. Draghi and Meloni restored greater flexibility and entrusted company bargaining (much weaker than the national one) with the identification of any corrective measures. This created a fragmentation of employment contracts, which made negotiations more difficult and created new forms of exploitation.

A striking example is the spread of so-called involuntary part-time contracts in which more than 30% of women and only 9% of men are employed. The woman is hired with this contract, because there is often no other way to work in certain sectors (catering, social cooperatives and cleaning). The worker hopes to reconcile work and family, but it often happens that the manager asks for an increase in working hours or imposes special shifts, which affect the possibility of taking care of the family. The extra hours are paid, but the employer pays contributions and therefore pensions based on shorter hours. This is how poor work is born, which leads to a very reduced pension.

With some friends of the Lilith group, which reflects on the condition of women, we started to do a series of interviews with female workers from Gorizia. The picture that comes out of the private sector, both as regards blue-collar work and that of the advanced tertiary sector, is truly disheartening. In the factory, problems emerge such as the scarcity of investments for new machinery and the massive use of manual work, which is extremely heavy and produces occupational diseases; the intense work rhythms in periods of greater productivity that put a strain on the serenity of the workers and create a tense and aggressive climate in the departments. In the advanced tertiary sector, the great competition between employees, who are required to be very efficient and fully connected, i.e. the willingness to send messages, answer emails and communicate well beyond working hours. The problem of motherhood stands out above all: the difficulty of being hired if you have a child, or motherhood seen as an obstacle to the efficiency of the worker with great skills, who often sees her career slow down and is urged to return to the office as soon as possible. Having children is an obstacle to women’s work and makes it difficult to make a career, while family welfare remains due to the insufficiency of public kindergartens. The workloads of care are still on the shoulders of women, with the only slight reversal of the trend whereby today fathers devote themselves to their children to a greater extent than in the past. But caring for the elderly, cleaning and managing the house are mostly on women’s shoulders. Reading the literature on the subject, the discouragement is great. We have been hearing the same things for decades, but the situation does not improve or improves too slowly. The issues of violence against women or mobbing must be linked to the work situation: a woman who does not work and has children, who cannot access social housing and with a low income finds it very difficult to leave her husband. The conditions of blackmail, and therefore mobbing, increase when the job is precarious and there is no choice. It is not possible to accept conditions of such evident inequality, especially in the Italian context where overall wages have a lower purchasing power than in the 90s. The great lack of attention to the concrete problems of women’s lives is striking. It seems necessary to us that the spotlight of politics and the sensitivity of civil society be turned on this mammoth discrimination.