A couple of weeks ago I wrote against the new tourist tax Florence and Venice are planning to introduce to finance essential tourist-related services (primarily cleanup); several people replied saying they didn't see anything wrong with contributing a few dollars to the maintenance of art treasures and whatnot. I suppose that if one is looking at the matter from an American wage perspective a few dollars aren't much. Shift the perspective to Italy, on the other hand, and things change. Substantially.

The average take-home-pay for a shopkeeper or factory worker in this country is on the order of 1.3-1.5 million Lire per month, which sounds like a lot until one translates it into dollars at 1800 lire/dollar, and comes out to between 725 and 835 dollars a month (between 650 and 750 Euros). This isn't much to live on, especially with apartment rents averaging at least 600-700,000 lire per month (plus utilities) in the cities. One suddenly understands why so many young people continue to live with their parents even after they have jobs, why almost all Italian households are double income, and by extension why the birthrate is so low -- many wives cannot afford to take time off for pregnancy. What's just a few dollars for someone working on a higher wage scale becomes serious money for an Italian store clerk or laborer.

What about other professions, you wonder? People with seniority obviously earn more than those who are starting out, and the technical professions, especially engineering of one kind and another, can do quite well. But well is a relative term; I recently saw an interview in which a recently hired full-time anesthesiologist working in a state-run hospital said he was earning about 3.5 million Lire/month. In other words 2,000 dollars, which is much less than his American colleagues would be earning. It is true that this was his take-home pay (the tax bite, which is Europe's highest, is between 50 and 60%), that since he is at the bottom his wages will increase, and that he has excellent job security, but considering the responsibilities the job entails he's not getting much.

One would think, given the relatively low pay of most Italian workers and the high national unemployment rate (12%, with pockets, especially in the South, of up to 50%) that government and union labor policy would favor steps to increase earnings, for example developing new types of activities and increasing job flexibility to let people take advantage of them. Well, not really.

The cornerstone of union policy is job security, and with the assistance of an odd coalition of Catholic and formerly Communist (now simply left of center) politicians they’ve set up a system that allows companies to hire but makes it almost impossible for them to fire. The new employee turns out to be lazy, inefficient, scheming, or downright nasty? Tough. Assuming he or she isn't caught taking money from the safe or destroying the machinery, there's not much the company can do -- and even then an end to the working relationship is not a foregone conclusion.

A trial period for the worker, you wonder. There is that possibility, but the duration is rigidly regulated, and it can only be extended once before the worker is declared an employee and given an open-ended contract in which everything is specified and job descriptions are painfully detailed. So, many larger companies cycle through large numbers of people, giving them the minimum training they need for the trial period and letting them go thereafter; this obviously does nothing for job stability. As Mario Pirani recently pointed out in an editorial in La Repubblica, this also makes it impossible for a startup operation to hire people legally -- an entrepreneur who doesn't know if her venture will still be here six months from now isn't going to want to hire her entire workforce for life. So she turns to the submerged economy, paying people under the table and hoping the Revenue department doesn't find out about her. Or she hires independent contractors who may or may not have her interests at heart.

Well, the Italian Senate has just approved a law that equates independent contractors and employees; once the House approves it too another slice of flexibility will float away. And though the authorities have finally decided to allow part time work, the parties involved have to agree to hours and conditions before a labor official; to change something they have to return to the labor official and renegotiate. Individual bosses and workers can't legally decide things just by talking them out. And finally, the labor people have decided that organizations such as Manpower can only place qualified workers, not the unspecialized ones who are more likely to be unemployed. The next step, which is already being debated in Parliament, will be to give any worker anywhere who deals with an Italian company via the Internet all the rights and privileges enjoyed by Italian employees.

Italy's a great place for organized labor, but for most unemployed Italian workers the only real hope of getting a job is to slide into the shadowy submerged labor market, where they have no rights, no security, and no pension fund.

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