2000-2010, the decade that led to the employment decline in Europe

Benefits deriving from the introduction of flexibility into the labour market have not been equally distributed between demand and labour supply. Labour flexibility introduced new margins of efficiency, but GDP does not grow. The Italian firms have failed in the face of change in the international economic scenario. In the presence of inefficiencies in the labour market, companies have gained advantageous positions. Flexibility and wage moderation have made it possible to contain the losses of competitiveness and to increase the number of employees, but who has paid the price? We can not allow that the system settles on a frontier of the production with a sub-optimal allocation of resources and positions of rent, or that the segmentation in the labour market is structured and social disadvantage increases. Some people are more affected than others by labour market segmentation, such as women, youth and elderly workers, more dramatically in the south of the country: we must support them with policies that will ensure effective security in transitions from one job to another, and from work to non-work ("on the market").