Early career patterns and labour market participation in Italy. Between old and new inequalities

Over the past decade, labour market flexibilization has become a major issue within the European Union, but the impact of deregulation and flexibilization processes and structural changes of labour systems on careers are still unclear. Job (dis)continuity and career configuration are crucial for understanding inequalities within the labour market and their evolution over time. The debate focuses, on the one hand, on the role of temporary contracts in trapping workers in precarious situations rather than in being a stepping-stone toward a stable job, and, on the other hand on increasing instability of employment careers and of career heterogeneity across the population. However, in order to detect vulnerable profiles of workers, it would be conducive to consider not just isolated transition between states and their timing but rather the complete pathways of labour market participation, conceived as a series of different labour market states and events succeeding over time. Moreover, it is just by adopting this approach that processes hypothesized as being triggered by globalization – like differentiation and destandardization of the working life – can be tested. Early careers represent a crucial step through labour market participation, since in this time-span the foundations for the following trajectories are laid and stronger or weaker within or between-groups differences with respect to a multitude of factors can influence different kinds of inequalities. The objects of this dissertation is precisely early careers patterns and their characteristics. The analyses are carried out using the new AD-Silc panel, that matches information from the National Institute for Social Security registers (INPS) and data from the 2005 wave of the Italian survey IT-Silc (part of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions – EU-Silc). Analyses concern four Italian cohorts of workers by considering if and to what extent gender and education are associated with different levels of differentiation and destandardization over time. Both synthetic indeces and ‘qualitative’ representative sequences will be used in order to study in depth individual pathways by highlighting different faces of the same processes in cross-cohort comparison. In fact, the first seven years of labour market participation of four different cohorts of entry (1974-1978, 1982-1986, 1990-1994, and 1998-2001) are defined as sequences and these will be my main object of study being analyzed as a whole in their temporal unfolding. I then analyze the cross-cohort evolution of the most frequent pathways leading to more or less positive/negative outcomes for labour market participation, such as being in full-time jobs and being jobless. Secondly, a focus on the younger cohort of entry (1998-2001) offers a broad description of the models of labour market participation that were at young workers disposal. The aim is to put in evidence to what extent gender and education and their interaction play a role in defining the likelihood of experiencing different models of labour market participation. The main results from the cross-cohort comparison confirm that an increase in dif- ferentiation and destandardization of early careers exists both for women and men, but to different extents, being more pronounced for women. Moreover, education strongly influences the degree to which each of these processes have evolved across cohorts, both for men and women. This also applies to the evolution over time of the representative sequences’ characteristics. This analytical step also shows that non-linear and disrupted early careers were already widely diffuse before the deregulation process started. Fur- thermore, the overall trend followed by the cross-cohort evolution of the most frequent pathways leading to full-time employment and joblessness show a general increase in the length of the pathways and a progressively stronger presence of more differentiated states. Differences according to education exist and they support the idea that the higher the educational level is, the less differentiated and complex the patterns. Finally, the main results from the focus on the younger cohort concern, firstly, the fact that clusters are mainly defined by the contractual arrangements, even though the internal variability and the variety in terms of states throughout the individual sequences confirm the complexity of the early career for a great number of young workers. Secondly, gender and the interaction between gender and education – net of other relevant variables – define a differentiated probability of accessing certain clusters (or better, certain models of labour market participation). Being women and being low-skilled are negatively related to the probability of being in more steady and secure (in terms of employment protection and stability and social security) clusters.