Upping birth rates and bringing more women into the labour force are the solutions the government is proposing to plug the current labour shortage of about one million, Labour Minister Marina Elvira Calderone and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently said.

“Today we probably have a million jobs that we are unable to fill, while we have so many people who are out of the work circuit and therefore out of active engagement in the world of work”, said Calderone at the Confcommercio Forum.

The employment rate in Italy was about 60%, while unemployment and inactivity rates were stable at 8% and 33.8%, data released by Istat in February reads.

At the same time, there is a shortage of college graduates of about 20%, while the shortage of high school graduates amounted to 40%, data from Unioncamere, compiled by the Study Foundation of Labour Consultants.

Pharmacists, biologists, life science specialists and physicians are increasingly difficult to find, the research adds.

Meloni lamented the little investment previous governments made regarding birth rates.

“In Italy, there are more and more people to maintain and fewer and fewer people to work”, she said, noting that this causes the “problem of holding the economic and social system together”.

To solve the problem, Meloni proposed to bring “women’s work” up to the European average and focus on demographics with “the incentive by families to bring children into the world”.

“I think that before we get to the immigration issue, we have to work, for example, on the possibility of involving many more women in the labour market. Then there is the issue of incentivising the birth rate. These are the priorities to work on”, she explained.

(Federica Pascale | EURACTIV.it)