IT
PRESS RELEASE
10th edition of the European social survey, 30 European countries in comparison
EMPLOYMENT, INAPP: “ITALIANS ARE AMONG THE LEAST HAPPY. ONLY 47% SAY THEY ARE VERY SATISFIED WITH THEIR JOBS
FADDA: “Strict working hours and location requirements weigh heavily on workers. Satisfaction rises by more than 20% when workers have the autonomy of working flexible hours and falls by 3% if one’s not able to choose where to work from. Technological, organisational, and legal instruments are needed to foster work flexibility. The pandemic crisis has raised the possibility of new models of work organisation, but, once the crisis is over, in Italy, we have not gone very far along this road, we have often gone backwards, in fact.”
Rome, 22 September 2023 – In terms of job satisfaction, Italian employees are at the bottom of the list compiled by the European Social Survey, which compared 30 European countries (EU and non EU, plus Israel). Only 47% note high satisfaction levels, 7% lower than the European average. Even more stark is the gap with countries such as Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium. Nevertheless, Greece, Serbia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Spain have even lower levels of job satisfaction.
This emerged today in Rome during the presentation of the first ‘National Report of the European Social Survey in Italy’ by Inapp (National Institute for Public Policy Analysis). The publication analyses and compares the opinions of Italians and people living in other countries participating in the survey on various topics such as new technologies, well-being, work, learning, health, and immigration.
Job satisfaction in Italy appears to be less widespread than in most countries considered especially when compared to the countries of Northern Europe, even though there are significant quotas of employed people who declare to be highly or averagely satisfied. This share decreases with lower education levels, temporary employment contracts, low-skilled jobs and among non-Italian citizens.
“As in most of the countries surveyed, job satisfaction in Italy too is now significantly linked to flexibility of work in terms of hours and location’’ said Professor Sebastiano Fadda, president of Inapp. “Two pieces of data from the survey make this clear: the proportion of highly satisfied employees rises from 47% to 68% (+21 percentage points) in the case of hourly flexibility. The same applies to all countries surveyed, whose average rises from 54% to 69%. On the contrary, the share of highly satisfied people drops to 44.6% when there is no possibility of choosing the place where to work from”.
However, in Italy, the share of employees who can avail themselves of these flexibilities is still very limited: only 15.7% of Italian employees are able to choose when to start and finish their working day (compared to an average of 20.6% in other countries) and only 30.8% can choose where to work from (compared to 42.3%). Workers with lower levels of education and skills and non-stable contracts are more penalised.
The ability to decide where to work from is a symptom of autonomy for employees, the report explains. From this point of view, Italy, together with Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Croatia, Greece, but also Portugal, Spain and France, i.e. Eastern European and Mediterranean countries, have the least flexibility. Northern European and Continental European countries are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
‘’It should also be considered,’’ Fadda concluded, ‘that even before the pandemic, the possibility for workers to choose where to work was less widespread in Italy than in other countries. With the pandemic crisis, this became more widespread, especially in certain sectors and for those employed with higher professional qualifications, as well as for women with a need to reconcile work and care responsibilities; but considerable swathes of employment remained excluded. Even today, inequality in the availability of this possibility between different categories of workers remains a problem’’.
The European Social Survey is a comparative statistical survey conducted at a transnational level to study changes in societies and transformations in the living conditions and opinions of individuals, as well as the evolution of the social, political and ethical fabric of European societies. It is conducted every two years; the first edition was carried out in 2001. In 2017, our country returned to contribute to the survey via Inapp, with a designation by the Minister of Labour and Social Policy. Inapp has completed three cycles of the survey, the eighth, ninth and tenth. For this last edition, it produced the first ‘National Report of the European Social Survey in Italy’.
For more information:
Giancarlo Salemi – INAPP President Spokesperson (347 6312823)
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