The sun has been shining in Rome for just a little over an hour. The neon-lights dimly illuminate the corridors at Ostiense Station, where, be it for the stuffy air and the smell of coffee, the loud clamour of the collective crowd in a buzz, reverberates through the walls. At the bottom of the central hall, a motionless figure: a man with a clean face and his eyes filled with a look of indifference.
“I’m Italian and 61 years old. I do not want to sleep in the street anymore “, reads a piece of paper that he holds in his hands. Jobless and with no pension, although he has paid in into a pension-scheme over several years, precisely for thirty-eight years and today, he explains, he is forced to spend his days on the pavement, in the company of an old mattress.
“I started working very early– he says -at nineteen. I was a technician in a data-processing company. I started in Como, and after a few years I was posted to Rome, where I became an executive “. A lifetime spent in a company, then came the ‘Diversity management’. And things for him progressively changed: technologies started evolving and from big data processors we moved onto main frames and PCs. “I was considered ‘outdated’. .And when the company began to select the ‘ pieces ‘, I was among those considered to be discarded: young people have been relocated and as for me, with fifty-nine years experience on my back and still four to go before retiring, the only option left was ‘ unemployed ‘.
Unemployed, That’s right. Yes, because the only thing a 59 year old can do, is send resumés and wait for someone to call him, only to end up being kicked out in the end: “I’ ve sent 700 curricula: five hundred only on the internet and posted some 200 copies. I have only been called two times, asking me if I had retired in order to take me on. But with ‘Fornero’s law’ I’m not eligible to access pension funds and the money that I have paid in already, serves to nothing, Just like my age “.
And even the severance pay was not helpful as the money to pay off for the loan, at some stage started running out.” I began declining physically, psychologically and morally: the house was confiscated and my daughters started to ignore me”. He would have liked to go on and start all over again. But having reached 61 under his belt, and a whole lifetime spent in the world of one single profession, the prospect becomes all the more distant every passing day. So all that’s left for him to do, is to pluck up courage and to arm himself with dignity and ‘fling’ out a little of the bitter truth to all those who are still working.
In Italy, the jobless count for more than three million. And if the young unemployed amount to 710 000, those in his same position have reached a half million: former workers over 40, that, the crisis, with mobbing and incentives to ‘forcefully’ retire early, have ousted them from productive processes or from a salary or a pension, because the retirement age was still too far ahead. The “forced retirées” suffer from the absence of a monthly income and fall into an age bracket considered unsuitable to find work. And if more than 40% of the unemployed under 30 may be considered the inheritors of this great recession, men and women like the protagonist of our story in this crisis, then he is the exact personification.
To all this generation of disenfranchised people, neither the Jobs Act, nor the Reform on Work ‘article 18’, serves to a purpose. Their humiliation is a representation of the unsuccessful system, which has failed not only in giving work to the young, but also to those who have lost their job. These are the new poor, many and invisible; and politics don’t care about them. Even if it would be sufficient enough to cast a glance distractly out of the window of the V.I.P. shiny blue cars, just to take a look.
Translation provided by Marina Stronati