Italy’s new PM, Matteo Renzi, has pledged to slash the country’s record unemployment with his American-branded ‘Jobs Act’. But his labour reforms, which will see short term job contracts extended for up to 3 years, are more of the same medicine applied since the turn of the 1990s that have been such bad news for the Italian economy and workers, argues Paolo Pini.
Renzi has pledged to enact reforms that tackle Italy’s growth and productivity crisis. But his ‘flexible’ labour reforms – which will allow employers to fire workers on the payroll for three years without justification – will do nothing to reverse the backwardness of Italy’s economy. Continue reading
The latest quarterly jobs figures reported by Manpower reveal the real truth about the economy. Not the gushing presentation offered by Osborne in his autumn statement, but what the men (nearly always men) with power and money really think. After the supposedly independent OBR upped its growth forecast for this year from 0.6 per cent in March to 1.4 per cent, and next year to 2.5 per cent, one would expect employers to be pursuing an investment and re-employment strategy to exploit the promised surge in growth.
As the British economic crisis becomes more prolonged the outbreak of stupidity that greets every new piece of important economic data becomes more generalised. Previously there has been a campaign to suggest that austerity has led to recovery when the opposite is the case. The recovery is based unsustainably on rising consumption, 
