Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Italy's Need for an Army of Elderly and Child Caretakers

The ANNOTICO Report

The gradual breakdown of the extended family, along with longer life span, resulting in the increase of those over 65 and over 80, requiring  more need for elderly care from persons other than family,  Plus the need for two paycheck family requiring child care help,  has created a need for an army of  caretakers.

Italy’s Army of Carers

Two million women work in private households but more are needed. One non-Italian in two employed illegally.

Corriere della Sera

Dino Martirano

March 31, 2008

By 2030, one Italian in three will be over 65 and the over-80s will account for 10% of the population. The cost of long-term care is set to rise from 1.37 to 1.83% of GDP, as it has in the United Kingdom. The projected demographic trend for the next twenty-two years as described by ISVAP, the insurance industry watchdog, paints a clear picture of an ageing country that will have increasing need for care and assistance, the high cost of which will have to be shared by central government and families.

Today, most of the 2,615,000 non self-sufficient elderly (ISTAT national statistics institute) are looked after by the army of non-Italian female carers who have become a point of reference for children and grandchildren, particularly in the centre and north: this is Italys do-it-yourself welfare state. No one knows precisely how many of these mainly female workers there are changing incontinence pads and ensuring their charges take the right medication.

Between 2000 and 2003, the number of non-EU carers and home helps rose from 134,000 to 400,000, mainly thanks to the first wave of permits issued under the Bossi-Fini law. Overstayers, the non-EU workers who arrived on tourist visas and then joined the illegal economy, had to wait for the migrant flow decree in 2006 that ensured work permits for about 250,000 domestic workers. Finally with the Click Day initiative last December, there was a stampede for the ministry of the interiors web site to secure last years 170,000 residence permits, 65,000 of which were for home helps and carers. In the end, 711,101 applications were received, including 403,500 for carers who are already employed in Italian homes looking after the elderly or children.

Bearing in mind illegal domestic workers, a figure somewhere between 250,000 and 900,000, the entire domestic sector, Italians included (20%), may well give employment to two million workers, although only 745,000 are registered with INPS, the social security institute.

A recent survey for the workers aid institution ACLI by IREF researcher Giancarlo Zucca offered a profile of carers working in Italian households. One point emerges clearly: more than half (56.8%) work illegally, evading social security contributions in part or entirely. Where the evasion is not total, there is a vast grey area embracing 61.5% of cases where fewer hours of work are declared than are actually performed. Other points emerging from the survey are that carers are generally married women between 31 and 40 years who entered Italy on a tourist visa, leaving their own children in the care of their mother-in-law or mother. Their level of education varies depending on where the workers come from. One in four left school after finishing primary education while the university graduates are almost all from eastern Europe. The lucky ones with their family in Italy are in the minority (38.3%) whereas all the others continu e to support households of transnational migrants (61.7%). Only the tate (nannies) who arrived before 1997 have been able to rebuild their families in Italy. One in two of the others (57.4%) lives apart from her children. The main preoccupation of these women is separation from their families, to whom they wire half of their earnings, scrimping and saving in Italy to ensure their children can study in Romania, Peru, the Philippines and other distant lands.

After Romanias entry into the EU and the consequent automatic amnesty for large numbers of carers, the weakest workers now are non-EU women without a residence permit. When their tourist visas run out, illegal workers become invisible and have to work for at least a year to pay off their debt with the organisation that brought them to Italy, often after a long, roundabout series of flights. Living clandestinely, albeit with a paid job, entails many sacrifices, chief among which is not being able to see your children for up to two or three years at a time.

Carers who look after elderly Italians, or Italian children whose parents work full time, are generally mothers, who cannot be with their own children because entire households depend on them for support. In general terms, the greater the intention to migrate, the lower the tendency to send money home. Time horizons are short especially for east European women (64.3%) but it is equally true that one south American in three intends to stay in Italy because she has settled in and perhaps hopes to make a new life here.

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