Thus the civil service becomes state gangmaster
“For the first time, young people will be able to serve their homeland with an activity of agricultural value”. It sounds like a phrase taken from a Luce newsreel from the 1930s. It was pronounced in 2024 by the Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida. While we start talking about compulsory military service again, the government inaugurates its “wheat war” by inaugurating the agricultural civil service. The majority let it be known that the first experimental call for tenders will be released in a few days, which will initially concern one thousand young people between the ages of 18 and 28. However, many people, folklore aside, have grasped the most serious aspect of the provision.
If poor work becomes normal
For the young people who join the project, a salary of 507.30 euros per hour for 25 hours per week is expected. No, you didn’t read it wrong. If we divide the monthly salary by the hours worked, we will obtain an hourly wage of 5 euros. A slightly lower salary, and sometimes in line with what is offered by the many “corporals” who exploit labor in the Italian countryside.
We obviously play with paradoxes: we wouldn’t dream of comparing the working conditions of an exploited laborer to those of a young employee in a state program. But paradoxes sometimes serve to suggest uncomfortable truths. And the truth is that it is quite symptomatic that a government does not perceive a 500 euro monthly salary as unseemly. And moreover, if we look at the triumphant proclamations on the increase in jobs, we must also understand what jobs we are creating.
In Italy, 12 percent of Italian workers (3 million people) are officially “poor workers”, meaning their gross salary is less than 11,500 euros per year. And the latest available INPS data relating to the salaries of younger people are alarming. In 2022, the average salary for children aged between 20 and 24 in our country was just over 12 thousand euros for boys and just over 8 thousand for girls. In the 25-29 age group it rose to 18,833 for men and 15,226 for women. We are obviously talking about gross amounts. Numbers not exactly reconcilable with the calls for births trumpeted by the government.
And if the Executive must be given credit for having introduced measures in recent years, such as cutting the tax wedge, which have raised wages, however, structural measures to reverse the trend appear to have never been initiated. And the initiative of the agricultural civil service to 500 euros per month for young people simply seems to confirm it. With the aggravating circumstance of not grasping the sense of the grotesque.
The more grotesque than nostalgic reference to the twenty years
We were already used to this register when the term “food sovereignty” was also given to the Ministry of Agriculture. An echo that refers, not even too indirectly, to the idea of fascist autarky. The myth of self-sufficiency, inherent in historical fascism, becomes pervasive after 1935 and the related sanctions against intervention in Ethiopia. Propaganda pushes that point even further with the myth of Italianness and Italic values. With the small detail that our country has never had an abundance of raw materials and if the idea is quite laughable in general, it is even more so for a nation like ours.
We are certainly not interested in making historical discussions here, but it is undeniable that in the echo of the definition of “food sovereignty” many have seen a reference to that otherwise unsuccessful experience.
Just as the myth of peasant civilization is a constant of early fascism. The rural world is often exalted to the detriment of the urban world. Italian is for the peasant, infantry and squad regime. And for Mussolini, Italy was essentially “based on the land”. In a speech in 1924 the dictator himself declared: “The wealth of Italy, the stability of the nation and their future are linked to the fate and future of Italian agriculture”. One hundred years later, on the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, Minister Lollobrigida (no, we are not comparing him to Mussolini), after having invited the “young people on the sofa to work in the fields”, talks about “serving the country” in agriculture.
We can summarize it like this: September 2024, with a rake in hand, for five euros an hour, Italy called.