Creating New Markets and New Jobs: The Personal Services Sector. Problems and Perspectives from an Italian Point of View

It is known that labour market has undergone a rapid and continuous evolution. Unfortunately the juridical discipline does not always follow the dynamics of the development of socio-economic phenomena. Very often new social phenomena are governed by old rules and in their scope, contents, and cultural inspiration they cannot correspond to the new realities. This process is accompanied by the crisis of legality with the increasing ineffectiveness of law. The sector of personal services is very emblematic in this concern as it seems to be completely deregulated. In Italy the increase of demand for personal house services to the elderly is accompanied by the reduction of the available indigenous work-force. It is the reason why the employers usually use the foreign work-force for these kinds of services. Often such relationships are illegal and wages are respectively lower. Taking into account the strong expansion of the personal service sector the authors of this article tried to examine the normative practices and evolution of tendencies especially in the perspective of regularisation of the previously illegal labour relationships.