Working-poor, children and migrants: Italy’s ‘new poor’

Abstract

This chapter focuses on three, partly overlapping, social groups that appear as not only the “losers of the crisis” but of the overall Italian model of social regulation: the working poor, children and migrants. The working poor and underage children were already over-represented among the poor before the 2008 crisis set in and were also the worst affected, while the third group, migrants, are a new entry because Italy became an immigration country only comparatively late. Together, they well represent the characteristics of the Italian poverty regime, its over-expectations with regard to family solidarity, the skewedness of social protection in favour of pensions with little attention for children and for work-family conciliating policies, a large and increasing presence of precarious jobs with a blurring of boundaries between the formal and informal economy. Furthermore, the analysis of these three groups allows to explore the experience and risk of poverty from different perspectives: the individual and the household level, the functioning of the labour market, the household gender division of labour, the functioning of welfare, the costs of migration.