Meloni's record: one worker in four is poor

The 2025 Statistical Report, “ Poverty in Italy” , drawn up by Caritas of Rome, delves into and completes the picture of the social health of our country. It is an alarming panorama that the Government hides daily through a sort of self-celebration of the results achieved in terms of employment. We want to be clear: no one intends to deny the fact that having exceeded 24 million employed people represents a record; as is a consequent employment rate of 62.8%.

What we want to emphasize is that it is not enough to stop at the quantitative data of employment, but that it would be necessary to examine in depth the precarious social condition of Italy and understand, above all, the profound structural changes underway that lead, as a result, to the progressive increase of inequalities. We were struck, recently, by a statement by the Prime Minister: "We want to defend the middle class ... ". This is a good intention. We should, then, begin to return the billion-dollar theft perpetrated against the middle class of pensioners, those who receive a check starting from 2,000 euros gross monthly (1,600 euros net), that is, former specialized workers and white-collar workers, by cutting indexations. This is just to underline once again the distance between declarations and concrete behaviors: specifically, the draconian cut in pension indexation in the latest budget law, which is worth more than 30 billion euros in a decade taken from the pockets of that very middle class that it is propagandistically claimed to want to protect.

But let's get to the Caritas report. First of all, it is worth noting the general growth of social fragility. It is not a condition that afflicts the "unemployable", that is, those who, in no case, are able to work and earn an income. Instead, it is progressively affecting those who work or have worked and reached retirement age. In Europe, the Report explains, "21% of the population lives in a condition of risk of poverty or social exclusion; this is over 93 million individuals [...]. Italy is the seventh country in terms of incidence of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion (at 23.1%, up from 22.8% in 2023)". If "education is still confirmed as an important protective factor: absolute poverty affects 13% of families with low educational qualifications [...], on the contrary, work ceases to represent an effective barrier: 16.5% of workers or similar figures experience conditions of absolute poverty and overall 21% of workers have an income too low to live adequately". All this is aggravated by the effect of "the 'high cost of living' which has progressively eroded the purchasing power of families".

So, the effects in our country: " the average age of accompanied people is 47.8 years, an increase compared to the past. Although official statistics show a situation in which the elderly are less affected by poverty than the younger segments of the population, the data collected by the Caritas network highlight a constant growth of the elderly component among requests for help: if in 2015, in fact, those over sixty-five represented just 7.7%, today their incidence has practically doubled, reaching 14.3%. The difficulties of families with children, who make up about two thirds of those assisted (63.4%), many of whom have minor children, remain almost stable and structural" . In addition to the effects of the so-called multidimensional and complex poverty, marked by the combination of three factors of fragility, namely, income, work and home, it is worth mentioning the "health vulnerability, often linked to serious pathologies and the lack of an adequate response from the public system".

"Many of these individuals explicitly ask for help from the Caritas network, which becomes for them a point of reference and an alternative point of listening and support. Others, however, do not make specific requests: this suggests that the phenomenon of renunciations is largely underestimated, especially among the most marginalized, who often escape the formal statistical and health circuits. From the analysis of the characteristics, a complex profile of people who suffer a double disadvantage, health and social, emerges." Among these, " men and women between 55 and 64 years of age, and increasingly over 65s" emerge. Therefore, those who are already retired. And here we must highlight a very Italian specificity. Pension income, it must be remembered, is a " deferred salary" . That is, taxes and social security contributions are paid on the paycheck from work. But, in Italy, extraordinarily, taxes are paid again also on the pension.

In short, Italian workers are taxed twice for the same income. And all this is further weighed down, as mentioned above, by the cut in the indexation of pensions to the cost of living, which has been greatly increased in recent years due to inflation. Cost of living not mitigated by the reduction of inflation itself after the peaks of a couple of years ago. Anyone who does their daily shopping or pays their bills can see this. Today, these people who have worked and contributed heavily on the fiscal level, increasingly give up, at the most critical age from the point of view of health, on getting treatment. The defense of the middle class by the Meloni Government is made up of words only. In terms of concrete effects on the existence of citizens, we are faced with nothing.

FROM

Caesar Damian