Parte Seconda. I risultati della ricerca

In this ample contribution, the Author presents and discussed the results of a research about unemployed migrants in Lombardy. On the basis of the indications emerging from the research, the Author tries to explain the determinants of the phenomena of unemployment, approaching the question in a very unusual manner: actually, it is the relative abundance of job opportunities that generates the rise un the number of unemployed migrants, through the continual arrival of new workers from abroad, often without a valid permit of stay. Therefore, the Author presents and discusses the hypothesis of the emergence of a “parallel labour market”. This market is highly characterized by the ethnicization of employment relations, as a consequence of a micro-social regulation system and a sort of “liking” some entrepreneurs show for immigrant workers. It is also characterized by very unfavourable and discriminatory work conditions, which appeal to immigrants’ need for work, and by a great career discontinuity, which is useful to keep the immigrant workforce vulnerable. It takes advantage of the restrictive mark of the current migration policies and the tendency to make employment relations more flexible (temporary) and it records the presence of matching mechanisms between supply and demand, which are often on the verge of the law (hiring of day labourers, improper resort to cooperatives, “heteronymous” work, etc.). This parallel market portrays a model of using immigrant work that exacerbates its functionalistic conception, thus giving rise to a sort of neo-liberalism where the old (the “pre-modern” behaviour of some entrepreneurial class) and the new (the multiplication of contractual solutions introduced by the labour market reform) combine. Finally, it produces a gradual worsening of work conditions and is a cause of the unemployment of those who are not willing to conform unconditionally. in this “parallel market”, ethnic differences are used to hide the new inequalities that are appearing in the post-fordist economies, subsisting on a new liberalism that, in the name of the imperatives of the post-fordist organizational orders, is trying to reduce the workers’ rights, making immigration more competitive for the weakest brackets of the native supply.