Disuguaglianze nelle carriere lavorative

It is a widespread opinion that Italy is a country where individual careers depend more on ascriptive factors, such as the social origin or the social networks of the individuals, than on merit and effort. Previous research on work careers has shown that the chances to move upwards during one’s career are not very high: this implies that the initial position in the labour market has a strong impact on the following career. According to some researchers, this situation has even worsened after the re-regulation of the labour market that took place during the 90s: the reforms introduced new inequality factors, such as the new atypical employment contracts, who constitute a low-income trap for many youngsters. Starting from these hypotheses, the paper looks at the impact on the individual’s career chances of the two main features of her first job, namely the quality of the job, measured by the social class it is classified in, and its legal form, contrasting open-ended and fixed-term employment contracts. Our analyses, using simple crosstabulations and the statistical tools of mobility table analysis, show that a) occupational mobility has somehow increased in the last cohorts, but this depends on increased downwards mobility, and b) entering the labour market with a non-standard employment contract leads in most of the cases to an entrapment in this situation.