Panel A.02 — Education and labour market inequalities
Convenors Terenzio Mingione (University of Milano Bicocca, Italy); Enrico Pugliese (University of Roma la Sapienza)
Keywords neets, labour market inequalities, long-term unemployed, poor workers, school drop-out
In the last years, social and territorial inequalities have increased. This trend is connected, on one side, with the transformation of employment and the diffusion of poor quality and little paid and tenured jobs and, on the other side, with the failure of social and economic policies to contrast this tendency. Increasing difficulties in employment are involving particularly young people and are concentrated in the Mezzogiorno.
Education and professional training are an important part of the increasing inequality process. School drop-out, less educated and professionalized young people are highly discriminated within the employment transformation. They are a large part of the long term or recurrent unemployed or poor workers. The large number of neets (not in employment, education or training) in Italy, particularly concentrated in the Mezzogiorno, are a good example of the relation between education and labour market difficulties. Research focuses mainly on the fact that these young people are not in employment but it would be important to understand better why they are in not in education or training.
In this panel, we would like to open the discussion on this issue inviting abstracts focusing on the relation between education and social and territorial inequalities. The persistent low level of wages and the poor quality of jobs are connected to an education system persistently unable to help disadvantaged young people to confront a labour market increasingly fragmented and polarized. These phenomena are particularly visible in the Mezzogiorno but are present also in other parts of Italy and in other European countries. In this sense, research and comparative presentations will be extremely useful for our debate.