Labour Market Segmentation and Informal Work

The four countries which make up Southern Europe, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain, show some similarities and many differences in terms of employment and labour market structuration. In this chapter, starting from the similarities I discuss the hypothesis that these countries constitute variants of the same model of capitalist development, typical of latecomer economies where family enterprises and self-employment are persistently dynamic, the formation of a fully proletarianized manufacturing working class is limited, and non-wage contributions to the livelihood strategies of households and, as a consequence, irregular forms of work are disproportionally diffused. The inclusion of the Italian case represents the major obstacle to the exploration of this hypothesis, not because Italy is industrially more advanced than the other three countries but because it is composed of two extremely different and divergent parts: the centre-north and the south. For this reason, Italy is seen as consisting of two different cases (Garofoli, 1991; Mingione, 1990a). I investigate whether it is possible to consider these two cases as opposite variants of the general model: northern Italy being an example of where family entrepreneurial resources and non-wage contributions to survival have been used to promote industrial development along a successful alternative path to the more proletarianized and capital-concentrated variants; and southern Italy being an example of a late-developing agrarian society that has been de-ruralized and modernized without passing through the stage of acute industrialization and sufficiently extensive diffusion of competitive manufacturing initiatives, either decentralized from outside1 and/or promoted by the development of local petty commodity production.