Dual Labour Market Theories And Irregular Jobs: Is There a Dualism Even in The Irregular Sector?

The research deals with the characteristics of the irregular labour. Current literature considers that irregular labour arises because of the heavy tax burden on labour, or because of the existence of regulations which impose too many constraints on the labour market. In Italy the labour market has some effective constraints, for instance, due to firing regulations, minimum wage legislation, or to regulations on multiple job holdings (for instance it is only since last year that retired people can have new jobs legally), whereas, regarding taxation, we think that it is not always a valid explanation of irregular labour. Actually, during past years there were several facilities to new hiring, especially in Southern Italy. We suggest that irregular jobs can originate from different causes, and, consequently, they can have different characteristics, referred to as good and bad irregular match . As to our opinion, dual labour market theories are the main framework for studying this phenomenon. This thery assesses that there are two tiers in the labour market, therefore, two type of jobs: the jobs in the primary sector and those in the secondary sector; the secondary tier of the market is the one where turnover is more accentuated. This hypothesis is supported by some empirical observation about irregular labour. Actually, data available for Italy, (INPS), tells us that irregular workers, in the most of cases, have been employed very recently. The 85% of irregular workers censored by INPS during 2001 had been working for less than 12 months; the same percentage in 2002 was 0.88. Dual labour market approach has been used by Boeri and Garibaldi (2002), who analyzed irregular labour in depressed areas. We use a similar framework, which is mainly adapted from the research of Acemoglu (2001), where dualism arises as endogenous choice caused by the different technology used in two different sectors.