Mass Cuts of Temp Workers Pose a Tough Test for Europe

[WriteDown]

Source: WSJ

GORDO, Italy -- Anton Filip and his family left Romania two years ago for this mountain village, where they were hired as temporary workers making designer sunglasses for Luxottica SpA. Luxury-goods sales were on the rise, and Luxottica was ramping up production.

Now the boom is over, leaving Mr. Filip and his 21-year-old son out of a job, along with hundreds of others hired under short-term labor contracts at Luxottica. "We were better off in Romania," says Mr. Filip, 45, who left a steady job as a construction worker there for the better-paying temporary job in Italy.

The Filips are among thousands caught up in a wave of cuts in short-term jobs rippling across Europe. Amid the economic downturn, companies world-wide are shedding jobs. But in Continental Europe, the majority of employees work under long-term labor contracts. Laying them off is expensive and complicated, requiring employers to navigate thickets of job-protection laws and make substantial severance payments.

In recent years, many Western European nations, facing high unemployment and competition from countries with low labor costs, tweaked their laws to allow more workers with short-term employment contracts. The changes led to millions of new jobs. But now job cuts are falling most heavily on those workers -- many of them immigrants and young people -- and are presenting the first big test for Continental Europe's experiment with labor-market liberalization....

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680920862100627.html?mod=igoogle_wsj_gadgv1&

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Interesting article.

[espiral]

1. re:

Two brief thoughts:

I. Italy is going in a direction that frightens me. Berlusconi, Forza Italia, racism in the football clubs, Chinese sweatshops in Milan, the rounding up and profiling of Roma people, and now this. I often wonder whether they truly did put an end to fascism.

II. I also wonder what Europe itself might be on the brink of. There is so much more that we do not hear about it over here in the Americas...