Evolving Poverty in Italy: Individual Changes and Social Support Networks

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, poverty has undergone profound changes, even affecting people who were once safe from the processes of impoverishment. Hidden under the guise of normal difficulties considered part of the natural course of life, it has lost its “occasional” connotation and has become “established” in people’s lives, causing new and dangerous trends. The article offers some reflections on how these dynamics have become particularly widespread in Italy, resulting in two types of poverty: cultural poverty, linked to the phenomenon of young NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training), and working poverty. These types of poverty are linked and risk feeding off each other. On the one hand, poor cultural tools force young people to settle for low-paid jobs. On the other hand, poor-quality work, due to poor training, discourages people from pursuing education and training and traps poor workers in a situation of social stagnation. A possible tool to tackle these issues could be Responsible Welfare, which focuses on the person as a unique entity, implementing the resilience of individuals to promote self-esteem while also enhancing relational, social, and community resources.

1. Introduction

The phenomenon of poverty is one of the most persistent and unresolved social problems. Its history is full of paradoxes, contradictions, and complex changes. Poverty studies offer clear testimony since they outline an evolution of the phenomenon characterised by uncertainties, denials, afterthoughts, contrasting approaches, banishment and condemnation, confrontation, and social struggle [1,2,3,4,5].

For a long time, poverty was considered an integral part of the human condition. It has ceased to be so in relatively recent times. Until the time of the great social and economic changes generated by the Industrial Revolution, being poor was a very common experience. It was experienced as an ineradicable component of life, a destiny marked from birth. These dynamics were determined by factors such as predictability and deep roots, which helped to make individuals’ life trajectories certain and stable. However, modernity has produced insecurity and fragmentation [6].

On the basis of these existential and social dynamics, the old values have dissolved in the fluidity of modern society, producing a social and cultural fragmentation that causes constant change within an individual’s life. The realisation of a better society today may also lie in the ability of individuals to manage their own resources. Individuals are becoming aware that, throughout their lives, the choices they make are decisive for their future. To face the challenge of change, they must increasingly become the architects of their own lives and choices.

It is a type of society that ends up imposing a model of life based, as Bauman [7] described, on the need to become what one is and to live with a certain amount of anxiety in the pursuit of an irrepressible self-determination: making a decision becomes a way of life that no one can renounce. The individualisation process, in which each individual is involved, emphasises their singularity and obliges them to design their life in harmony with the imperatives of work, the education system, and the welfare system [8].

The dynamics of impoverishment are affected by these changes. Over the years, the concept of poverty, understood as a living condition referable to a specific and homogeneous social group (single mothers, long-term unemployed, people without a professional qualification), has been integrated with the concept of social exclusion, which defines a different way of conceiving and thematising the condition of poverty, with reference to increasingly broader segments of the population [9].

The phenomenon of poverty moves away from a purely economic approach to be explained by the failure to satisfy the needs deemed necessary. The problem becomes defining these needs since they change in relation to social contexts and historical periods.

This not only shows how difficult it is to synthetically define the concept but also highlights its multidimensionality and the plurality of approaches to its study. The validity of the view of poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon has been confirmed by its widespread use in recent years, especially in empirical research [10,11,12,13,14].

The image of poverty that emerges cannot be associated with a mere lack of income but rather with homelessness, reduced purchasing power, lack of means and channels of expression, difficulties accessing education for one’s children, and health services for the family.

The issue is further complicated by the significant political, economic, and social changes that have occurred in recent years, which have had a major impact on poverty and those affected by it. Economic crises have imposed severe spending cuts and progressive public cost containment, replacing old vertical inequalities between social strata and classes with new horizontal inequalities which, by creating fractures in individual life trajectories, make everyone more vulnerable to poverty [8].

Under the impetus of these changes, the phenomenon has taken on different connotations. It now appears more segmented, multidimensional, and polarised, with indefinite boundaries connected not only to situations of long-term deprivation, but also with the emergence of occasional, episodic, and oscillating forms of deprivation. It is a transformative process that has led to a distinction between so-called “traditional” poverty, which presents itself through extreme forms of hardship, and new poverty generated by instability and precariousness due to the growing diffusion of informal and precarious work, the lack of protection in the employment sphere, the diminished integrative capacity of the family, and informal support networks. The latter is what used to be called “new poverties” in Italy. Today, as “new poverties” have impacted the lives of large sections of the population, they have lost their novelty to become chronic forms of impoverishment.

It is on these forms of poverty, once described as new, that this article intends to reflect, stopping to analyse cultural poverty and in-work poverty and pointing to the Responsible Welfare approach as a useful tool in combating these forms of poverty.

2. How ‘New Poverty’ Has Become Chronic

The way in which poverty has changed over time has acquired a renewed centrality among those working in the field. This is also thanks to the use of different analytical categories than in the past that relate not only to the economic sphere but also to the social, relational, and educational spheres [15]. Talking about these forms of poverty has forced us to move away from traditional frames of reference to focus on the elements that redefine the new processes of impoverishment.

In a highly articulated social system, such as the contemporary one, with the multiplication of events and situations that produce impoverishment in a direct or indirect way, poverty has acquired unpredictable meanings and forms. What was once impossible has gradually become probable and then turned into a certainty.

The economic and political changes that have occurred over the last few decades (from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic, to labour market deregulation) have contributed to worsening situations of socio-economic vulnerability of large segments of the population [16] that, until then, were considered safe from the dynamics of impoverishment [17].

The Italian case is particularly significant precisely because of the entrenchment of poverty in the middle class, in those families characterised by economic stability that have seen their lives become increasingly precarious, in a dynamic of entry and exit from poverty. In young families, for example, the presence of children has ended up increasing the risk of poverty from the birth of the first child (with reference to 2022, according to ISTAT data, in 21.7% of cases), a risk that reaches 29.6% when the children become 2 years old [18].

These situations are at risk of becoming stable if the time of persistence in poverty reaches or exceeds 5 years, putting people in a state of real impasse [19]. Persistence in poverty is caused by both visible and measurable factors. These include low education, unemployment, and poor health, as well as subjective factors that are not always immediately visible, such as low motivation and lack of cognitive skills. There is also dependence on welfare interventions that end up rooting living in poverty in biographical trajectories [16,20].

The latter elements generate the most serious and pervasive situations since they affect the lack of social participation and pathways to responsible citizenship [4,17], generating long-lasting effects.

Amartya Sen [21,22] analysed these dynamics very well, adding the lack of “attribution rights” as an indicator of the phenomenon. For the economist, income and savings, for example, are not to be considered adequate indicators of well-being because individuals and the specific societies in which they live may have different capacities in converting economic resources into concrete acquisitions. The profit individuals can derive from the resources they possess is neither certain nor predetermined but depends both on their ability to act and be and what Sen calls “functioning”. They concern “what a person may wish to do, or to be, [and] range from the most basic, such as being sufficiently nourished and not suffering from avoidable illness, to very complex personal activities or conditions, such as being able to participate in community life. Capability, on the other hand, is that set of functioning alternatives that a person is capable of enacting” [23] (p. 79).

In Sen’s view, poverty concerns aspects of existence that are not purely material and depend on both a macro dimension (institutions and culture present in a particular area, the place where an individual is born and grows up) and a micro dimension, inherent to the specific capabilities of an individual.

In this dynamic, Sen distinguishes two aspects: well-being and the faculty to act. Well-being can be traced back to the opportunities an individual has and the results they can achieve to their advantage. The faculty of action, on the other hand, refers to a broader vision that goes beyond personal interests. “Well-being” is important in assessing issues of distributive justice and the nature of the tools an individual has at their disposal in terms of personal advantage. “Faculty of action” takes a broader view of the individual because it considers the various things they would like to see realised and their ability to set goals and achieve them [24].

These two dimensions have been strongly influenced by the profound social transformations and consequences of the global crisis of recent decades, which have generated a cumulative dynamic that has led to an increase in the number of people at risk of poverty, along with the emergence of poor individuals, hitherto excluded from possible impoverishment processes [25].

The medium- and long-term effects have been the emergence of new and articulated types of poverty. Some are determined by the worsening of already compromised economic conditions, characterised by psychological and social distress. Others are characterised by situations of loneliness that not only affect the elderly but also individuals in situations of social vulnerability, such as single women, especially those with children [26].

Alongside these classic forms of poverty, forms of poverty that were considered “new” until 10 years ago have increased and become an overt reality. The novelty has become an entrenchment in people’s lives of all those factors that had generated them.

What was referred to as a grey area in the first decade of the 2000s, due to its low visibility, has now become a new and dramatic normality, entering the lives of men and women in an inexorable and stable manner [27]. We are talking about the poverty of all those people who have jobs of a short duration and “intermittence”, alternating periods of contractual coverage with periods of unemployment and living between destitution and survival. These are men who, following a separation, suffer a veritable economic collapse; women who have always been penalised by a labour market that relegates them to underpaid jobs; elderly people whose pensions are not enough to ensure the sustenance of even their grown-up and often unemployed children; and children deprived of material and cultural resources, almost always destined to retrace the same steps and the same difficulties as their parents, like an inheritance that is passed down from generation to generation.

The complexity of the phenomenon is characterised not only by the aggravation of already chronic situations [28], heralding failed biographical careers, but also by liminal components involving “normal” people with a job, a family, and a home. It is a type of poverty hidden within individuals’ daily lives, concealed in the form of normal difficulties considered apparently episodic and physiological in a biographical pathway that has then lost its “occasional” connotation and has “stabilised” in the lives of individuals, provoking new and dangerous drifts.

To cope with these situations, those affected relinquish everything they consider “superfluous” (going out with friends, holidays, clothes) and deprive themselves of important elements in life, such as medical care or the purchase of essential goods.

Among the new forms of poverty, two types emerge that we would like to focus on in this article: cultural poverty, which is most clearly represented by the phenomenon of young NEETs, and working poverty, which is inherently paradoxical because current society expects that those who work should be able to guarantee themselves a good standard of living.

These two types of poverty can also be seen as predictors of each other. Cultural poverty can lead to working poverty because it prevents people from acquiring or accumulating the knowledge necessary to find a well-paid job.

One of the peculiarities of the NEET phenomenon is, in fact, a low level of education and culture (an issue that is particularly evident in Italy), which prevents them from finding long-term, stable employment. Among young NEETs, those who are most disadvantaged are those who are discouraged from continuing their education because they believe that studying is useless for finding work [29,30,31].

This attitude traps them in a cycle of finding underpaid jobs, so-called “small jobs” [32], which are so precarious and low-skilled that they do not allow them to earn enough or accumulate the skills needed to find better work.

The considerations presented in this article do not seek to present this dynamic in absolute terms, but rather to shine a spotlight on a social dynamic that connects the two phenomena and risks placing the most vulnerable young people on a path of social hardship [33,34].

3. Cultural Poverty and Young NEETs

We will now focus on an aspect of poverty that is as invisible as it is serious in its consequences: cultural poverty, a type of poverty that today is hidden (or perhaps poorly hidden) within the widespread phenomenon of the NEETs, young people who are not in education, employment, or training and who are present in Italy in greater numbers than the European average [35].

Connecting cultural poverty and young NEETs means examining a phenomenon that feeds on itself and risks generating a condition of serious social exclusion for the most vulnerable part of the new generations [36,37,38,39].

Italy, in relation to this phenomenon, still fails to be in line with European standards. Even if, compared to 10 years ago when the phenomenon was first discussed in Italy, the percentage has decreased from 26.2% (2014) to 16.1% in 2023, the values are far from the European average of 11.2% [35].

At an international level, the phenomenon of young NEETs was already being discussed at the end of the 1990s when, in the United Kingdom, experts from the Social Exclusion Unit [40] used the acronym to refer to young people aged 16 to 18 who were not working, were not in any form of education or training (Not in Employment, Education, or Training), and who were therefore considered to be at high risk of social exclusion.

At the same time, the phenomenon was also detected in the United States through studies focusing on school-to-work transitions. The researchers emphasised the presence of a category of young people (non-college-bound-youth-NCBY) that referred to college graduates who did not attend college, young people without a diploma, and socially excluded young people. Just like the experts of the Social Exclusion Unit, the American experts also provided alarming signals about this phenomenon, emphasising the high risk of social and economic exclusion due to remaining on the margins of the labour market. These were young people who lived in an existential situation, constantly hovering between short periods of unskilled work and lengthy periods of unemployment and inactivity. The situation of young women was perhaps worse because motherhood often resulted in their definitive “expulsion” from the labour market [36,41,42].

Since then, the phenomenon has been studied in all its facets and entered the priorities of policymakers’ agendas. It has undergone changes in its defining elements and has assumed a strong centrality in public opinion and political debate, so much so that the NEET rate is used as a benchmark indicator to describe the condition of the new generations [29,36].

When we talk about young NEETs, we are referring to young people aged between 15 and 29 years old. In Italy, due to the phenomenon of young people staying in the family home for longer, this age range has been extended to 34. The group also includes those who are neither in informal education nor looking for a job (the so-called inactive). Finally, it also includes those who express the will not to work, including those (mostly women) who carry out care activities within the household [43].

NEETs are a very heterogeneous category, ranging from young people who have already graduated and are seeking employment, to 15 year olds who have left education prematurely, to those who have not even fulfilled compulsory schooling. They are often deprived of cultural and training tools and find it difficult to offer themselves on the labour market.

In recent years, the phenomenon has been articulated in all its complexity and related to traditional, physiological elements of the younger population (unemployment, maternity, discouragement of workers), as well as to factors that can determine its diffusion at a territorial level. An obsolete labour market and welfare system conditions the protection mechanisms of the weaker segments of the population.

If, in general, the young Italian generation is little inclined to take advantage of schooling (in 2024, Italy ranks eighth in terms of dropout rates (9.8%), after Romania (16.8%), Spain (13.0%), Germany (12.4%), Cyprus (11.3%), Estonia (11%), Denmark (10.4%) and Hungary (10.3%)) [35,44,45], which is considered useful for acquiring knowledge and know-how to invest in the world of work, then the situation is not comforting. The peculiarity of the NEET phenomenon in Italy emerges from the training gaps of young people. The significant “production” of Italian NEETs has, as its privileged place, the school [30,31]. For these young people, once they leave the education system, it is not simply a matter of not being able to find a job due to the crisis in the labour market, but rather of not having the knowledge and skills to be used in a possible job.

The core of the debate on the phenomenon is related to early school leaving, which remains at relatively high levels in Italy, although it has shown signs of improvement in recent years. The percentage of young people in the 18–24 age group who dropped out of education and training was 9.8% in 2024 [46].

Over the last 10 years, there have been positive signs due to both a steady decline in the percentage of young people dropping out of school and a narrowing of the gap with the European average. In 2014, the gap between the Italian average school dropout rate (15%) and the European average (11%) was four percentage points. By 2023, the gap had narrowed by one percentage point. Despite this encouraging trend, the current school drop-out rate in Italy is still above both the European average of 9.5% and the target of the European agenda to reduce it below 9% by 2030 [46].

An important issue is the tendency on the part of young people to no longer re-enter training once they have left. They believe that training is not a valid tool for access to the labour market. This is the category of young people of greatest concern, those whom Rosina describes as being “precipitated into a spiral of progressive corrosion of their condition, not only economic but also emotional and relational” [30] (p. 21), who, if left to their own devices, risk becoming trapped in a social undertow that will eventually lock them into a condition of social exclusion [47]. These are young people whose human and cultural capital, poor and lacking, risks remaining so because it is not invested in enriching their professional experiences, thus marking the beginning of a long-term path of social exclusion.

It is worth emphasising that when we talk about school drop-out as a risk factor towards a condition of social exclusion, we are talking about a phenomenon that is never only linked to individual causes. Young people’s learning processes, school performance, and decision to drop out are strongly influenced by the family environment of origin, the level of schooling of the parents, and their attitude during their studies [48,49,50].

Family relationships and resources affect access to quality schools. The degree of inequality in the labour market is determined by both family resources and the type of education young people receive. This whole process then determines earning capacity in adulthood.

Families with more human capital invest more in their children. According to Becker’s [51] theory of human capital, individuals, by acquiring more education and training, increase the possibility of improving their productivity in the future. Expenditure on education and training is to be understood as a form of investment with benefits to be calculated in the same way as traditional forms of capital.

Any individual, or their parents, must necessarily choose the extent to which to invest in education based on the costs it entails in terms of fees and the cost of books, as well as on the future return on their labour.

Counting education among investment or consumption goods has theoretical, operational, and political implications. When it comes to education, consumption and investment enter a bi-univocal relationship since those who study, because they like to learn and perform well, will be more inclined to obtain a degree and enjoy the resulting benefits. It is not very realistic to think that we study instrumentally to obtain advantages because, even in such cases, it cannot be ruled out that we do not develop, along the way, a certain taste for knowledge of which we were not aware at the beginning [52].

Parents with a good level of human and cultural capital have a higher capacity to invest in their children’s education, due to their higher income, and provide them with a greater incentive to learn. These investments are influenced by money. Parents with high incomes are more likely to develop their children’s skills and aptitudes, as well as enrich their everyday experiences from an early age. However, non-monetary investments should not be underestimated, including those that concern the development of behaviour and the support of one’s children’s motivations and aspirations [53].

Money, therefore, is not enough because what influences young people to stay in education is the motivational drive that their parents manage to transmit to them. The factors that weigh most heavily on school failure are: a lack of family presence/supervision, a permissive educational style, letting children make their own decisions, low aspirations and lack of commitment to their children’s schooling, negative reactions to their school failures, and low level of verbal interaction between the mother and children [54,55,56,57].

The attitude of the family during the schooling process is decisive in establishing conditions for success. On the other hand, the first signs of dropping out often occur in the first part of the educational process, when unsuccessful results are manifested sometimes already in primary school, and a process of disaffection towards studying is initiated that increases with the transition to other school levels [58].

We could speak of a motivational process that, instead of growing, as young people tread the path of education, precipitates with the first school failures, nurtured by an ever-deepening disengagement from school. The family’s reaction to the first failures is decisive in reversing the sign and helping their children to make up for the first gaps.

Social disadvantages and a low educational level of the family are elements that trigger the decision to leave school early [59]. In several studies on the topic [56,57,60,61], the connections between school dropout and family conditions have emerged. The degree of parental expectation seems to influence school performance more than the socioeconomic status of the family [36,49,54,55]. A weak socioeconomic situation increases the risk of early school leaving. Children of unemployed or low-income parents, for example, are more likely to drop out of school, if only under the illusion that they can find a job that supports their family.

This approach, which goes beyond the monetary component, is emphasised by Bourdieu [62], who emphasises the concept of culture in the humanistic sense of the term with reference to knowledge learned in school circuits.

The core of Bourdieu’s vision revolves around the idea that for a resource to be defined as capital, it must be cumulative, transferable, and convertible into other resources. The importance of the concept lies in its use as a tool for constructing and measuring social space, defined by two basic dimensions: volume and composition of capital. The intersection of these two dimensions defines an individual’s social position. A third dimension, the temporal dimension, refers to the change in capital endowment and type of capital that each biography brings with it [62].

The expression “cultural capital” has great value since it manages to relate three fundamental elements: education, social stratification, and cultural production. The richness of Bourdieu’s concept lies in being able to capture, through a single expression (that of cultural capital), the three mechanisms through which cultural competences contribute to determining social inequality. The first is the process of socialisation. The second refers to the opportunities that cultural industries and institutions guarantee in the labour sphere. The third is the effect that cultural competencies have in generating class differences.

In these dynamics of the accumulation of cultural capital, it becomes essential for the individual to be aware of how much cultural capital, training, and education can be considered valuable tools for personal promotion and development, important means of protection from situations of social distress. Young people are not always aware of how much cultural capital can be a support in situations of social distress.

Reflecting on cultural capital in relation to the conditions of poverty and social discomfort of young people takes us back to the late 1960s when Don Milani [63] wrote that “Letter to a Teacher” with his boys to denounce the failure of the education system, pointing out how serious it was that boys, especially the poorest ones, abandoned school due to being discouraged by a system that favoured the richest. Those were the days when a qualification was considered a means of social mobility, and it was realised that keeping children in education was fundamental not only for large sections of the population, but for the country’s entire economy.

Compulsory schooling was supposed to somehow eliminate the profound disparities in the post-war social system. However, poverty continues to lurk precisely in the interstices of educational pathways and arises in the most vulnerable period of an individual’s life, in the period of choices of what to do when we grow up, in an age in which we never fully grow up, as well as in an era in which transition times are dilated [64] and rites of passage, once circumscribed to precise moments in life, though reversible and multidimensional, remain within defined and predetermined trajectories [65].

In this social landscape, young people face considerable difficulties, experience contradictions, deal with a plurality of life options, and activate their resources to better manage a dilated transition process that, as they grow, fragments, deconstructs, becomes more and more multiform, and, for this very reason, branches off into different possible transitions [64,66].

They are young people grappling with a paradox. On the one hand, in order to survive these changes, they have to train and realise their lives as best they can, in full freedom. On the other hand, they are forced to do so in a social context characterised by scarce resources, job insecurity, and lack of welfare, thus only increasing the risk of social exclusion and poverty.

The most serious element today is that the risk of social exclusion is hidden in the devaluation of educational pathways. Educational qualification is no longer seen as a life goal, but rather as an obstacle to be overcome. These are the most serious situations, and the most worrying side of the younger generations. The proof of all this lies in the phenomenon of young NEETs who do not study and do not work, having lost the motivation to study, and do not even look for work because they are convinced that there is none [44,47].

The consequences on the individual level drag on throughout life and are linked to a number of risks [67,68,69]. Firstly, that of having greater difficulty in finding a job, in particular, a lasting job, than those with a higher education qualification. Poor preparation for work hinders the development of a country’s economy because the drive for innovation and growth starts with a skilled workforce in all areas of the economy. There is a lack of opportunity to participate in the social, cultural, and economic life of society, so that young people who leave school early are less likely to be active citizens participating in democratic processes [70]. There is also the risk associated with the use of drugs or alcohol, as well as the risk of mental health problems [71]. Finally, there is the risk of being dependent on social support programmes throughout their adult lives, stuck in a process of impoverishment and exclusion from which they find it difficult to escape [47,54,55].

In the 1970s, Levin [72], in a study on school drop-outs in the United States, identified economic–social consequences of school failure, such as: loss of gross domestic product; loss of tax revenues to support public services; increased demand for social services; increased crime; reduced political participation; reduced intergenerational mobility; and lower levels of health. Early school-leaving, associated with a prolonged period of inactivity and disengagement from education, training, and the labour market, represents a wasted opportunity for society to invest in its future.

However, the most serious danger is that those who enter this circuit of social exclusion end up passing on to their children a distrust of education, resulting in further hardship and poverty.

Dropping out of school, therefore, marks the beginning of the crystallisation of cultural capital [31,47,70] in a young person and generates chronic effects not only on the life of the individual but, in an avalanche, on the entire social and economic system of any country where the phenomenon is particularly present. In economic terms, a young person who drops out of school as an adult is very likely to earn less than a student who continues to study [36,57].

To summarise, we can define the consequences of early school-leaving in the short, medium, and long term in this way. The short-term consequences, as already anticipated, refer to the working sphere and, thus, to unemployment and precarious, low-income jobs [73]. The medium-term consequences refer to social costs (social disintegration, increased demand on the health care system, and less social cohesion) and economic costs (lower productivity, lower tax revenues, and higher social payments) [74]. Finally, the long-term consequences constitute a huge waste of potential for the social and economic development of the whole community.

This analysis reveals a number of difficulties related to the implementation of adequate policies to contain the phenomenon. It is difficult to imagine that most of the young NEETs should not burden their families due to the temperament of the Mediterranean family to keep their children at home until adulthood. It is equally difficult to imagine that a welfare system can be structured at the national level to support families in an effective and substantial way in making up for the static labour market and the lack of protection and activation systems for young people in this vulnerable condition. The shadow economy is also likely to acquire the function of a major social shock absorber. Young NEETs risk surviving only on the economic support from their families to find a fallback in the so-called “little jobs” that will not allow them substantial autonomy. Those who have the skills will make themselves available to the friendship network to create small informal businesses [75].

In a gerontocratic country like Italy, characterised by a labour system in which young people with talent and preparation are not favoured because careers and salary profiles reward seniority rather than the acquisition of new skills [76], it is very likely that young people in socially disadvantaged situations, without any educational and labour skills, remain stuck in a state of immobility, along with the entire Italian economic system.

If, on the one hand, the productive system that develops in an innovative and competitive manner produces a demand for high-level training, on the other hand, innovation and economic growth are based on the skilled workforce [58]. Conversely, if the performance of education is reduced, it triggers a perverse mechanism of less investment in training that blocks a possible improvement from a social and economic point of view.

The most obvious repercussions of this phenomenon are realised in the removal from the labour market, which is anything but circumstantial or episodic, as well as in the loss of opportunities and experience useful for a return to active life, with the consequent radicalisation of the problem. The greatest risks posed by these dynamics lie in the growth of both the working poor, those who are so because they lack the appropriate tools for well-paid jobs, and those who, with little potential to enter the labour market, remain indefinitely subsidised by family and state support.

4. Work That ‘Creates Poverty’

Both the social and economic transformations, as well as the phenomenon of young NEETs, lead to a reflection on the condition of large sections of the population that live in a constant balance between survival and destitution. These are social categories that comprise people who have never felt they belonged to the so-called “world of the losers” and feel they are not assimilated into the culture of poverty. They are those people who, in terms of lifestyle, relational network, professional relationships, and family models, belong to the middle class that once felt they had guarantees against the risk of downgrading and impoverishment [77,78]. We are referring to that part of the population that, despite having a job, finds itself in a situation of labour, social, and cultural disadvantage, whose economic (and social) equilibrium appears to be constantly challenged partly by market dynamics, partly by the fact that wages remain low [79].

The existence of this share of individuals below the poverty line, even though they are in employment, contradicts both the idea that work in economically developed societies is an element that can reduce the risk of poverty and the assumption that poverty is the result of a lack of attachment or interest in work.

Since the late 1990s, among those who had a job and in households where there was at least one employed adult, there were still barely visible and poorly thematised forms of poverty. The phenomenon had, until then, mainly concerned the United States and was considered marginal in the discourses of politicians and academics in Europe, where it was regarded as connected residual forms of backwardness, confined within sectors of the population in marginal geographic areas and contained within the effects of an informal economy [5,32].

Although not with immediate effects, the 2007 crisis, known as the Great Recession, has impacted this type of poverty, making it more evident in numerical and social terms. Since then, there has been an increase in the number of unemployed people in many European countries (at the Euro-area level, this figure rose from 7.2% in 2007 to 10.4% in 2014, reaching 6.4% in 2023) [80]. Additionally, the number of workers at risk of poverty has increased, rising from 8.2% in 2005 to 9.6% in 2014 [81]. Moreover, the phenomenon has become more concentrated among younger segments of the population and includes the spread of atypical contracts, characterised by precariousness, low earnings, and lack of protection, both social security and welfare [82].

When it started to be talked about in the early 2000s, European stakeholders used the rhetoric of the working poor to emphasise how the American labour market policy was failing because it continued to generate the working poor. In short, there was a belief that in-work poverty in Europe was a moot point since the quality of employment and social protection in the old continent was considered better than in the rest of the world [82].

However, structural changes in the organisation of economic and social integration models were creating the conditions for this phenomenon to spread in Europe as well. From an economic point of view, the decline in agriculture and deindustrialisation generated a shift to a knowledge-based service economy model within the context of a financialised global economy. While the development of the service sector has led to an increase in female employment, it has also led to women being employed in non-standard, low-paid forms of employment. The effect of these dynamics, in many EU countries, has been a substantial increase in unemployment rates [83,84].

The most immediate consequence for European employment policies has been a shift in the supply side towards improving the adaptability of the workforce, increasing the flexibility of labour markets, and actively involving those who might be described as disadvantaged in the labour market [85].

Social phenomena such as the ageing of the population, the increase of the number of women in the labour market, and the significant spread of the dual breadwinner family model, which refers to the need to have more than one salary to ensure a good quality of life for its members, [86,87] must be added to these new dynamics.

These are dynamics that have posed a major challenge to European welfare systems, which have been called upon to address new social risks in the face of a series of problems arising from increasingly tight budget constraints on economic expenditure, the downsizing of the role of the state, and the succession of massive economic crises that have reshaped the various policy responses.

The consequences of these transformations have provided a considerable boost to forms of poverty that, until the early 2000s, had been considered residual and that, more than 20 years later, affect large sections of the population. These are those forms of poverty generated by the segmentation of employment and by the spread of low-quality, underpaid, temporary, and poorly protected work [82]. Poverty has increasingly affected the working population, not just the homeless, the long-term unemployed, or retired people [83].

The components that have favoured the expansion of the phenomenon are diverse and can be traced to labour market developments and institutional changes [88]. In the labour market, for example, technological changes have increased the demand for specialised workers, as opposed to unskilled workers [89]. Meanwhile, the relocation of many production activities to areas where labour costs are very low has caused wages to fall in many parts of Europe for less-qualified workers. From the point of view of institutional changes, market liberalisation reforms have produced both a qualitative deterioration of job positions and a significant weakening of the bargaining power of trade unions and less recourse to centralised bargaining, thus causing negative effects on wages [82,89,90].

In the Italian context, the legislator’s outlook on employment and labour has been both short-sighted and has failed to implement any innovative and effective policies. It has remained in the wake of traditional interventions, placed within contradictory dynamics, stemming from the need to include flexibilization processes in a labour market that is still strongly standardised, rigid, and guarantee-based [76,91].

For a long time, the labour market in Italy was considered a static system compared to the rest of Europe because those workers on permanent contracts would have enjoyed a very high level of protection from both the legal system and the trade unions. These categories of people, protected within the labour market, would not have been at risk of losing their permanent jobs, and companies would not have been encouraged to hire new recruits because they were intimidated by excessive rigidity [92].

The rhetoric of work, understood as a fortress in which to be safe thanks to protection and trade union bargaining, has been countered by that of precariousness, which contributes to increasing employment rates in the various statistics of the sector. However, just as impressive, it generates an increase in precariousness that is transformed into existential insecurity [93,94,95].

We also realise how the determinants of poverty among the working poor can multiple and are often connected with personal (referring to socio-demographic characteristics), employment (the type of contract), and territorial variables (referring both to a macro-geographical level and to a micro level precisely in relation to the area of residence) [96].

The incidence and continued presence of the working poor have progressively become a matter of great concern in many developed economies, not least because it is closely linked to the growth of inequality. A high proportion of low-wage earners may imply greater household poverty and be linked to low-skilled and low-productivity labour supply [97,98].

This trend is usually more present in countries where there is a wider wage range and more flexibility in employment contracts. While the reforms implemented have not changed the conditions of those in stable employment, they have reduced protection for new employees by introducing new forms of atypical and flexible contracts. Characteristics of employment, changes in the quality of work, the type of contract, and the spread of atypical forms of work characterised by fixed-term, temporary, coordinated, and continuous collaboration, or occasional contracts, have been strongly predictive of poverty [99].

The increase in these types of contracts can be attributed to the need for companies to have new labour without having the costs of employing permanent workers, since they offer the possibility of taking advantage of lower social security contributions due to occasional collaborations [100]. Atypical labour contracts, in addition to containing the cost of labour utilisation, also influence the dynamics of average wages through lower fees for temporary workers [101,102]. All these elements have produced an increase in precariousness due to both an outflow of permanent workers, as well as an inflow of people working with atypical contracts with expiry dates.

This dynamic has led to greater convenience for those companies that have streamlined personnel management practices, but above all, have saved on the costs of hiring, dismissals, and job guarantees. Workers have found themselves caught in the mechanisms of persistent job insecurity [82,103].

The issue of in-work poverty has immediately raised the interest of the EU political agenda, so much so that it has become a political objective, with the need for efforts to improve the quality of labour standards having emerged. The revival of the complex employment issue through the Europe 2030 Strategy, due to the poor performance of the Lisbon Strategy, has put the concept of flexibility in relation to job security and protection at the centre of the issue, in a dynamic that emphasises the benefits for both workers and employers [104,105,106].

The multidimensionality of the phenomenon is linked to a number of factors, such as, first and foremost, low wages, but also low job security, that have a direct impact on the quality of life of millions of working poor and their families [81].

A distinction must then be made between low-wage workers and the working poor on a family basis. According to the OECD definition, low-wage workers are those who have a monthly wage of less than two-thirds of the average monthly wage of full-time workers in their country [106]. According to Eurostat, they earn 60 per cent of the average monthly wage calculated among all workers [81]. According to the European Commission and Eurostat, poor workers on a family basis are those who, regardless of their wage level, considering any other income within the family and the number of family members, have a disposable income of less than 60% of the average per-capita income [81,107,108].

Italy shares with the EU most of the characteristics that distinguish this phenomenon. A considerable segmentation of labour, a rapid deregulation of work, and an increase in flexibility have worsened the situation in a labour market that was already in severe crisis. The need to adapt to European standards has caused a further spread of atypical contracts over the last 10 years, which do not facilitate young people’s entry into the labour market [97] while also slowing down their stabilisation.

In Italy, territorial peculiarities have a considerable weight in defining the phenomenon. Southern Italy has always been at the forefront in this sector, with percentages that, at certain times in history, have exceeded those of the north by 10 points [99,108]. Family situations are also different, with a higher number of large families, often with children, compared to the north. These factors contribute to the entrenched nature of the working poor phenomenon [108].

This has had very serious effects on the quality of life due to the absence of social safety nets and poverty-protection and prevention tools, such as guaranteed minimum income.

In the Italian context, the phenomenon presents specific characteristics in comparison to other European countries [109]: a large presence of self-employed workers, a low percentage of employment, and a high presence of single-income households. These factors must be analysed together with the trend in employment income since they influence the level and dispersion of employment income at a household level.

Eurostat data for 2024 tell us that in Italy, 10.3% of employed persons are at risk of poverty [110]. The latest data processed by ISTAT refer to 2022 and reveal that the regions of the south and the islands have been penalised compared to other areas of the country, with percentages exceeding 20% (vs. northwest 8.6%, northeast 5.8%, and centre 9.2%) [111].

Interesting differences in the risk of poverty for the employed emerge when comparing data by citizenship. The statistics reveal large gaps between Italian citizens, for whom the risk of poverty for the employed is around 10%, and foreign citizens, for whom, overall, this percentage stands at 24.7%, which is a decrease compared to the pre-pandemic data (26%) [111].

Among the elements that distinguish Italy from the other European nations, when analysing the phenomenon of the working poor, are age and gender.

With reference to age, the ISTAT data show that, in the last year (2024), the risk of poverty increases for 25–44-year-olds and for those over 50. It is at its highest level in the last 10 years [111]. The countertrend in Italy compared to Europe is a lower involvement of young people (18–25 years) in in-work poverty, despite the generally unfavourable conditions (low wages, unemployment, or job insecurity) that young people encounter in the labour market [97,112]. In Italy, this situation is due to the fact that young people participate in particularly long school-to-work transitions [113,114] and live safely in the household of origin, in which they remain even when they are employed. They are less exposed to the risk of in-work poverty and contribute, at least from a statistical point of view, to the maintenance of the household’s well-being.

Even if young people have poor employment conditions, the Mediterranean model of school-to-work-adult transition makes the intergenerational dependency process a relevant element in explaining the higher risks of in-work poverty of employed adults compared to young people [115].

The gender variable contributes to delineating the complexity of the phenomenon [99,115]. Regarding in-work poverty, women are more likely to work in the secondary labour market or have part-time occupations [116]. In Italy, most employed women are additional workers in the household, excluding single mothers and the rare cases where the woman is the sole earner in the household.

The availability of a higher total household income thus explains the relative protection of working women from the risk of in-work poverty. On the other hand, the growth of poverty among working women can be understood with increasing difficulties of the male breadwinner, especially if placed in the first percentiles of wage distribution, i.e., in manual working class occupations, in conjunction with the economic crisis that has affected mainly adult males with low qualifications and/or low education [117,118]. In addition, there is the problem of the shortage of early childhood care services, which, although they have good coverage for children aged 3 to 6, are still uncommon, particularly expensive, and often inadequate to meet the needs of working mothers, so much so that many women are forced to give up full-time work and fall back on part-time work or even drop out, hoping to re-enter the labour market once their children are grown up [82,119].

One element worth emphasising is that, if looking at the determinants of poverty intensity, the level of education behaves differently from the other indicators. Individuals with a university degree, although they are at a lower risk of falling into poverty, are less impoverished than those without any qualifications.

Low levels of education tend to be more exposed to low wages, short-term jobs, employment instability, and other possible disadvantaged labour market conditions. Individual human capital is confirmed as a powerful risk factor for in-work poverty, even net of personal, family, and work characteristics. This confirms the importance of education as a form of permanent protection from social risks [113].

This element, which may seem obvious, conceals the impact of a long period of intergenerational inequality that is little counteracted within the mechanisms of social reproduction. Low levels of education are closely linked to family origin. While having a low salary may relate to a transitory phase in the course of life, having a low qualification and coming from low-income families may increase the risk of low remuneration throughout life [32].

To aggravate the situation of this category of people are situations of family instability, whereby at the time of a separation or divorce, the man, much more often than in the past, slips precipitously into a process of impoverishment from which it is difficult to escape [120,121].

This happens mainly in the economically more modest classes since the presence of a minimum income does not allow them to pay rent for another house or to contribute to child maintenance. Over the years, the demand for local policies to combat the phenomenon has grown (think of homes for separated fathers). Although women are, in most cases, the economic victims of separation, men, when they are unable to cope with the practical and relational reorganisation of their daily lives, enter a spiral of overall de-structuring. Following a separation, it is almost exclusively men who join the ranks of the homeless [32]. These are men who risk slipping into a condition of irreversible misery, as they are deprived of a family network and resources that might give them hope of an improvement in their condition.

These are the forms of new poverty caused by discontinuity elements in daily life that generate states of personal degradation, social isolation, and distress at risk of becoming chronic. These are the situations in which individuals experience economic narrowness, poverty of social relations, and loss of physical or psychic well-being before finding themselves in situations in which they cannot live without the help of the community [121].

This trend confirms the multifactor nature of the impoverishment process and the presence of multiple elements that aggravate the condition by generating new situations of social weakness.

5. The Community as a Support in the Change Processes

Cultural poverty and work poverty can be seen as two sides of the same coin. They are two types of poverty that risk being self-perpetuated. On the one hand, poor cognitive and cultural tools force young people to make do with low-paying jobs. On the other hand, poor work due to poor training can have a distancing effect from education.

What the two phenomena have in common, beyond the causal connection that may exist, is the state of habituation to the condition of social and economic hardship. NEETs, especially those in a condition of social distress [47,91], show a condition in which passivity, disorientation, and recrimination are combined with vague and confused ideas about the possibilities of social integration. Often deprived of the safety nets guaranteed by the formal sector of the economy, they implement personal survival strategies in their parental networks, which are often weak, in the public assistance system, or in the private social sector.

The working poor very often slip from one opportunity, irregular or atypical, to another, or from one place of vocational training to another, failing to accumulate material, professional, relational, or psychological resources capable of drawing them away from what increasingly appears to be a personal crisis with connotations of biographical paralysis [122].

In these situations, the risk of social drift must be mitigated by trying to implement intervention methodologies that facilitate capacitation processes.

One proposal could be to work on a proximity approach involving subjects starting from the community in which they are embedded. The involvement of young people and their activation could occur through the innovative use of tools close to the world of young people and the involvement of social actors who illuminate the space in which young people linger, convinced that there is nothing to be done. The involvement of specialised personnel in the implementation of interactions with subjects in distress, starting from the motivational and emotional sphere, could help to focus attention not on the subject’s social surroundings but, above all, on the awareness of the life path so far. In short, it is necessary to work to implement the resilience capacity of these population groups, as well as promote their self-esteem, enhancing their relational and social resources.

A fundamental condition for any action implemented in this direction to have a positive impact on people and the territory and to be consistent with the needs expressed by those directly affected by the action is to involve the stakeholders right from the formulation and definition of the problem in a process implementing a sense of responsibility shared by all the social actors.

It would be useful to activate intervention methodologies that put the person at the centre and involve the community in a joint-responsibility takeover as defined by the Responsible Welfare approach [123].

Placing the emphasis first and foremost on the person means placing the human being at the centre, understood as a unique entity with its history and social ties, “open to relationship with the other and to mutual recognition” [123] (p. 7). The dimensions of singularity and relationality that pertain to the concept of personhood become fundamental since they allow us not only to get to the heart of the problems but also to create social connections that have a supportive function in situations of individual and social difficulties. It is a method that distances itself from a welfarist approach, which is incapable of strengthening a person’s potential and their social and relational network, in order to promote instead the assumption of responsibility not only by those who offer help, but also by those who receive it, who are called upon to activate their own resources in order to get out of their state of need. It is a process that finds its references in the “meso” dimension, with reference to the welfare system, whereby the various local welfare actors come into play and are activated to tackle the problems and needs of people in the territorial context in which they live. It is in this way that local public, private, and third-sector actors can be involved in a process of taking responsibility and promoting well-being for individuals and the entire community.

Paying attention to the territorial context helps to define the frame of meaning of this approach. It is realised, therefore, through the centrality of the person, the concept of responsibility, and the community dimension as the privileged place of its implementation.

It is a methodology that is characterised, first of all, by the overcoming of a unidirectional assistance-oriented approach in order to provide space to the involvement of all the actors present on the territory in a mutual assumption of responsibility on the part of those who receive help, who are called upon to activate their own resources to get out of their condition of need.

This process only finds “fertile ground” if, at the territorial level, those connections that are useful in promoting the well-being of individuals and the community in an osmotic process of development are activated. On the other hand, the community, in the micro dimension, has often had a protective function through the strong sense of belonging, emotional security, and a strong degree of integration that have always acted as the glue of community living.

The importance of working in a network is to create a sense of community that activates effective support. It is an approach that is consistent with the theories of social psychology, according to which when social ties provide the right support, in stressful life situations, they go so far as to affect the lowering of disease and mortality rates [124,125,126]. Social support [127,128,129,130] is among the most important functions that can be attributed to the social network. It is because of this principle that social networks are believed to “contain resources that can be potentially supportive. Accordingly, social support is the information that leads a person to feel loved, valued, and included in a network of mutual communications and obligations” [131] (p. 196).

Implementing these methodologies, through the activation of individuals and the community, would orient young people and workers in conditions of social distress towards an analysis of their real needs to look for the most appropriate solutions that can come from the community. In this way, they would find support in the process of changing their biographical path through contact with services and knowledge of possible resources in the area.

It is a type of activity that can be assimilated to the four types of support that Prezza and Principato [132] identify according to the different functions that social support performs:

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Information function/support that refers to advice and guidance that can help people face problematic events in their lives. This support can be exercised through the assessment of life events experienced by young NEETs and people who have a job, but one which does not guarantee quality standards, or through suggestions to solve an impasse, not least support to look for new job opportunities;

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Instrumental function/support, which refers to an action of concrete help. It is help that can be realised through the offer of services, economic aid, or even the direct performance of a task. Thanks to this type of support, which we could define as immediate, there is an immediate effect on the lowering of stress levels generated by difficult situations;

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Function/emotional support comparable to listening, the propensity to provide attention to the person; expressing interest in the person in difficulty tends towards the satisfaction of an emotional need, and the person receiving this type of support strengthens self-esteem because the person receiving help feels accepted despite the problematic nature of their experiences;

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Affiliative function/support is the type of action that develops a sense of belonging more than others because it offers the possibility of favourable social contacts that can stimulate a positive process of activation of the individual within their own community.

The positive effects of this approach emerge through the individual’s self-efficacy [133,134] in activating relationships of trust and reciprocity. Self-efficacy refers to the belief that we have the ability to organise and perform all the actions necessary to achieve certain results. This belief can influence many aspects of life. The choice of the individual actions to be taken to achieve the result, the amount of effort to be invested, perseverance and resilience in the face of obstacles, the perception that our way of thinking may or may not facilitate overcoming obstacles, and the amount of stress we accumulate in adversity need to be considered. Having these skills does not always coincide with knowing how to apply them at the right time to achieve our goals. The starting point is becoming aware of possessing them and then putting them to use.

In situations where such interventions have been implemented, the results obtained report an evident improvement in the performance of the subjects involved [91].

Positive elements of particular interest can be found in:

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Strengthening ties with adults is important in growth processes [135];

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Increased self-esteem and strengthened social networks in experiences involving the younger generation [136];

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Increased problem-solving capacity in problematic situations [137,138];

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Greater continuity in tertiary education and increased levels of satisfaction in students with a poor cultural background [139]

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Increased self-esteem in individuals participating in the realisation of new work ventures [140].

The community thus becomes the real instrument for structuring effective capacitation processes.

Attributing renewed importance to the community dimension makes it possible to recover the role of space as a decisive variable from a theoretical point of view. It makes it possible to better realise a link between social phenomena, such as those of poverty that we have examined in this article, and the context in which they are expressed. It is, therefore, fundamental to assimilate the value of the forms of structuring of local contexts to our own theoretical model, taking into due consideration their heuristic potential to avoid mechanically applying theoretical assumptions that are far removed from reality.