MILAN (AP) – The coronavirus pandemic did not cause Elena Simone’s first budgetary difficult period. The 49-year-old single mother lost herself from the job market when the 2008 global financial crisis hit Italy and never quite entered it again, but she created a patchwork quilt of small jobs that took care of herself and the youngest of her three children.
That all changed with the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy in the spring.
Simone’s cafeteria job went with the schools closed. Her cleaning performances had also dried up. While others went back to work when the lockdown ended, Simone remained frozen.
“There was a time when I only ate carrots,” she recalls from her kitchen, which was decorated with colorful plush figures shaped like vegetables.
For the first time in her life, Simone needed help to put food on the table. At the urging of a friend, she signed up to enter the food stores of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas. Her suitability will cover her through January, and she hopes to get rid of the charity roles by then “to make room for people who need it even more.”
The charity serving more than 5 million people in the Archdiocese of Milan, Caritas Ambrosiana, says the pandemic is revealing for the first time the depths of economic uncertainty in Italy’s northern Lombardy region, which accounts for 20% of the country’s gross domestic product. land.
Simone, who has two grown children and a 10-year-old son at home, is typical of the new poor in Italy. These are people who got by after the 2008 financial crisis and stayed off the radar of the Italian social security system by relying on informal gray market jobs and the help of friends and family.
But between the near-complete freeze of spring in Italy, the introduction of a partial freeze when the virus rose again in the fall, and the ongoing toll the pandemic is taking on the Italian economy, the thin threads that allowed people to pool jobs have been broken .
Nowhere in Italy is this more evident than in Lombardy, where COVID-19 first exploded in Europe. Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti estimates that the virus has created 300,000 new poor people, based on surveys of the dozens of charities operating in the region.
Caritas Ambrosiana helped 9,000 people during the spring shutdown, 20% of whom said their financial situation had “drastically” deteriorated during the 10-week shutdown. In October, nearly 700 families asked for food aid for the first time.
Nationally, a third of all people seeking help from Caritas during the pandemic are first-time recipients, and in a reversal of usual trends, most are Italians, not foreign residents.
More than 40 organizations provide food every day in Milan, Italy’s financial capital. One of the largest, Pane Quotidiano, serves around 3,500 meals a day. Many of the people in need have once worked in restaurants and hotels, punished in particular by the restrictions of the coronavirus, or as domestic helpers.
“It’s even more widespread than we knew, especially for a wealthy city like Milan,” said Caritas Ambrosiana spokesman Francesco Chiavarini. “These precarious jobs were lost. And we don’t know when or if they will be restored. “
Researchers from Bocconi University in Milan said in a working paper for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that workers without a university degree paid the highest price for the virus restrictions in Italy. Half reported a drop in their pay, compared to just 20% of top earners, and many did not have the luxury of working remotely.
“What we are seeing is a substantial increase in inequality,” said Vincenzo Galasso, a researcher at Bocconi University.
Those without solid employment contracts are the most exposed to the pandemic that has already killed more than 68,000 people in Italy, the highest death toll in Europe.
Simone found out too late that her cafeteria contract described her as an occasional worker, meaning she had no basis to ask for government support to replace lost earnings. Her cleaning jobs were no longer off the books, and she’s only restored two of the dozen she had before the pandemic.
Even when workers qualify for Italy’s short-term public-private layoff plan, the money has arrived too late and is generally not enough to cover a family’s basic expenses, Chiavarini said. Basic coverage is 400 euros ($ 490) per month, but the monthly rent in a city like Milan starts at around 600 euros ($ 735).
Food security is emerging as a major issue as the pandemic enters winter.
Progetto Arca, which runs shelters and provides other social services in Milan, began operating a food truck last month after seeing homeless people who had their stomachs filled with restaurant and bar handouts go hungry during the partial fall arrest when many establishments were closed.
And not just the homeless who pass the food truck. One recent night, a well-dressed man in a quilted jacket and frock pants waited to the side for the line to disappear. He identified himself as a lawyer, but declined further comment, asking not to be photographed taking away two hot meals and two bags of food for the next day, one for his companion who was waiting at home.
So far, government moratoria on evictions and layoffs of contract workers have helped maintain a limit on what charity workers see as an emerging poverty crisis.
“When these are lifted, we will see the real price we have to pay for this pandemic,” said Chiavarini. “We celebrate Milan as the capital of innovation, but beneath these skyscrapers that we are so proud of, lies a hidden world where people live in conditions of truly precarious conditions. “
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