Vesuvius Caused Less Damage Than Italian Labor Laws

Via Hot Air comes
this terrifying report of what it’s like to live and try to work in
contemporary Italy. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius caused less damage
the Italian labor policies.

Writes Nicholas Farrell in the (U.K.)
Spectator:

The youth unemployment rate here is 43 per cent — the highest on
record. That figure doesn’t factor in the black market, which is so
big that the Italian government now wants to include certain parts
of it — prostitution, drug dealing and assorted smuggling — into
its official GDP figures. The contribution is thought to be
sizeable enough to take the country out of its third recession in
six years.

We should remember that Italian companies get state money to pay
workers to do nothing and not sack them — currently about half
a million workers are in what is known as ‘cassa
integrazione’. So the real unemployment rate in Italy must be
at least 15 per cent, and that does not include all those who have
given up trying to find work. Just 58 per cent of working-age
Italians are employed, compared with an average 65 per cent in the
developed world….

There is another Italy — the state-financed
one — where life is, if not a bed of roses, still fine, all
things considered…. Italian MPs are the highest paid in the
civilised world, earning almost twice the salary of a British MP.
Barbers in the Italian Parliament get up to €136,120 a year gross.
All state employees get a fabulous near-final–salary pension. It is
not difficult to appreciate the fury of the average Italian private
sector worker, whose gross annual pay is €18,000.

The phrase ‘you could not make it up’ fits the gold-plated world
of the Italian state employee to a tee — especially in the
Mezzo-giorno, Italy’s hopeless south. Sicily, for instance, employs
28,000 forestry police — more than Canada — and has 950
ambulance drivers who have no ambulances to drive.

Farrell opens with an anecdote about the state-funded Rome Opera
House, where “the musicians at the opera house — the
‘professori’ — work a 28-hour week (nearly half taken up with
‘study’) and get paid 16 months’ salary a year, plus absurd perks
such as double pay for performing in the open air because it is
humid and therefore a health risk.”

That anecdote provides the only upbeat moment in the story: 200
members of the Opera’s orchestra and chorus were recently
fired.

And note that according to the BBC, parliamentary barbers have
had their pay reduced to only 99,000 euros. Times is tough all
over!

Read the whole thing.

It’s a rare day when I don’t thank
my maternal grandparents for getting the hell out of Italy in
the 1910s. I think I’ll thank them twice today after reading that
Spectator story.