The Italian family facing the welfare crisis (2007)

The poverty shadow spares no one: it affects the elderly who receive pensions of just €500 (and there are more than 7 million of them), young people with insecure jobs who move from one job to another, and those who until now were considered privileged because they were sheltered from all economic contingencies, the so-called ‘middle class’. Poverty is progressively spreading and is also affecting people who used to enjoy a decent standard of living. The likelihood of the impoverishment of the lower and middle classes has increased and the dividing line between the poor and the non-poor is becoming increasingly blurred.
For many Italian households the risk of poverty has materialised, households that have not made it and, for similar reasons (erosion of purchasing power, exit from the labour market, illness, separation/divorce, etc.), have plunged below the poverty line. The loss of a job, redundancy funds or the onset of a serious illness are causal variables that can seriously undermine the fragile economic and financial balance of a large proportion of households.
The current picture outlines the three-thirds society that Eurispes has been talking about since the early 1990s, where one third lives in an area of certain social hardship and economic poverty, one third appears to be absolutely guaranteed and the central band (the middle classes) lives in a condition of instability and precariousness.