MILAN (AP) – The coronavirus pandemic did not produce Elena Simone’s first budget patch. The 49-year-old single mother found herself out of the job market when the global financial crisis of 2008 affected Italy and she never returned completely, but she created a mosaic of small jobs that provided her and her youngest of his three children.
Everything changed with Italy’s first COVID-19 blockade in the spring.
With schools closed, so was Simone’s cafeteria job. His house cleaning concerts also dried up. While others returned to work when the blockade ended, Simone froze.
“There was a time when I only ate carrots,” he recalled from his kitchen decorated with colorful vegetable-shaped plush characters.
For the first time in her life, Simone needed help to put food on the table. At the urging of a friend, he signed up to access grocery stores run by Caritas, a Roman Catholic charity. Her eligibility will cover her until January and she hopes to be out of charity “to make room for people who need it even more”.
The charity that serves more than 5 million people in the Archdiocese of Milan, Caritas Ambrosiana, says the pandemic reveals for the first time the depths of economic insecurity in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, which generates 20% of the country’s gross domestic product.
Simone, who has two adult children and a ten-year-old son at home, is typical of the new poor in Italy. These are people who managed to overcome themselves after the financial crisis of 2008, staying off the radar of the Italian welfare system based on informal gray market jobs and the help of friends and family.
But between the almost total closure of spring in Italy, the introduction of a partial blockade when the virus rose again in the autumn and the continuous toll that the pandemic is taking on the Italian economy, the thin threads that allowed people joining occupation have broken up.
Nowhere in Italy is it more evident than in Lombardy, where COVID-19 first exploded in Europe. Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti estimates the virus has created 300,000 poor people, based on surveys of dozens of charities operating in the region.
Caritas Ambrosiana provided assistance to 9,000 people during the spring closure, 20% of whom reported that their financial situation had worsened “drastically” during the ten-week closure. In October, about 700 families applied 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 the usual trends, most are Italian and not foreign residents.
More than 40 organizations provide food daily in Milan, the financial capital of Italy. One of the largest, the Pane Quotidiano, serves about 3,500 meals a day. Many who needed it once worked in restaurants and hotels, which have been particularly penalized by coronavirus restrictions or as domestic help.
“It’s even more widespread than we knew, especially for a rich city like Milan,” Caritas Ambrosiana spokesman Francesco Chiavarini said. “These precarious jobs were lost. And we don’t know when or if they will be restored. “
Researchers at Bocconi University in Milan said in a working paper by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that blue-collar workers without university degrees paid the highest price for restrictions on the virus in Italy. Half reported a drop in their wages, compared to only 20% of the first winners, 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 discovered too late that her cafeteria contract described her as an occasional worker, meaning she had no basis for asking for government help to replace the lost income. His cleaning jobs were completely off the books and he has only recovered two of the dozens he had before the pandemic.
Even when workers qualify for Italy’s public-private short-term layoff plan, the money has arrived late and is generally inadequate to cover a family’s basic expenses, Chiavarini said. Basic coverage is $ 400 ($ 490) a month, but monthly rentals in a city like Milan start at $ 600 ($ 735).
Food security is emerging as a key issue as the pandemic enters the winter.
Progetto Arca, which manages shelters and provides other social services in Milan, began operating a food truck last month after seeing homeless people who had filled their stomachs with restaurant and bar sheets go hungry. during the partial closure of the fall when many establishments had closed.
And it’s not just the homeless who come with the food truck. On a recent night, a well-dressed man in a padded jacket and dress pants waited beside him until the line had dissipated. He identified himself as a lawyer but declined to comment and asked not to be photographed, as he took two hot meals and two bags of food for the next day, one for his partner waiting at home.
To date, government moratoriums on evictions and the dismissal of hired workers have helped maintain the limit of what charity workers see as an emerging poverty crisis.
“When they stand up, we will see the real price we have to pay for this pandemic,” Chiavarini said. “We celebrate Milan as the capital of innovation, but beneath these skyscrapers of which we are so proud there is a hidden world where people live in conditions of real precariousness. “
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