Unemployment: The Upside

The Italian unemployment rate is around 6%, which is much lower than I would’ve thought, for all the complaining about it that I hear. So I did a little further research, and it turns out that they’re right: the official number isn’t very telling. The 6% figure masks a rapidly growing migrant/immigrant workforce, a growth in part-time workers, a huge divide between the industrial North and the largely unemployed South, and a huge growth in fixed-term contracts (which, along with immigrant-bashing, is everyone’s favorite conversational sport). But from my outsider perspective, I’d say that Italy needs a high unemployment rate. And not for the traditional “ideal unemployment rate” reasoning. Here, there’s a different reason: Someone in every family must be available to wait in lines. “Waiting in Lines” and “Playing Bureaucracy”, is effectively, a job. Two, in fact; though developing skills in one or the other can prepare a beginner for successful careers in both.

Seriously, the amount of time you have to waste here to do anything can get really frustrating. For example, I recently learned that, for the upcoming elections, Italians must return to their home provinces to vote. Mail-in or internet balloting? Ha! Well, that’s not an entirely accurate criticism: If you are incarcerated in a province other than your own, you may vote in the province of your incarceration. If you are working in a province other than your own, or, God forbid, studying overseas, however, you must return home to vote. Seriously, I met a girl yesterday who flew back to Italy from her university in Spain so that she could cast a ballot.

If you need to make a payment to the university? Online payment? Check? Credit card? Ha! Go to the bank with a wad of cash. Wait in line.

And here’s a fun one: Want to take out a book from the library? Ho-ho. Grab a seat. If I had one wish for the Italian university system, it would be a well-functioning library system. As it lies, here’s how it works. There are maybe fifty or a hundred different university and municipal libraries, each with its own set of rules and practices. Need five books? You’ll most like likely need to visit five different libraries and Play the Game at each one. Maybe you need a special card to use a certain library; maybe not. Just to enter, you’ll need to leave your backpack in a locker outside so that you don’t steal any books. (Since the bar code scanners that seem to quite effectively work in supermarkets, department stores, and foreign libraries suddenly don’t function for Italian books???) Actually, more than that: Some libraries are more generously tolerant, but many actually prevent you from bringing books into the library. And, even better, many prevent you from taking books out of the library! How, then, does the library serve its function, you might wonder? Answer: You may sit in that library and read a book from that library.

Ah! But that assumes you were able to get the book in the first place. That’s a whole ‘nother story. To get a book, you can’t usually just go to the shelf and get the book. That job is reserved for a Library Employee. You must find the book in the catalog, fill out a paper form (electronic requests from the comfort of your home? Ha!), hand-deliver the paper form to the librarian, and wait for the next book retrieval period (often occuring on the hour). You may then pick up your book. If that library permits you to take out books, you’re still not homefree. You might not be able to take out that book, even if it says in the catalog that you can. For example, after visiting three different libraries, filling out a dozen different forms, waiting in three different lines, and spending – no kidding – about five hours on the entire endeavor, I discovered that practically none of the over 2000 Bibles in the Bologna library system can be checked out. I gave up.

Hence: If you want to vote, write a check, read a book – or god forbid do something more complicated such as legalize your immigration status – prepare thyself for hours and days of lines and bureaucracy. It’s no wonder to me that immigrants remain illegal. If my experience is any indication, it would be – no exaggeration – absolutely impossible to have a full-time job and to fulfill the bureaucratic steps for becoming legal.

So, here it is, the Economic Theory of the Day: Without at least one unemployed person in every family, a family would not be able to perform basic social, civic, and economic tasks. Hence, high(er) unemployment is, in Italy, an absolute economic necessity.

On that note, I leave you with this calming photo :)