Abstract

EC Regulation No. 2204/2002 aims at better workability for a wide range of people with some kind of disadvantages in the labor market. However, a similar taxonomy of structural predictors of disadvantages must be adopted with caution, for three reasons: a) they do not work additively, on the contrary they interweave with each other in the form of "INUS"-causes; b) their effect is not the construction of unidimensional states of exclusion, but rather of multidimensional "situations"; c) these situations are today embedded in demographic and socioeconomic frames that are radically changing, and they are taking the form of "new social risks", which in turn are marked by a sort of stabilization of (traditionally temporary) critical states in the life-course. This is the case of atypical employment. Today its ability to introduce people into stable work careers is the core of a huge split in the pertinent debate: some people strongly support flexible jobs as virtuous entry ports, just as other people denigrate them as job traps. Empirical evidence up to now, concerning the Italian market is limited and not convergent. One dominant mechanism does not exist in the atypical Italian labor market: both mechanisms coexist, and where the entrapment works, the flexibility can produce in young adults a loss of ability to plan the choices of familyformation. We need to investigate under the surface of unidimensional analysis, and to analyze the geography of atypical work in terms of more complex "syndromes". Exploring a database of subcontract workers in Lombardy, the article evidences some emerging "INUS-causes" of stabilization into a state of precariousness: women (&) divorced, males (&) breadwinners, over 45 years (&) with a degree. All these situations have in common a specific mechanism of entrapment: Watzlawick et al. define them "paradoxical situations", from which there is no escape, whatever action is taken, because of something that is an intrinsic part of the situation itself. A longitudinal survey design is thus warmly recommended, in order to document these "new" social risks.