Main reasons why employees might lose their job in Italy 2021, by type of contract

The COVID-19 pandemic, which first hit Italy in late February 2020, had a massive impact on life in the country. The measures adopted by the Italian government to control the contagion pushed many businesses to stop or radically scale down their activities. For many employees in the country, this translated into an increased fear of losing their job. According to a survey conducted in April 2021, the reasons why workers had such fears varied according to the type of their employment contracts. Unsurprisingly, for employees with a fixed-term contract or a temporary one (in Italian, precari), this risk was due to the lack of adequate safeguards in this sense in their job arrangements. On the other hand, employees with an open-ended contract were mainly worried about the major setbacks suffered by their company, which in some cases forced them out of business.