Introduction

The discussion in this chapter will focus on the three, partly overlapping, social groups that were affected most by the crisis: the working-poor, children and migrants. These groups also epitomise the characteristics of the Italian poverty regime: insufficient labour demand in an increasingly weak economy and in a globalised world, a high incidence of low wages in a context of decreasing trade union power, a persistently strong gender division in paid and unpaid work within the household (underpinned by scarce work−family reconciliation policies), low levels of defamilialisation through public policies, and an overall fragmented welfare state that often leaves precisely the poorest unprotected or only barely protected. These characteristics are present throughout Italy, but are particularly concentrated in the South.

The first two social groups in focus – the working-poor and underage children – were already over-represented among the poor before the 2008 economic crisis set in, and were also the worst affected. The third group, migrants, are a new entry because Italy only became an immigration country comparatively late, and migrants, and more generally foreigners, did not appear in national statistics on household consumption or income and wealth until very recently, de facto almost coincidentally with the onset of the crisis. For this reason, data on the impact of the crisis are more robust for the first two groups than for the third.

The three groups partly overlap, but they do not entirely coincide. The working-poor are often, but not always, foreign workers. The large majority of poor children live in households where there is at least one worker. The presence of more than one, and particularly more than two children, is one of the main factors associated with poverty for a low-income worker's household. Many poor households with at least one foreign member include children. Keeping these three groups distinct in the analysis prevents an unjustified clustering of the three and enables an exploration of the experience and risk of poverty from different perspectives: individual and the household, functioning of the labour market, gender division of labour within the household, functioning of welfare, discrimination against minority ethnic groups and lack of social capital.