The shaky social citizenship of young professionals: work transformation, transition to work, career and life planning and unrepresented rights

The paper focuses on young adult professionals in the Milan urban area (Italy) and their difficulties to plan and develop a successful career and satisfying life. The current economic phase seems just to worsen the pre-existing obstacles, due to post-industrial changes affecting labour market, school-work transition, welfare protection. Until 10-15 years ago young professionals, defined as professional at first steps of their career, were normally destined for a satisfying and linear career; the combination of the current long-lasting crisis and the under-qualified Italian labour market – inadequately rewarding qualified jobs in particular at the starting stages of their careers – creates an unprecedented condition of instability, precariousness and risk. Work contents and professional satisfaction are under pressure: young professionals receive scarce remuneration and acknowledgement of their competences; labour contents within certain professions tend to worsen and autonomy to be reduced. The label ‘professionals’ hides young adult employees in precarious conditions, with low wages and without contracts. Self-employment is a traditional feature of the Italian social class composition, but many changes have been occurred during the last decades. The post-industrial transitions produced new forms of self-employment, which do not take part in the social integration unlike the traditional middleclass. The old regulative pattern was based on controlled markets, social homogeneity, traditional habits, social and political representation – professional orders and associations, political parties, relations with local and national institutions. The current Italian social system reveals strong social differentiation within the post-industrial middle-class in regard with income and social representation. Young professionals and a-typical workers in particular experience difficult working conditions, economic hardship and lack of representative organisations aiming at enlarging rights and welfare coverage. In this sense, we argue, the new generation of professionals undergoes a crisis of social citizenship, conceived as a full participation to social life, through labour market inclusion, interest representation 1 , welfare protection, social networks support. Semi-structured interviews to 72 young-adult professionals were used to understand the relation among biographical project, economic constraints and adaptation to them. Biographies – education and working careers, transition to adulthood – resources and limits, expectations, social needs were analysed, in order to outline professional and biographical patterns and the most 1