The social unsustainability of EU anti-poverty measures

The measures adopted by European countries to lift people out of relative poverty are not effective. Our review shows that: 1. no country uses the European relative at-risk-of poverty threshold (Eurostat) to define the poverty, but lower thresholds; 2. half of the poor do not claim the access to the measures; 3. in most cases, purely economic support are not sufficient to overcome social exclusion; 4. all countries require people to stay on the labor market as a condition to get income; 5. if not, sanctions are applied; 6. in most cases the net minimum wage is beneath the line of poverty. Italy is the only country in the EU that has not yet adopted measures to address poverty: there was Greece too, but the Troika has imposed to prepare the measures. The major Italian parties have made proposals that follow the patterns of UK and Germany. We analyze their systems, and show that: 1. the access to the income is subject to the compulsion to underpaid wage labor and unpaid labor; 2. the compulsion is based on very stringent penalties; 3. the system creates dependency and subjection to the discretionary power of local management; 4. a lot of poor prevent from entering the system so as not to be subjected to treatment that infringe rights and freedoms, and which make them subject to the social stigma. We believe that the implementation of such system in Italy is socially untenable, and we propose measures that come close to some principles of universal and unconditional basic income.