La flessibilità del lavoro nel Servizio Sanitario Nazionale prima e durante la pandemia da Covid-19

The first thesis of the article is that the public health sector experiences, after the financial crisis of 2007 and until 2019, a process of increasing labour flexibility. This is a numerical flexibility (in the number of employees and in the type of employment contracts), rather than a functional flexibility. Indeed, the latter is difficult to imple- ment in a sector based on high proportion of professional work, with corporatist forms of self-regulation. The second thesis, relating to the pandemic period, argues that between 2020 and 2021 even more flexible labour policies in the NHS were produced, with further deregulation dictated by the emergency. The concluding question concerns to what extent the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) issued in 2021 and the new Budget Law for 2022 may be able to reverse the long cycle of labour flexibilisation that entered the public health sector more and more.