There’s a detail no one in San Marino has commented on: in recent months, the sharpest analysis of the state of the country has come not from the Grand and General Council (Consiglio Grande e Generale), nor from a research institute, nor from a political party.
It has come from a series of union statements. They belong to the Unione Sammarinese Lavoratori (USL), and taken together they tell a story worth stating plainly: this union has stopped simply being a union and has started doing systemic analysis.
The most recent piece came two days ago. It was the second-quarter statistical bulletin, with all the plus signs in the right places — companies growing, employees growing — yet USL, instead of applauding, went looking for the shadow beneath the glossy surface: the strictly defined unemployed are up by 72 compared to June last year, from 2.25% to 2.68%. And crucially: 32.5% of them hold a diploma, 28.6% a university degree.
The conclusion USL draws is one a union, historically, isn’t supposed to draw: our market is still too closed, and the promised opening remains a hope. Calling for greater openness is traditionally the language of businesses, not workers. That USL is the one saying it suggests it looked at the data before looking at the script.
The point isn’t any single statement. It’s that lined up together, they become a single dossier.
In August, USL spoke of a “generational relay in reverse”: young people who don’t appear on unemployment lists because they aren’t looking for work, aren’t studying, and in some cases don’t leave the house. Not a statistic — since none exists to capture them — but what parents and grandparents describe. From there came the Youth Observatory (Osservatorio Giovani), championed by Secretary General Francesca Busignani since taking office, and the Ri-Attivi project.
In January, alongside the other unions, USL took up the cause of retired former cross-border workers crushed by tax notices from Italy’s Revenue Agency (Agenzia delle Entrate), pushing the issue all the way to the Italian Parliament.
In June, it demanded answers on public-sector-wide contracts that had expired since December 31, 2024, with back pay still unresolved.
In August, it insisted on discussing a draft wage agreement before it was announced publicly — a seemingly procedural detail that in fact marks the difference between genuine negotiation and a mere press release.
And for some time now it has been pressing on an issue often dismissed here as folklore: San Marino’s inflation running faster than Rimini’s, eroding purchasing power even as employment charts climb.
Now read them all together. Young people withdrawing, graduates stuck on lists, fifty-somethings pushed out just years from retirement, declining birth rates, pension concerns, wages losing ground, cross-border workers indispensable yet poorly treated. These aren’t seven separate files. They’re one single file, and it concerns a question the country has dodged for twenty years: who will be working in San Marino fifteen years from now, and under what rules.
USL’s real achievement lies exactly here: treating the issue as a system, while institutions treat it as a highlight reel of results. In February, employment figures were celebrated as record-breaking; in May, officials spoke of “substantial full employment.” These weren’t lies: private-sector employees number 19,619, the retail sector absorbed 122 new workers in twelve months, and the economy is genuinely humming. But record employment and 92 additional unemployed people sit on the very same page. Whoever communicates only the first half isn’t informing the country — they’re doing their own press clippings.
There’s also a passage in Monday’s statement worth more than many official reports: the one on algorithms. USL notes that technical skills are increasingly being entrusted to machines, but that no algorithm replicates judgment, responsibility, trust, or the ability to read new situations. Coming from a union in a country that mostly discusses artificial intelligence at conferences, this is a more mature stance than it appears: neither Luddite resistance nor brochure-style enthusiasm. Simply a question about what remains human in the value of work.
The other side must also be said, or this becomes hagiography. USL is not a neutral research office: it demands raises, contests the IGR tax reform, defends a specific constituency, and “opening the market” is a phrase that, until filled with actual content, can mean anything and its opposite. On how that opening happens — what protections, what timeline, what safeguards for residents — the debate will be tough, and rightly so.
But the method is sound. In a small country, the truly scarce resource isn’t labour: it’s someone willing to read the numbers all the way through, even when they say uncomfortable things.
Right now, that someone is a union. It would be worth someone else noticing — and perhaps taking up the same job, which, technically, is theirs to do.
