With Increasingly Flexible Work, the Old Stakes Are of Little Use

NEW WORK TIME ARRANGEMENTS AND FORMS REQUIRE NEW WAYS OF MANAGEMENT AND NEW PROTECTIONS. AND THEREFORE, NEW FORMS OF LABOR RELATIONS AND UNION ORGANIZATIONS

by Maurizio Del Conte, Associate Professor of Labor Law

The last century saw the birth and flourishing of labor law, as a response to the emergence of the modern enterprise, transformed by the second industrial revolution. Work under the direction of the entrepreneur quickly became the social-typical model of reference, capable of representing the new class of workers. But in the transition to the new millennium, that company and those workers have undergone a profound mutation, making it necessary to rethink the rights and protections of those who work. The extraordinary acceleration of change brought about by competing exogenous factors such as globalization, the digital revolution, the pandemic and geopolitical crises has called into question elements that were once considered staples of subordinate work. With the progressive virtualization of a company's physical spaces, difficulties in reconstructing the sense of community and belonging is a common experience. The relationship between management and employees has been affected in its most consolidated balances. The new paradigms of modulation of time, space and the very object of work performance require a redesign of the models of work organization.

This does not mean giving in to an anarchic conception of the enterprise, which is fertile ground for the rise of new forms of labor exploitation, especially among a firm’s weakest components. On the contrary, the transfer to workers of shares of responsibility in the management of time and ways of working and the loosening of spatial-temporal control over performance presuppose greater attention to the personal dimension of the worker. Technological innovations put the integrity of workers' privacy at risk, with the need to constantly update regulatory and technological tools to guarantee the confidentiality of sensitive data. The health of those who work is also exposed to new risk factors, as demonstrated by the worrying spread of new diseases related to forms of ubiquitous work. On the other hand, in order to achieve the goal of more valuable work, it is necessary to build a system of mass vocational training to ensure that all workers are equal to the new responsibilities with which they are invested and that the unemployed are effectively helped in building a wealth of useful skills. In this scenario, trade union relations will be able to have new openings for involvement, but only if new forms and tools of expression are found.

Only in this way will well-equipped and representative trade unions and employer representatives be able to create a collective bargaining context capable of accompanying this change without trauma, redrawing the map of work in a substantially different way from how we have known it until now. The structure of working hours and remuneration as a rigid function of the time spent in the factory or in the office struggle to respond to the demands that come from organizational models that are increasingly oriented towards evaluating results. Traditional institutions such as overtime, holidays, time off, sick leave and everything that has been built around presence in the workplace need to be redesigned. If workers are going to be less and less tied to a predefined schedule, it will be necessary to identify a different metric of work. In this perspective, collective agreements will have to be able to identify new parameters for the enhancement of work.

The challenge is to build a system of rules and services that can provide effective responses to the protection needs arising from new forms of work organization. Participation, welfare, health, lifelong learning and tools to effectively overcome employment discontinuities are the main axes around which the new network of labor protections will have to be built.