At the annual labor seminars in Grinzane Cavour, the Bruno Leoni Institute originally assembles many different experiences and skills to observe and comment on changes in work. The method is also somewhat original because labor issues are usually approached not from the real dimension but from the ideal one, which is itself rigidified by preconceived schemes.
Yet, many participants have noted, the separation is evident between the “old wineskin” of the regulatory framework spun from the second industrial revolution and the “new wine” represented by the extraordinary (and dynamic) technological leap.
While concerns about the replacement of many activities are legitimate, on closer inspection, intelligent machines are destined to create not only new tasks but also greater freedom “in” work, not “from” work. Work is increasingly done “by projects, by phases, by cycles, by objectives,” as Marco Biagi intuited twenty-five years ago, whereby the person is required to dedicate all their abilities to the desired results, going beyond their specific technical skills.
It is clear that this tends to change work potentially for the better from the point of view of the various gratification profiles that can be generated. No repetitive tasks, flexibility of constraints related to working hours and location, involvement in company decisions, continuous theoretical and practical learning, remuneration partly fixed and partly performance-based, prevention of all health needs, complementary welfare also dedicated to supporting the consequences of unforeseen risks to income stability.
In short, the conditions exist to go far beyond the traditional exchange between hours and salary, to build a new contractual synallagma that questions the separation between dependent and independent work. Many of those who spoke at the seminars recalled the desire of family doctors not to “regress” to dependence at the moment when they could evolve free contracted activity towards companies equipped with technologies and skills to enhance and not cancel the trust relationship with patients.
Others have noted that even many riders, as students or people with other jobs, want to be able to refuse the call and freely decide if and when to accept the delivery. Above all, it is easy to observe the cause of the flight abroad of many young people with good professional skills. They seek elsewhere that professional and wage dynamism which in Italy seems prevented by the rigidities of the subordinate contract, by classifications with salary only (or almost) fixed. Can a young engineer, for example, remain trapped for years in the standardization of the national collective contract without being able to adequately assert their abilities with the consequent satisfactions? The future will depend on the value we give to people in work.
