This year Cgil, Cisl, Uil have chosen Prato as a symbolic city to celebrate Labor Day. A choice that has a strong link with the theme that the unions have decided to place at the center of the celebration, that of health and safety in the workplace. After about 10 years in which there was a decrease, albeit gradual, in accidents and deaths at work, this year we have seen a recovery: 151 victims since January, as certified by INAIL.
The reasons for the perpetuation of this situation are known. On the one hand, the lack of a widespread culture of safety, which remains deficient despite the improvement in the regulatory framework; on the other, the dismantling of the network of controls.
As Fim Cisl on the occasion of May 1st, for the third year, we organized together with NexT and the civil society networks, a prologue to the Labor Day in preparation for May 1st which we will celebrate together in all the squares of Italy and in Lawn nationwide.
This year we did it in Milan, where together with 300 metalworkers from all over Italy we awarded three companies, one from the Veneto and the other two from Lombardy, "champions" of safety, social and environmental sustainability.
I believe that, as we wrote together with Leonardo Becchetti in the Sole 24 Ore last week, no one escapes the view that in all its rules and institutions, the economic system in which we live is built primarily to achieve the objective of growth and consumer well-being. It is undeniable that this orientation has allowed us to achieve extraordinary results in the last two centuries.
We are equally aware today that this dual objective necessarily overshadows two other fundamental issues for life satisfaction and the very sustainability of the system: the quality of work, which also means greater safety and health, and environmental protection. Both are essential conditions for sustainable development. Provided that workers become aware that their "daily vote with wallet" is decisive for their own fate and that of the environment in which they live.
For this reason we have deemed it useful to update the union's fighting tools with a tool such as the "vote with wallet", which we have also included in our statute.
It is now known that, in the medium term, sustainability (social, environmental and fiscal) reduces exposure to important sources of risk and is the key to making companies profitable.
In this dimension, the May 1st Festival should also represent a moment of reflection, especially with respect to the changes that work is already going through with the advance of new technologies. We are immersed in a cultural and meaningful revolution, of which it is not yet possible to identify the contours but which, in any case, cannot find us unprepared.
Even if we have partially recovered from the crisis, the selective nature of the recovery means that many people feel treated like rejects. However, it is interesting to note that the spread of poverty is inversely proportional to the level of education. This must lead us to take compulsory education and training very seriously. Education and knowledge are the strongest tools we have at our disposal to tackle poverty. In order not to be caught off guard in a rapidly changing labor market, we can only focus on training.
Training that, for the first time in Italy, the metalworkers' contract introduced as a subjective right of workers. Improving their set of skills is an absolute necessity, considering that we are seriously lagging behind on this front and that all estimates tell us that 65% of children who attend primary school today will have a job tomorrow that does not exist today.
As certified by Istat among the workers, one out of eight is absolutely poor, this figure, together with that of deaths and injuries, is a defeat for all, because if even those who have work are below the poverty line, it means that a piece of our world is inside the existential peripheries mentioned by Pope Francis. And it also means that it is not enough to campaign generically to raise wages, we need to attack the causes of low wages and lack of work.
Focusing on productivity and betting on people through training is one of the ways to bring people back out of the suburbs. But poverty is the result of a lack of capital, not only economic but also social, of relationship capital, and do-it-yourself isolates people. There are two symptoms of this aspect: first the diffusion of "buy gold", then of slot machines. Where poverty advances, gambling and desperation grow. There is a break in the ties, which must be rebuilt.
The digitization of the company, what we now call "Industry 4.0", i.e. the fusion of new digital technologies, the Internet and conventional manufacturing, represents a leap towards a different, completely new world that can no longer be read, interpreted and protected with instruments and interpretative lenses of the '900.
The change will affect the entire ecosystem in which we live: cities, networks, public administration, mobility, energy; everything will be redesigned in a new dimension of interconnection.
In this context, imagining stopping progress is unrealistic. In our country there are many technophobes who lurk in the media and opinion makers. These are the environments that fuel the business of fear for the future and for technology, which according to these new cassandras would lead us to the end of the job. It is a pity, however, that the countries with the lowest rate of unemployment are those with the highest rate of technological innovation (see South Korea and Germany).
Technology contains the values of those who design it, therefore we must not fear the future, but work together to design it within a dimension in which man is at the center of this new "digital renaissance". Last October in Cagliari on the occasion of the social weeks of the Church, thanks to the project of the "Job seekers" more than 400 "good practices" were identified from which to start, a way to react to that culture of decay which has poisoned a part of the country.
We are aware that work will change, after all it is already changing considerably. Precisely to accompany the change we have been at the forefront of negotiating trade union agreements which, by introducing smart-working in many companies, have taken charge of regulating the new relationship between work performance and physical space. Smart-working allows you to carry out activities even away from your workplace: it is an essential change in the organizational dimension.
After all, digital platforms and "apps" have already brought work to a dematerialized territory, to cyberspace, as demonstrated by the events of the gig and the sharing economy.
The protections and rights of these workers must be completely rethought within a dimension and a framework of rules, perhaps through a "trade union app" that is capable of adapting legal forms to the needs of the times without retracing the paths trodden in the 900s.
Of course, the solution cannot be that of basic income: imagining a society in which only 10% of the population works permanently while 90% lives on subsidies - as some Silicon Valley gurus and some parties in Italy suggest - is immoral even before to be illogical.
While some continue to imagine a world of men free from work, we prefer to fight for a world in which people are free to work…Happy May XNUMXst.
°°°°The author is the General Secretary of the Fim-Cisl
