In the last 25/30 years the world of work has been hit by a series of phenomena that have progressively changed its structure. In the mid-eighties, the technological revolution of production systems transformed the mass-worker from a factor of production into a technical manager/controller of automated and computerized plants.
In the following decade, the companies' focus on their "core business" led to a process of redesigning the company's organizational perimeters through the "outsourcing" of activities deemed non-strategic, i.e. everything which, not being perceived as a distinctive value by the customer, can be purchased from third parties at lower cost.
In this way, companies have been implemented which, in turn, have made their activity a distinctive business, from logistics to general services, from industrial plant engineering to ordinary and extraordinary maintenance, from customer services with call centers to back office services, from information and communication technology to e-commerce, and so on.
The fluctuating demand in these sectors has at the same time led to the affirmation of diversified and flexible forms of work, such as semi-subordinate, temporary or self-employed work. The globalization of production and the internalization of the markets has then accentuated the need for a rapid adaptation of the company workforce to changes in demand: hence the need to respond more and more quickly to the changing market conditions with the propensity of companies to establish where possible, fixed-term employment relationships or, in the case of open-ended relationships, to make work performance more flexible in terms of modulation of working hours.
Lastly, the ongoing economic and financial crisis is now desertifying the manufacturing presence in our country, in particular of small and medium-sized enterprises, with the consequent crisis of the shock absorber system and social welfare. In this context, the laws of the global market and the economic crisis have definitively rendered obsolete one of the cornerstones on which our labor law is modeled, the guaranteed job for life.
If with the Fordist-Taylorist model, based on the division between those who think and those who execute, the common worker had established itself as the regulatory prototype of the subordinate worker, in today's world of work a diversification of the social identities of workers has now taken place . This leads to the progressive unsustainability of the traditional guaranteeing practices that continue to permeate labor regulations, while the need to replace rigidity with the principle of flexibility in the discipline of the employment relationship can no longer be postponed.
Once the myth of pursuing, sometimes with considerable forcing, the goal of full employment with binding legislation on the employment relationship has definitively faded, a myth that characterized generations of labor lawyers, legislators and labor magistrates in the last century, the legislator over the years has intervened only on the flexibility of the types of contracts rather than on the regulation of flexibility in leaving or work performance. In other words, unlike the German model, the field of legislative action was limited to the labor market not protected by the union, young people, VAT numbers and the unemployed, while it was not wanted or able to intervene on the "guaranteed rights" of workers permanent and union members.
In fact, despite the fact that the organization of companies on a multinational basis now makes it possible to create real and proper autonomous labor systems and markets, modulated on the various national, legal and contractual regulations and to go shopping among the most favorable ones, tetragons remain in our labor law the two taboos both of the outgoing rigidity with the "real" protection of the workplace, guaranteed by art. 18 of the Workers' Statute of 1970, which of the rigidity of the performance of work with the immutability in peius of the tasks and the irreducibility of the remuneration, sanctioned by art. 2103 of the civil code.
The real structural reform of our labor law will therefore be to shed the legacies of the past to seek new ways such as "the right to lifelong learning and employability", the only true "protection" that the worker will have to demand in the future increasingly characterized by a working life divided between work and unavoidable professional updating.
Paraphrasing a Carousel from many years ago from "Good giant think about it" to "Matteo Renzi think about it with your jobs act", even if the process of converting the Poletti Decree into law is not a prologue of the best, as well as conditioned by those persistent conservative and trade union forces still anchored to a twentieth-century culture.
