The end of the great deflationary crisis is accelerating and expanding the digital transformation of the organization of production, of the structure of the global market and of the labor market. The fulcrum of this technological change is the enterprise in its various connotations. The company's digital transformation (TD) process is the cause and necessary consequence of the affirmation of this new technological revolution and of the exponential growth of the innovations that are generated from it, both directly and by combination, such as the Internet of Things, big data, Industry 4.0, platform economy, artificial intelligence etc.
These innovative solutions have changed the way of doing business and represent only the beginning of a technological and cultural revolution within organizations and in relations with customers and the market.
Digital transformation is not limited to particularly innovative businesses, young digital start-ups or Silicon Valley giants, but is rather a process that embraces companies of any size and operating in the most diverse markets. This process encompasses every aspect of the organization, from the company's organizational chart to the corporate culture itself, from the business model to leadership.
The innovative processes induced by the generalized introduction of digitization, the Internet, big data, robotics and artificial intelligence, have distorted and will distort even more radically the management and production organization of companies and the methods of interaction with the market of consumption, overturning the traditional hierarchies.
In the digital economy, flexibility, adaptability and, above all, the capacity for permanent innovation, as the driving force of productivity and competitiveness, imply the decomposition and recomposition of the rigid corporate hierarchies and the profiles and professional skills of the workers.
Work takes on a dualistic connotation: cognitive tasks versus manual and repetitive versus non-repetitive tasks. ICT and digitization replace the demand for repetitive tasks, both cognitive and manual. This leads to a polarization of jobs: demand for mid-wage jobs is depressed, while non-routine concept roles and non-routine manual workers hold up relatively well.
The depressive crisis, by decreasing consumption, investment and employment, has given new impetus to the digital transformation process of companies, especially medium and large, integrated into the global market.
Companies have relied on digital technologies to reorganize decision-making authority, incentive systems, information flows, recruitment systems and other aspects of their management and organizational processes, significantly reducing the share of labor compared to capital, significantly productivity and increasing the demand for better educated and skilled workers.
In this way, the foundations have been laid for a profound restructuring of the labor market which undermines the system of industrial relations on which the social economic organization inherited from the last century was based, and still is, temporarily based. This revolutionary change affects the role of the workers' unions, their ability to represent at the same time highly diversified and personalized work relationships and characterized by a professional identity that is not easily classified as dependent work and can be classified in productive categories and, sometimes, without a spatial and temporal reference, and large areas of structural unemployment, marginalized by the production process.
In an extreme case, such as that of Uber, a professional figure and an employment relationship emerge that cannot be configured in any type of contractual instrument currently in force, the regulation of which escapes the traditional contractual power of the union, also because it is not a defined economic counterpart , but a company that creates and sells a digital service managed directly by suppliers and users as owners of their own material means.
Possession therefore becomes a secondary tool for accessing primary and innovative services and information that lends itself to further technological innovations ad infinitum. This is particularly evident in the field of automobile transport (but could be extended to public transport and other transport systems) which, with the introduction of automatic driving, paves the way for applications that broaden the horizon of knowledge and interaction with the web.
These processes are developing and have already affected the technological transformation strategy of companies as a reaction to the global depressive crisis, starting with robotization, this has allowed a consistent recovery of productivity, at the price of a managerial reorganization centered on digitization and the consequent restructuring of production relations with the reduction of less qualified and medium-level personnel, of a routine type, increasing the demand for profiles operating at a cognitive level for the management of increasingly specialized and flexible technological and organizational processes that lead to employment relationships, classifications and personalized salary policies.
These historical guidelines have developed spontaneously without a serious attempt by trade union organizations and workers' representation policies to understand the causes and, above all, the effects of globalization and the technological revolution on the system of economic and social relations based on the state social, on incomes policy and on the negotiated settlement of the social conflicts they had built.
While it was evident that the scenario that was emerging more and more clearly had its epicenter in the business system and that the national bargaining system was not able to affect effectively the distribution of income, productivity, growth and, consequently , on employment the company should have been the main place of negotiation and the epochal process of the digital technological revolution could not be negotiated, nor even more only co-managed, but rather participated.
The trade union, as a labor representative, should participate in managing the company as a stakeholder together with the representatives of the lenders and owners and top management. Labor representatives
they should enter corporate governance bodies.
From this point of view, a new union culture is needed in which the role of the union and, therefore, of the trade unionist, must consist in identifying the contractual solutions most congruent with the specific expectations of the company employee, and with the strategic interests of the company as economic and social institution.
Company bargaining must, therefore, be the main contractual level, and must therefore include small and medium-sized enterprises and sole proprietorships themselves, albeit organized in the form of networks or on a territorial scale. The centrality of the enterprise in the era of the technological revolution does not eliminate or diminish the importance of the national and federal level, which should pivot their role in linking and supporting strategic corporate policies such as employment, productivity, innovation, the formation of human capital, particularly from a social point of view and their sustainability, with the evolution of sectoral, national and global technological processes and in relation to the policies of national and local institutions that interact with corporate ones.
The union must be profoundly renewed, from a cultural, organizational and institutional point of view, in order to be able to face and govern the epochal transformations which will increasingly radically affect social and economic relations, but also the way of living and thinking and the structures educational and training. The creation and availability of human capital is a sine qua non condition for keeping pace with the technological transformation and acquiring the cultural tools necessary for dealing with its negative effects on employment, social exclusion, growing inequality, the danger of marginalization and poverty.
A trade union capable of tackling these tasks must be endowed with a high degree of responsibility: it is therefore necessary that the criteria of its representativeness, its internal democracy and its ability to sign contracts and call strikes are regulated by law .
