The world of work is going through a phase of profound change, in which new technologies – from robotics to 3D printing to Iot (Internet of Things) to Big data – are playing a decisive role.
Someone thinks that smart working, "agile work", is just the updated version of teleworking. In some respects it is true. For example, the first envisages, just like the second (regulated by the interconfederal agreement of 9 June 2004 which implemented the European framework agreement on teleworking of 16 July 2002), the possibility of "escaping" from the office or from the place where the performance takes place. Yet smart working is also something different. We could define it as a mixture of man, machine and technology.
As some are beginning to theorize, we are at the dawn of a paradigm shift. While he declines the twentieth-century idea of Fordist production, he goes on to impose another, in which the fragmented boundary of the time-work-space dimension, thanks to new technologies, becomes increasingly blurred.
Even in sectors such as manufacturing, the physical presence of the worker for a certain number of hours a day, until now a fact considered unalterable, thanks to the accessibility and pervasiveness of new technologies, is less stringent than in the past.
Obviously, like all changes, smart working also arouses different, not to say opposite, reactions. There are those who underline its innovative potential and those who see it as an attack on consolidated rights, another step towards the precariousness of work. Emblematic was the hornet's nest that aroused a declaration by the Minister of Labor Poletti a few months ago during a conference at the Luiss: "I am convinced that the role of work in people's lives is changing ... we should imagine contracts that do not have the sole reference working hours". Words that unleashed the predictable and angry reaction of the CGIL.
The leader of the metalworkers of the Cisl Marco Bentivogli shied away from this call to arms, attributing its backwardness to a narrative on work and the union that stops in the last century. Only those who wander off the factories, is the reasoning, he doesn't know that for many workers the space-time dimension of what was once called "work performance" has already radically changed. There's no need to pose as futurists, just look around, read some union agreements that are spreading more and more from services to manufacturing, to understand that smart working is already a reality in the most innovative and competitive companies.
Just a few examples. At General Motor Power Train in Turin, thanks to an agreement between the parties, it is possible for the engineers involved in the design and testing of the new diesel engines to remotely manage some production processes. At Endress Hauser in Milan, a German company of precision instruments, where work is done to order, after an initial experiment that lasted 4 years, an active flexibility in the organization of time has now been made structural, with an agreement with the trade union organisations. of work in favor of the worker: almost an "ATM" of the time.
But also in Almaviva, the national ITC group, in the American semiconductor multinational Micron, at Selex Elas of Genoa, at Arneg of Padua, leader in refrigeration systems, forms of "agile work" are being tested. And so in Finmeccanica, the national giant in the electronics, defense and space sector, with more than 30 employees in Italy alone, which, having become a single company, has launched a new supplementary agreement valid for the entire group in agreement with the unions.
Of course, a debate like this needs a serious study to understand which production realities apply forms of smart working and what benefits can come from them in the future.
The Smart Working Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic has been studying the diffusion of the phenomenon among Italian companies since 2011. The latest data certify strong growth not only in companies in the digital and service sectors, which have always been dedicated to more flexible ways of working, but also in traditional realities such as manufacturing, food or the banking sector. In 2015 alone, 17% of large companies - reports the POLIMI study - had already launched smart working projects, introducing new digital tools and technologies, revisiting the layout of physical work spaces, new organizational and managerial policies, to which is added 14% of companies are in an "exploratory" phase, while another 17% has launched flexibility initiatives aimed only at particular profiles.
Small and medium-sized enterprises, on the other hand, are lagging behind. Just 5% have adopted structured initiatives. This is perhaps also due to the low level of innovation of many of our SMEs. From a recent study presented by UCIMU (the association of Italian machine tool manufacturers), it appears that the fleet of machine tools and production systems installed in the Italian engineering industry has the highest average age recorded in the last 40 years. A gap that obviously holds back the use of agile forms of work, to encourage which industrial policy instruments should be put in place. In this sense, an ultra-band infrastructure accessible throughout the national territory would be fundamental, as well as a new Sabatini law.
The Polimi Observatory has also estimated that the adoption of models oriented towards smart-working would allow savings for the country system of 37 billion euros thanks to the increase in labor productivity, quality and reduction of management costs; and, last but not least, it would improve employee satisfaction and involvement at the same time. Furthermore, the reduction of workers' travel could theoretically produce economic savings for citizens of around 4 billion euros (about 550 per worker per year) and a reduction of CO2 equal to 1,5 million tons/year.
From all this it follows that for the union to remain on the sidelines of transformation means to look at work through the rear-view mirror of history. Already today many company agreements are ahead of national bargaining, if only for the ability to articulate the needs that emerge among workers in a framework of rules shared by the parties.
After all, the government has also felt the need, with the approval by the Council of Ministers of the draft law on smart working, now being examined by the Senate, to update the legislative framework albeit with a "loose-necked" solution .
As Francesco Seghezzi and Michele Tiraboschi of Adapt wrote in Avvenire on 19 February, among the first to talk about Industry 4.0 and smart-working in Italy, "talking about agile work means starting to admit that the old twentieth-century logic of working and the permanent job today are no longer representative of reality. So places and times don't count, if technology allows you to do without them, but results, interaction and skills count. Therefore, agility is not that of the job, but that of the person, of the worker.
“This does not mean freeing work from any type of regulation by confusing it with an individualistic model, it rather means making work evolve towards a community dimension of the enterprise where the good performance of the same is the common objective of the entrepreneur and the worker. A dimension that implies a cultural leap, not only on the part of the worker, but also on the part of the company, which especially in Italy has always viewed with suspicion the participation of the worker in the company which, however, today can prove to be successful as well as strategic .
There is also evidence of an approach of this type in the ongoing negotiations on the renewal of the national contract for metalworkers, which have brought the individual right to training to the fore, one of the pillars of the proposal drawn up by Fim and Uilm. A right that, according to the leader of the Cisl metalworkers Marco Bentivogli, we must learn to consider of "series A", equal to and even above that of wage increases.
