The Future of Work in Europe

On the one hand, there is the troubled exit from the pandemic crisis, still under the threat posed by the emergence of new Covid-19 variants. The pause on redundancies has come to an end in Italy. This, albeit partially, would have "spared" about 520,000 jobs in Italy up until now, according to Centro Einaudi’s estimates [25th Annual Report on Global Economy and Italy, June 2021]. Company closures and staff reductions (in a mixture of arrogance and callousness) have marked the summer months, only to announce a difficult autumn, when the redundancy ban will be lifted also for small businesses and services. However, it is clear how uncertain the workers’ condition remains, regardless of any collective agreement signed, and how necessary it is always to organize and fight for the defence of our class.

One must add future prospects to the lasting effects of the past. And the future is now called electrical and digital restructuring which, in the third decade of this century, is the updated version of the European restructuring. They indeed both follow the same rules and have the same raison d’être: the world contention, which pits industrial systems of a continental scale against each other, from Europe and America to China. One should not be surprised to see the ideological armour of this contention painted in the fashionable green of environmentalism, so that the poisonous content of an 1mperialist clash — which embitters workers against other workers — is concealed.