Although the common perception is that the pandemic is ‘the great equaliser’, workers’ tasks, contractual framework and position in the internal organisational hierarchy strongly affect their ability to work remotely.

No abstract

The aim of this paper is to reassess the current view of technological trends adopting a historical perspective. In our interpretation, the historical record provides some suggestive evidence for a more sceptical view of the notion of an emerging "fourth" industrial revolution. Indeed, even at an impressionistic glance, the recent developments in AI, communication and robotics that are marked as the core of the fourth industrial revolution, appear as a rather natural prolongation of the ICT macro-trajectories described in this paper. At the same time, to study the relation between technology and labour, we focus on the plant level as the most useful unit of analysis to consider the complex interaction between management systems, labour process and technological innovations. In this sense, we examine two Internet of Things' technologies in order to underline the persistence of a fundamental trait of the capitalist mode of production, namely the exertion of control over workers. Consistently, we expect a continuity between newly emerging management practices and previous management systems, especially referring to the ones adopted during the ICT revolution.

Why are there so many non-teleworkable occupations? Is teleworking only a matter of ICT usage or does it also reflect the division of labour and the underlying hierarchical layers inside organizations? What does it happen to those workers not able to telework in terms of socio-economic risks, and how does the gender dimension interact with risk stratification? Hereby, we intend to shed light on these questions using a detailed integrated dataset at individual and occupational level (Indagine Campionaria delle Professioni, Indagine delle Forze di Lavoro and Inail archive) which provides information on different nature of risks (income, employment and safety). Our results entail that, first, class attributes, intended as execution of tasks, degrees of autonomy in doing the job, layers of the occupational categories, strongly influence the chance of working from home; second, those individuals who are not able to perform their work remotely are more exposed to transition to unemployment, to earn low wages, and to safety and health risks; third, being woman and employed with a temporary contract significantly amplify risk stratification.

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Following a market-oriented approach, policies aimed at increasing labour flexibility by weakening employment protection institutions should enable firms to efficiently allocate resources, improve their capability to compete on international markets and adjust to economic cycle. This work documents the rise of non-standard (i.e. temporary and part-time) work in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) over the period 1994-2016 and investigate the nexus between the use of non-standard work and innovation performance using data for 18 manufacturing and 23 service industries. Contrary to the objectives that market-oriented policy recommendations promised to achieve, we show that there is a significantly negative association between the share of workers employed under nonstandard contractual arrangements and the introduction of both product and process innovation. Furthermore, we show that the harmful consequences of the spread of non-standard work on firms' product innovation propensity are more pronounced in high-tech sectors.

This paper analyses medium-term labour market trends from 1983 to 2018 in Italy relying on the “Rilevazione dei contratti di lavoro” from INPS archive which provides information on average salaries by professional category, age, gender, and geographical origin. Within an overall pattern of exacerbated wage inequalities, documented by means of different indicators, the empirical analysis highlights how the within-component of the wage variation prevails in the gender, age and geographical dimensions. By contrast, the between-component in terms of professional categories (trainees, blue-collar jobs, white-collar jobs, middle managers, executives) is the only between-variation attribute to prevail, corroborating the role played by a reduced class schema, excluding capitalists and the self-employed, in explaining wage inequality. Regression-based inequality estimations confirm the role played by managerial remuneration, the contradictory located class, in driving divergent patterns. Stratification of wage losses is recorded to be largely concentrated among blue-collar professional categories, women, youth, and in Southern regions.

The article studies the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the labor market for what concerns the diffusion of remote working in Italy. First, it shows how working remotely represents a possibility for a minority of the workforce. Then, it discusses the presence of structural socioeconomic gaps between those who can and cannot work remotely in terms of income, unemployment, and health security at work. Finally, it addresses the issue of poor regulation on remote working by offering an overview of the national regulatory framework and describing recent trends in collective bargaining.