These days, the new worker identifies with the company or with trends<\/p>\n
Wages and working hours: goodbye to the trade union \u2013 workers now want to go it alone<\/p>\n
Several years ago, the sociologist and former factory worker Aris Accornero coined a striking phrase to sum up the political and cultural journey of the blue-collar workers of twentieth-century Italy: \u2018They were machines for the class struggle\u2019. Coming from someone who knows a thing or two about workers and trade unions, this definition was \u2013 and remains \u2013 highly apt, and it is no coincidence that it immediately sprang to mind when I read the results of the survey published yesterday by Federmeccanica and overseen by Daniele Marini. The sample size is relatively small (1,123 respondents), but the trend that emerges is clear. Labour is breaking free from the ideology that held it captive throughout the last century and for much of the first decade of this one. Workers are ceasing to be instruments of political struggle and are becoming people; they are freeing themselves from the script that ideology had written for them, forcing them to feel, in any case and exclusively, as mere commodities and to harbour prejudicial hostility towards their employers. The Federmeccanica survey, on the other hand, tells us that workers have begun to identify with their work and also with the company they belong to.<\/p>\n