Shaping Techno-Organisational Change? Trade Union Responses to Digitalisation and Industry 4.0 in the Italian Automotive Sector

In the last decade, the automotive sector has been hit by a wave of technological and organisational innovations associated with so-called Industry 4.0, relating to digitalisation, interconnection and collaborative automation. Much of the literature has focused on the consequences of these technologies on workers and working conditions, sometimes highlighting their positive or negative impacts, sometimes relativising their actual significance. Less attention has been paid to the study of how workers and trade unions can influence the implementation and deployment of new technologies, conceiving workers as active agents of technological change.

This paper sets out to investigate union responses to the introduction of technological innovations linked to digitalisation and the so-called ‘Industry 4.0’ in automotive factories in Italy. Leveraging on the field materials of two research projects conducted in cooperation with the Italian metalworkers' union Fiom-CGIL, we are able to analyse the a set of automotive assembly plants marked by technological change, including factories belonging to the former FCA group, now Stellantis, and foreign-owned companies in the luxury vehicle and material handling sector. These factories are characterised by different organisational models and technological trajectories and display different industrial and labour relations contexts.

Our results reveal how, even within the same country and the very same sector of activity, the various techno-organisational and industrial relations contexts at firm or workplace level offer different opportunities for unions to shape technological change. In particular, a distinction emerges between a ‘high road’ in which unions bargain for various aspects related to digitalisation (employment, skills, performance monitoring) and a ‘low road’ in which unions are excluded from technology implementation processes and have limited opportunities to oppose them. However, despite this variety, we detect a common tendency towards limiting union action and collective bargaining on issues concerning working conditions and work organisation.