The Metamorphosis of Work in an Pervasive Capitalism. in Search of Decent Work.

Labour relations are becoming more unstable, fragmented and diversified. Globally and in industrialised countries, there is more employment, but the quality of work is at risk and workers' rights and protections are declining (Antunes). It can be argued that this is due to the combination of increasing productivity and technological change, on the one hand, and the continuing influence of labour market logics that penalise a large and increasingly diversified labour supply, on the other.

The scale and quality of recent transformations (pandemics, wars, technological and ecological transition, globalisation) make it clear that the binomial between ‘abstract work’ and social identity, on which industrial society was founded and which reached its peak in the Fordist regimes, has entered a phase of decline. The relationship between work and society is becoming more complicated, even if work is not disappearing and continues to be a central point of reference for the life prospects of those entering adulthood now or in the near future.

In some contexts and for some social groups and generations, it can be assumed that there is a growing search for satisfactory working conditions, not only from the point of view of economics and stability, but also from the point of view of the search for meaning and the recovery of the creativity and professionalism typical of the ‘homo faber’ (Supiot).

On the basis of recent sociological debate and data on Italian and European cases, we will try to interpret the metamorphosis of work and the redefinition of the role of abstract work in society. A hypothesis on recent phenomena such as the Great Resignation and the Quiet Quitting is that the close link between work and social identity remains (continuity), but the subjective needs related to work are changing towards a "decent" work instead of the neoliberal "any".