Work plays a very important role in human life.
Through it, man not only satisfies his own needs, but seeks his own fulfillment both on a personal and social level.
The profound changes that have occurred in society with the advent of industrialization have largely changed the structure and organization of work.
The increasingly massive introduction of the machine and the birth of the large factory have ended up depriving the individual of the autonomy of decision that he enjoyed in the past and have transformed work into a complex mechanism, which produces serious forms of human alienation.
The work has thus become, thanks above all to the action of the trade union, the terrain of strong conflicts, aimed at defending the rights of the workers’ world and, more radically, at the elaboration of a new model of society.
The 1970s marked the culminating moment of this process.
The centrality assumed by work and the expectations of social change, fueled by the then dominant ideology, favored the development of protest and the commitment to promote a new quality of life.
The current phase is, in this respect, a phase of withdrawal.
The fall of the myth of indefinite progress and the fading of political tension, as well as the affirmation of social complexity and the introduction of new information technologies, have given rise to a new situation, characterized by passivity and individualism.
Work risks being considered more and more as a simple tool to meet the needs of daily life and less and less as a place of integral human liberation.