Italian
Cifa-Consal: with our “third way” bargaining, ad hoc observatory
GENOA (GE): Exploiting artificial intelligence to “help protect the psychophysical integrity of workers” and “break down the horrible wall of a thousand deaths per year, three deaths per day.” This is the challenge launched by former Minister of Labour and President of the Labor and Welfare Studies Center, Cesare Damiano, during the meeting “Rethinking work. The evolution of collective bargaining between innovation, tradition, and new intelligences,” organized today by Cifa in Genoa, at the Cotton Warehouses, on the occasion of the second day of the Labor Festival.
“On this theme – Damiano remembers – the International Labour Organization has spoken, presenting a report on April 28, on the World Day for Safety and Health at Work: now, there are many devices, from the construction site badge to the digital construction site, from microchips in personal protective equipment to fall airbags, from the lone worker or isolated worker detector to intelligence applied to forklifts and trolleys transporting goods that stop in case obstacles are detected”.
The point, argues the former minister, is “to finance, even with Inail resources, those who are already heading in this direction, companies that invest in these devices to reduce workplace fatalities, accidents, disabilities and occupational diseases.” However, we must be careful, warns Damiano, because “one thing is the use of artificial intelligence for the protection of the worker’s physical and mental integrity, another thing is to control the worker.” There are opportunities, but there are also risks. “The risk – he points out – is that of invading the worker’s privacy, the risk is that algorithms could intensify the person’s work, the risk is from techno-stress.”
The balance between opportunities and risks, adds the former minister, can be addressed “through a healthy negotiation. If in the 70s negotiation mainly involved company-level issues like canteen committees, piecework, or environmental qualifications, in the new era we are living in, there should be a national and decentralized committee that deals with the topic of artificial intelligence. Implementing it means doing it together, employers and workers.” Surely, he concludes, “it will be necessary to develop a new strand of negotiation. Bilateral commissions can help dig into this issue and, then, since there is a European law, there is an ongoing translation into national law and the International Labour Organization’s report, those guidelines need to be translated into behaviors”, considering that “artificial intelligence can have three levels of impact: on employment, on professions, and, above all, on prevention.”
The first answers can come from the “third way” of collective bargaining, signed by Cifa Italia and Confsal, which has given rise to an observatory on artificial intelligence. “This is a great necessary response in order to create a working group that monitors the impact of artificial intelligence on micro and small businesses, which are the ones that have fallen a bit behind,” notes the president of Cifa Italia and FonARCom, Andrea Cafà.
During the meeting at the Labor Festival, it was also emphasized that “the Cifa-Confsal bargaining does not engage in dumping – the president underlines – now, there is the issue of the equivalence of collective bargaining and, in a short time, I believe that the Cifa-Confsal collective bargaining will go beyond equivalences. So, it will be a rich bargaining, a bargaining aimed at entrepreneurs who want to invest in human resources.” Cafà adds that “we want the ‘third way’ of collective bargaining to be followed by entrepreneurs who want to create wealth within society, because they invest in human resources, and wealth for society, because those human resources will be able to bring great results to the company itself.”
The general secretary of Confsal, Angelo Raffaele Margiotta, highlights that “the founding paradigm of the new bargaining model of Confsal is that each worker should be seen as an individual performing a specific task. There are many tasks and they differentiate workers by level of responsibility and technical specificity, and therefore, also by economic treatment.” However, he clarifies that “the individual-worker is a unifying concept, bearer of universal rights, which must correspond to full, complete, and universal protections.”
