The Pandemic Prepares A Changing Job, A New Risk Assessment

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has speeded up the changes in work organization already in place due to technological evolution, resulting in a strong acceleration towards other types of work organization: smartworking. In 2019, in Italy, the percentage of people who worked from home was 4.8, among the lowest in Europe, in April 2020 more than a third of workers in the European Union had started working from home and Italy that started from the rear was one of the most involved countries. Remote work, albeit over short periods of application, has shown advantages on several levels by increasing the opportunities for reconciliation of the life-work spheres especially for people with disabilities or with assistance responsibilities, significant reductions in production costs for Employers and the environment would also seem to benefit over the long term with the hypothesized lowering of emissions due to the reduction of travel and the redevelopment of extra-urban areas. But on the other side of the scale in such a short time of “application” we can already find the shift to workers of connection and equipment costs and the lengthening of the working day, the fragmentation of the workforce and the isolation from the organizational and social security of the worker.
The remodeling of work observed during the health emergency has shifted attention to risks attributable to the psychosocial sphere; this is where the D.L. once again it is called upon to intervene to safeguard the state of health of workers understood by the WHO as a state of complete psychophysical well-being through a new organization of work that brings the production costs back to the D.L. and that takes into account the need to create frequent moments of confrontation between workers to avoid isolation and encourage aggregation. The taking root of this new form of work will have obvious repercussions both in the workplace on the management of the activity and on the organization of spaces and in the living environments where the times and purposes of travel change in search of a new balance between life. and I work.