C'è lavoro sul web?

Abstract

Is there work on web? Can we distinguish web-users between "workers"? What innovative ways takes digital activity? Is it possible to identify typical professional profiles and trades on web? Can the extreme accessibility and impersonality of the web create genuine employment relationships and support production processes? Is there a way to apply labour rules and protections to experiences that intentionally take advantage of extraterritoriality, autarky and polycentric dimension of Internet?

The questions raised by the Author underline that the web, rather than simply providing means and support to the movement of information in advantage of the labour market traditional players (companies, workers, private agencies, public employment services), has instead developed autonomously its own potential. On one hand, the web has became a professional intermediary, using the capabilities of computing devices and search engine that offer global employment services 2.0; on the other hand, has caused the “dis-intermediation” towards institutional operators (public and private) through the dissemination of informal circuits, sites of social recruiting, and also civic networks aimed at intercepting interstitial job opportunities.

Moreover, the web tends increasingly to exchange or combine the role of the intermediary and the one of the employer in the labour market, making available - at least potentially - a virtual, but global, space for outsourcing. The A. reflects, in particular, on legal characterization of digital work through crowdsourcing and on the application of rules of contracts and Agency work.

Although work on web is difficult to recognize, measure and regulate in legal terms, it has been observed that the use of technological devices and digital services mark the rebirth of the "trade" - in its original, ancient meaning of the practice of an art or the expression of a talent - in contrast to the "profession" established in the high twentieth century through a bureaucratic public organization. The network is the means and the support of the "trade" professed by digital workers, but is both the object and purpose of the trade itself. Means and end often coincide.