10. Digitalisation, Automation, and Job Quality: Implications for workers' health and safety

Sessione 10

Digitalisation, Automation, and Job Quality: Implications for Workers’ Health and Safety

Chairs: Valeria Cirillo (UNIBA), Daniele Di Nunzio (Fondazione di Vittorio), Dario Guarascio (Sapienza University
of Rome), Jelena Reljic (Sapienza University of Rome)
Corresponding Author: Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.

Description
Over recent decades, investment in digital and automation technologies has increased substantially, transforming production and distribution processes in both manufacturing and service industries. These technologies promise significant improvements in efficiency, productivity, and service delivery, while also bringing about profound changes in the nature and organisation of work. A growing body of literature highlights the potential economic benefits associated with advanced operational technologies—such as greater automation, control, and interconnectivity—alongside their potentially detrimental effects on job quality, employment conditions, and, in
some cases, technological unemployment (Brynjolfsson & Ford, 2015; McAfee, 2014).
Digitalisation is driving pervasive, deep, and continuous transformations of work, with far-reaching implications for organisational structures as well as for workers’ health and safety. These changes pose long-term and constantly evolving challenges (Castel, 1995; Stark & Pais, 2020) for industrial relations systems and for occupational health and safety and prevention frameworks (Cagliano et al., 2024).
Digital technologies reshape work in diverse and uneven ways, generating opportunities, risks, and ambivalences for workers’ well-being and the protection of health and safety across multiple dimensions. These include: (a) interpersonal and inter-firm relations along value chains, with new forms of work organisation, fragmentation, accountability, individualisation, and control, but also emerging opportunities for autonomy, cooperation, knowledge sharing, and mutual support; (b) working modalities, in terms of workloads, work intensity, skill requirements, and processes of upskilling and deskilling in both physical and cognitive tasks; (c) the production,
management, and use of data, information, and knowledge; and (d) the ways in which workers and their representatives organise and act at company, sectoral, territorial, national, and international levels within increasingly dynamic and evolving productive and social contexts.

Against this background, this session aims to explore how, and to what extent, the adoption of digital and automation technologies affects job quality, with a particular focus on workers’ health and safety.

Contributi:

Automation, Digitalisation, and Workers’ Well-Being: Evidence from Machine Learning Analysis of Italian Survey Data
Tiziana Canal (INAPP)
Co-authors: Valeria Cirillo (Università degli studi di Bari); Elio Ferrulli (Università degli studi di Bari); Dario Guarascio (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Digitalization and prevention systems: the role of Occupational Health and Safety Representatives
Filomena Canterino (Politecnico di Milano)
Co-authors: Raffaella Cagliano (Politecnico di Milano); Daniele Di Nunzio (Fondazione di Vittorio); Claudio Arlati (IAL); Fabio Piacenti (EURES)

New technologies and prevention of climate change-related risks: a focus on heat at work
Armanda Cetrulo (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna)
Co-author: Maurizio Curtarelli (EU OSHA)

Algorithmic Management and Wage Dynamics: an Individual-level Survey Evidence.
Claudia Collodoro (Catholic University of Milan)
Co-author: Maria Enrica Virgillito (Catholic University of Milan)

Digitalizzazione e smart working: eterogeneità degli atteggiamenti tra lavoratori e lavoratrici
Francesca della Ratta-Rinaldi (INAPP)
Co-authors: Sara Caria (UNIMORE); Francesco Gentilini (UNIMORE); Matteo Rinaldini (UNIMORE)