(by Alessandro Capezzuoli, ISTAT official and manager of the Aidr professions and skills data observatory) For over ten years, I have been a staunch supporter of smart working. I spent myself in every way, between conferences and interminable discussions with colleagues and managers, to try to convince the most stubborn to change their minds, to question the subculture, the swampy logic, the outdated working models and that distorted opinion that confused the right to work in smart working with the privilege of granting a way of working considered to be of series B. When I was now resigned, and I had almost given up my weapons, the Coronavirus has called everything into question.
There was a time, more or less in April, when any strategy seemed possible and feasible; an energetic legislative measure would have been enough (perhaps) to give the final blow to the entire system and irreversibly change society. What happened then? It happened that we were not prepared, we are not yet, and that the fear of contagion has diminished and has made the desire to change lessen. In many cases it has even reinforced the idea of returning quickly to the old model, with the conviction that an hour of work in the office is worth a week of smart working: dangerous madness.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, some change has been implemented, albeit in a distorted, hasty and approximate way, and we need to start taking stock, to better understand what to do in the immediate future. If the inability of the ruling class, with respect to understanding the world and implementing adequate policies, has always been evident enough, the inability of the workers has in some ways been a surprise. Talking about workers' incapacity is a bit of a gamble because the common thought, now bent by the sensationalist services of the news, immediately turns to the scene of the crafty tag, which, in a historical period in which one works remotely, represents one of the most idiotic clichés imaginable. Since reality has shown something else, namely that productivity has greatly benefited from smart working, so it would be unthinkable for an employer to return to a working logic that recalls the chicken coop or intensive farming, I want to clarify that the content of this article is aimed at another type of inability far removed from the concept of productivity. The truth is that smart working is worthwhile for public administrations and companies: many are implementing cost containment policies, eliminating offices located everywhere, expenses for workstations, expenses for maintaining unproductive spaces and meal vouchers ... in few words, the emergency has shown that to work you can do without the superfluous.
With all due respect to those who, thanks to a not very transparent management of the superfluous, managed to buy a beach house and the kit for the children. Where is the problem then? The problem lies in a cryptic phrase, which has been used hypocritically for years more or less in all circles and more or less with the same malevolence with which the word merit is used, to justify the careers of those whose only merit is the ' belonging to a corrupt and patronizing system. The offending sentence is "Reconciliation of life and work times", a kind of magic formula that is inserted in any press release referring to smart working.
The more I listen to pronounce this sentence the more I am convinced that the Italian language is used in a reckless way, without dwelling on the deep meaning of the words. First of all, considering life and work two separate areas has always been a huge mistake: work is part of life and the worker insists on wanting to remain human, just think that he demands, even in the workplace, bringing with him the weaknesses, the pettiness and all that Terentius had summarized in the phrase Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am a human being, I think nothing of what is human is foreign to me). Life times include everything, even work: there is no reason why a worker should wear other clothes and become, I know, suddenly selfless when in reality he is selfish. If he was a bitch, and there are, it remains a bitch.
Everywhere. As often happens in the bureaucratic republic in which we live, this phrase was coined many years ago with a purpose as noble as it is far from the philosophy of smart working: to help working women manage their lives better. Noble because it was a form of help to a group of workers in difficulty, far away because smart working is not a form of help but a philosophy of life. In fact, as always happens when there is someone who helps you, but only once ... eg puté di ': "T'aggio helped", as Eduardo De Filippo claimed, the magic formula has immediately turned into a swamp through which to confuse the waters and carry out atrocities and favoritism of all kinds. The manipulated rankings, the exchanges of favors, the union connivance and the rankings of the misfortunes we have witnessed in recent years strongly cast doubt on the noble purpose.
Among other things, we lived in a paradoxical situation in which, in the same organization, there were those who could reconcile times, working and shopping, and those who, despite having the same needs, had to respect working hours and he was punished if by chance he was caught shopping. A depressing oxymoron. In any case, the initial noble purpose has been transformed, society has changed and men now have the same need to "reconcile" as women. Reconciling the times of life and work would be a beautiful declaration of civilization, if only it were clear to everyone what the time of life and work are.
Every time I find myself talking about the time of life, a reflection by Pepe Mujica comes to mind, perhaps the most lucid analysis that has ever been made on contemporary society, which I also like to report in this article: "My idea of life is sobriety, a very different concept from the austerity that you prostituted in Europe, cutting everything and leaving people out of work. I consume what is necessary but I do not accept waste. Because when I buy something I don't buy it with money, but with the time of my life that it took to earn it. And the time of life is an asset towards which one must be stingy. We must keep it for the things we like and motivate us. This time for oneself I call it freedom. And if you want to be free you have to be sober in your consumption. The alternative is to be enslaved by work to allow you conspicuous consumption, which however takes away the time to live ".
One of the problems that plagued pre-Covid men and women was essentially the lack of time and therefore of freedom. The rhythms were exaggeratedly frenetic: too many things to do and little time available. The problem that afflicts post-Covid men and women is, paradoxically, too much time available: few know how to use it and in many cases they use it to fulfill obligations that have nothing to do with freedom. Time management, however, is at the basis of the cultural revolution introduced by smart working: regaining possession of it and spending it to live, this means being smart. In Western culture, work is conceived as a kind of suffering and the worker must not only work, he must also suffer. The more he suffers, the more he gives the impression of working.
More than measuring the objectives, suffering is measured, imposing a minimum threshold through regulations, resolutions, prisons, punishments and controls of all kinds. In Italy, people suffer better than in other countries, because they also commit profound injustices, favoritism, patronage donations, rewarding demerits and the creation of fake managerial careers in the form of competitions published in certain notices so transparent that the tax code of the winners designated at the table. In a system of this type, convincing and convincing oneself that working hours in many cases are a farce and that one can work better by educating society in the search for beauty, using the time to see an exhibition or read a book, is pure utopia. . Yet, a computer scientist can find the solution to a job problem even by reading Philip K. Dick. The same cannot be said for a post office worker, but anyway ... even the application of smart working has limits.
Unfortunately, after years of behavior shaped by the instructions for use on achieving happiness through consumption, people are no longer able to spend the time they have gained, while they have become very skilled at spending the money they earned over time badly spent. Unfortunately, I find myself more and more often listening to the stories of those who have known new unhappiness due to the poor ability to live in a world marked by rhythms other than the frenetic ones to which he was used to. Stories of those who prefer to work in the office because they spend at least half a day away from home or of those who feel the burden of gender discrimination resulting from the culture of a country that has never really grown up. But didn't that magic formula, “reconciling the times of life and work”, promise to make life more sustainable? What went wrong? Why has smart working, for some people, turned into a death trap? There are at least three aspects to take into consideration: Italian culture, the role of women and men within a family unit and the society in which we have been accustomed to living, without having been questioned. Recently, a research conducted by IPSOS was published, which highlights a very questionable aspect of the level of (in) civilization we have reached compared to other countries.
The report highlights that, unfortunately, Italians (and Italians), despite any discourse on equality, tend to preserve the aberrations of a sexist system, just as Rino Gaetano sang forty years ago when listing a list of intolerable things since then. , such as the bride in white and the strong male. What happened, therefore, following the disorganized and disrupted implementation of smart working, combined with fear, the prohibition of social contacts and the obligation to remain indoors? An alarming fact has happened, which needs to be remedied immediately: people have transformed their home (and their smart working) into a prison, into a prison regime that continues to resist even after the restitution of freedom and, what is more more serious, of the time.
On the one hand, the desire to live, to dare, to expose oneself to even the small daily dangers was annihilated, on the other hand all the founding principles of smart working were subverted: the woman found herself being a full-time worker, housewife full-time, full-time mom and full-time wife. The man (often) no: he continued his usual life, passing from the PC to television series, contributing little to family management and contributing a lot to overloading his partner with commitments and burdens of all kinds. Without generalizing, of course, because there are also numerous virtuous cases. The fact is that this new imprisonment has been accepted because in a country educated to disparity there is no alternative. Or you can't see it. On balance, listening to the experiences of others, after all it is not even an unsustainable imprisonment.
It is as if women had resigned themselves to silently covering all the roles that have always been attributed to them and smart working has amplified this aspect, creating a new unbalanced balance. Naively, I thought it would be enough to regain possession of one's time to lead a slower and more sustainable life, but obviously I was wrong. Paradoxically, the time available for the things they like and motivate has shrunk further, because those hours earned are badly spent not only because of family disorganization and gender disparity, but also because of the inability to fill in the gaps, because the “old-fashioned” office and work still represent the common thread in the life of a large slice of the population and the only channel for social relations. In all this, even those men who confuse their partner with their mother and need to be cared for do not live a better life: for many of them the house has still turned into a prison, but with a less onerous prison regime. In short, many workers, complicit in the repressive measures of recent months, have reduced life to a set of duties to be fulfilled and a series of boring, sedentary and asocial activities.
It must be said that if the magic formula had been "reconciling the working time, the clothes to wash, the lunch to prepare, the children to manage, the jujube partner to look after, the TV series, the sofa and the shopping" , perhaps it would have been less captivating but certainly less hypocritical and more realistic. In a nutshell, smart working has become a way to reconcile working times and working times, eliminating life times with the exception of those idle moments spent at home. This aspect is disturbing and must be taken very seriously because it has considerably regressed the quality of life and civic sense. I have always argued that smart working is not for everyone, not because many work activities cannot be carried out in smart mode, but because people are not prepared to be smart.
They weren't brought up to be. To "reconcile the times of life and work" it is not enough to move the station home, it is necessary first of all to have built a life beyond work. You need to be aware that living and working are one and the same and that the most productive meetings often take place over a beer, while discussing music, cooking and digital transformation. The task of those who have to manage this transformation are very delicate, they need a vision and an ability organizational outside the box, but above all an Einsteinian emotional intelligence is needed. Now we hear about the "right to disconnect", another idiotic slogan that demonstrates the inability to understand what is really going on. Workers stay connected not out of some sort of boundless love for what they do, but because they have no alternative. Once again, the right to life is hypocritically confused with something else. You can live on smart working, but you can also die. This, frankly, is not tolerable.