New perspectives for workers' organizations in a changing technological and societal environment

The declining of trade unions in manufacturing, started at the end of Seventies, seems destined to be worsened by the progressive digitiza-tion of workplaces. This research is addressed to propose possible solu-tions to contrasts the aforementioned process, taking into account the new characteristics of labour contexts. The paper, first of all, will ad-dress the impact of digitization on manufacturing, highlighting the ex-pected raise of new categories of "autonomized workers 4.0". After-wards, the attention will be focused on workers' organizations, to ana-lyse the reasons of their decline in recent decades, the expected impact of Industry 4.0, and the consequences for workers. The core part of the study, therefore, will be directed to attempt to find a reply to trade un-ions' difficulties, on the base of two cardinal points: new mutualism - originally developed by independent workers - as a mean to contrast fragmentation of "autonomized" dependent work, and digital-user friendly strategies to attract workers used to work in a digitized envi-ronment. In the light of above, attention will be centred on two ver-sions of new mutualism: the so-called "umbrella companies", and the freelancers' interpretation of associational unionism, by analysing em-pirical examples as the European SMart and American Freelancers Un-ion. Furthermore, the study will be directed to a practical examination of the most advanced techniques of exploiting electronic communica-tions to organize collective actions, developed by several E.U. and U.S. trade unions. The outcome of the paper will be a list of possible guide-lines to develop more competitive workers' organizations in next years, to allow renovated trade unions maintaining a central role in the chang-ing technological and societal environment.