Europe has to recover competitivess in digital labour market
A few weeks ago the Economist showed some data on the capitalization of large European corporations compared to their competitors in the rest of the world. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corporate-heavyweight-europe-is-now-an-also-ran-can-it-recover-its-footing
This figure, which shows a reduction in the share held by European companies, comes on top of a series of other data (the percentage of unicorns among start-ups, the number of patents, GDP growth and productivity) which show that Europe is struggling to compete with the Anglo-Saxon world and with China.
In fact, the new frontier of competition is shifting more and more from the industrial world to the digital services sector, in particular the so-called ‘platform economy’.
In this sector, competition will be even fiercer and it is likely that work will move to where it is most productive, as this research by the Tony Blair Foundation (https://institute.global/policy/anywhere-jobs-reshaping-geography-work) shows.
What to do? The wrong mentality would be to think that remote working should be stopped because it will steal our jobs. What we need to do instead is to encourage every company to become more competitive by using digital work, providing better services, paying more taxes and thus better social policies. How?
For a few months now, we have been discussing with labour lawyers, workers’ representatives, trade associations, entrepreneurs and startuppers the idea of building a collective agreement for digital work and an ad hoc regulation for this type of work.
Start-ups, corporation in digital field and the world of innovation are in fact the natural recipients of this regulation, which is strategic for building a real european industry in this sector. Why work on such a project?
1) although I cannot go into the details here, I have all the elements to believe that a new contract can allow a better response to the interests of companies, workers and society.
2) It is possible to clearly isolate this form of work from more traditional forms as I try to explain in this article ( https://nicolo-boggian.medium.com/digital-jobs-policy-5d3fe57ec2cf) .
3) The labour market in services and digital work is quite different from that in industry and much more labour intensive.
I will also briefly respond to the first “hostile” considerations:
1) The current contracts are not enough because, for example, they do not resolve the issues related to the overlap between autonomy and subordination, the issue of pay linked to results and not to hours worked and the need for continuous training .
2) Those who in the past carried out work that can be remotely controlled will be able to decide in agreement with their employer whether to ‘fall back’ on traditional employment contracts or the digital contract.
3) the number of existing nationals regulation should be reduced, indeed there is more difference between a worker in a bar and a data analyst than between a bank employee in Belgium and a telecommunications employee in Italy.
4) some changes in the civil code and in taxation will be necessary to substantially change labour practice.
I believe it is time to think in a far-sighted, systemic way, with a collective effort, rejecting the tendency to manage the day by day with less than optimal tools.
Intervening in the labour market is crucial for the service sector and even more so for the digital sector. The aim is to make our economy competitive by providing the right incentives to workers and businesses.
To do this, upskilling and reskilling policies alone are not enough and the investments of the Next Generation EU risk being water that ends up in the colander of the service economy.
Nicolò Boggian
