DIGNITY, WORK AND RESPONSIBILITY

Exhibition promoted by Team Service
Scientific Committee: Lucio Brunelli, Renato Cerisola, Ivan Guizzardi, Seghezzi, Felice Siciliano

The aim of the exhibition is to try to get in touch with the needs of those who work today or those who seek a job, especially the youngest but not only, starting from a provocation linked to the title of the Meeting: even in the world of work is it possible to experience “inexhaustible friendship”? 

The starting point, to make the question less abstract, is the observation that many of the criticality of today’s world of work, both for those who work and for those who look for work or have lost it, arises from the experience of a certain degree of loneliness. You find yourself alone within a complex context at workplace both because of organizational models that tend to isolate people, pressing on the performance of the individual and elevating this to the sole criterion of evaluation, even in contrast with the others, or with pressure from the leaders that it is difficult to dodge, and of which one becomes slaves so much that le level of oneself esteem is modeled on them. We find ourselves alone in managing the complexities of the work-life balance. You find yourself alone looking for a job with a system of employment services that does not work. We find ourselves alone because of the difficulty of the social partners, such as the trade unions, to grasp and represent the new needs of workers, especially the youngest. We find ourselves alone within that effective slogan of work “not as a place but as a path”, a path, however, that requires, in order not to get lost, company. The consequence of all this is that work risks losing more and more that dimension of centrality in life as a source of dignity, of satisfaction, of being part of a community, of citizenship, even of democracy. Work is therefore no longer one of the main ways of relating to reality, it is no longer commitment to it but regresses to a mere source of sustenance and subsistence, as if true life is placed outside hours (if it ever exists yet). In doing so, the only dimension becomes that of the demand for working conditions that are reduced to wages and compliance with contractual conditions which are central, and indeed should be the premise of everything, but which are just the beginning of what could be the experience of work.
The exhibition wants to deepen into these aspects trying to understand how a dimension of relationship, of friendship can be expressed in work to be able to open spaces that make new Interesting, desirable and useful work in the world. Just as it wants to recall the role that the Companies and those who create jobs have not only for the creation of their value, but also for the good common and for the good of all society.