RISULTATI RICERCA

The local level is emerging like a solution to the crisis of Welfare State. At this level, we face high complexity, because of the number of actors and the heterogeneity of strategies. To open this lock, the study of the third sector labour market is proposed like a useful key. The apparent contradiction in this issue is rich of many research themes. After an analysis of the role of third sector in services supply and labour policies, some hypothesis are suggested about the relationships between voluntary action and labour market (by the demand and the supply side). At the end, a research design about different welfare mixes at local level is sketched.

This essay, based on the results of a big inquiry carried out in Lombardy, put under observation the unemployment of immigrants issue, allowing us to throw light upon a universe which has remained up to now at the margins of researchers’ attention; a universe that must not, however, makes us forget the steps forward in the adaptation process of the last few years, tough having much greater implications. By focusing on the most marginal component of immigration, that is the unemployed or underemployed one, we demonstrate that evoking an ethnic difference could turn useful to obscure the new inequalities that are being shaped by the transformations of production processes and regulatory systems that mark the transition to post-fordism of our economies and societies. A sort of parallel labour market may therefore be ahead that, by exasperating the functionalist dimension of immigration, makes it eventually more and more competitive for the most vulnerable brackets of native supply.

In this paper we wish to draw on comparative survey data collected at the GM plant in Ellsemere Port (Britain) and the Fiat plant at Melfi (Italy) to debate the assumption that new forms of work and organisation of the labour process, which have been introduced under the High Performance Work Systems (HPWS), lead to the improvement in employee experience of employment in the automotive industry. Thus, the article aims to critically evaluate the claims made by the literature for HPWS the heir to lean production regarding its putative positive impact upon employees. Conclusions are that HPWS can be understood as a distinctive pattern of management strategies developed to confront workplace labour organization. Rather than to empower employees and produce high workers’ quality of working life, we suggest they produce unevenness on the latter measured in terms of employee perceptions of the consequences of factory regimes on, work intensification, performance monitoring, stress, work-life balance and employee consultation.