RISULTATI RICERCA

In this introduction the editors of the Special Issue of Sociologia del lavoro devoted to digital labor and the crisis of the wage-labor system, analyse recent trends in the scholarship of platform capitalism in the aftermath of the pandemic outbreak. Platforms are not only a type of business model - they have become a crucial infrastructure around which society reorganizes itself. They extract value not only from traditional labor activities, but also from the social cooperation. Their operations permeate even private spaces and turn social ties such as kinship, friendship, and sexuality into complex monetization schemes. This process represents a departure from the salary institution, where identity was mostly linked to the position occupied by each individual with respect to work and wages. Ultimately, the hidden dimension of digital capitalism is represented by automation which, contrary to the prevailing opinion, does not mark the decline of human labor. A huge amount of data, and data work, is required to deploy platforms’ algorithms. Such work is performed by under- and micro-paid remote providers, often residing in lowincome countries. Even if platform capitalism appears stronger since the Covid-19 outbreak, it is far from mastering the global challenges it triggers. As its contradic tions become apparent, new struggles of digital workers become more visible and better organized.

This paper is an introduction to the EPEE’s special issue, which examines nine draft National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs). Firstly, we will briefly review the EU’s energy-climate goals for 2020 and 2030 and we will look at its long-term "climate neutral" vision for 2050. We will then assess how successful or not individual member states were in achieving the EU’s 2020 targets and how they can best achieve 2030 goals. In the third section, we will look at the overall achievement objectives for 2030 based on draft NECPs assessed by the European Commission in June 2019. However, we will express some criticism of the planning process required by the Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union. Finally, we will present the findings of expert contributors from nine EU countries - Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom - who have assessed their respective countries’ energy-climate plans

This contribution constitutes an introduction to the special issue of EPEE dedicated to the examination of four updates of the integrated National Energy-Climate Plan (NECP) which follows the other special issue published in 2019 (EPEE, no 1/2019) when the first version of the Plans for 2030 has been prepared. The NECP-2023 differ from the NECP-2019 signifi- cantly, first of all because the EU in the meantime has raised the targets for 2030 significantly following the approval of the “Climate law” in 2021, which commits the EU to reaching the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050. But, in addition to the change in the tar- gets, the entire framework of energy-climate policy has changed profoundly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine which brought the issue of security of energy supplies (particularly gas) in Europe back to the foreground. First, this introduction, to allow the reader to understand how the EU came to decide the com- mon objectives and those of the Member States (MS) and how the NECPs examined in the special issue are structured, traces the history of the last 60 years of the European energy and climate policy. The next section summarizes the assessment that the European Commission made of the provisional update of the NECPs which was presented by the MS in the second half of 2023. Finally, some salient points highlighted by the experts who examined the NECPs of France and Germany, Italy and Spain are reported.