Sergio Bologna has long been one of the sharpest analysts and critics of the changing structures in the contemporary labour market. In this new volume, the Italian thinker focuses on the phenomenon of ‘freelance workers’, and particularly of knowledge workers, not just as another segment within the global workforce, but as an emerging category striving to construct its own identity. Far from limiting his analysis to the realm of the economy, Bologna investigates the difference between employees and freelancers also in terms of their existential experiences and of their social relationships, both in the public and private sphere. On this basis, Bologna argues that the development of a shared identity among freelancers can function as the first step to establishing a network of cooperation and solidarity, all the way to the creation of a union of freelance workers. Himself a freelance worker, Sergio Bologna offers the reader a powerful and passionate argument for political and existential change in the 21st century.
Sergio Bologna was born in Trieste (Italy) in 1937. He has taught History of the Worker’s Movement and Industrial Society at a number of universities in Italy (Trento, Padua) and Germany (Bremen). In the 1980s, he began a logistics and maritime affairs consultancy for big business and public administrations and has been a member of expert groups for transport and logistics planning at the Ministry of Infrastructure.
“Today’s freelancers might think they are absolute beginners, but Bologna’s masterful history of self-employment sets the record straight. A landmark book in every respect.”
Andrew Ross, Author of Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times
“These essays raise profoundly important and fundamental questions about the reality and the context of self-employment. It is so refreshing to read such well informed questioning, when the norm has been so often to see autonomous workers as simply a residual category in the labour market and rarely worthy of serious examination.”
Patricia Leighton, Professor of European Law at IPAG Business School, France
“Through an in-depth sociological and historical analysis of the freelance movement, Sergio Bologna draws a portrait that allows us to better under stand the characteristics and importance of freelance workers, and he offers new perspectives on how collective strategies must be implemented.”
Sandrino Graceffa, CEO of SMart cooperative
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
For an Anthropology of the Self-employed Worker (1997)
Ten Parameters for Defining a Self-employed Workers Statute (1997)
From Gentlemen to Mercenaries (2011)
The Ideology of Professionalism and Its Crisis
ACTA , The Freelancers’ Association
Manifesto of Second Generation Self-employed Workers (2010)
Organizing the Self-employed: A Battle for Social Justice (2017)
Book Reviews
Martí López-Andreu, Work, Employment and Society, 1-2
“The Rise of the European Self-Employed Workforce”
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