SAN MARINO – May 1st is Workers’ Day: a moment that only makes sense if it remains anchored to reality. And the reality is that the work remains there. Stubborn. Central. It has not been canceled by technology, despite everything that has been said for years. Artificial intelligence, robotics and automation have not replaced it: they have transformed it, complicated it, made it less readable.
It remains the main source of wealth produced. But above all it continues to be the place where an essential part of people’s lives takes place: autonomy, recognition, meaning. Or, on the contrary, compression, precariousness, inequality. This ambivalence is not a remnant of the past. It is a current fact.
This is why the work cannot be closed into simple formulas. It is not enough to evoke it as a right, nor to reduce it to a cost. It requires a more demanding gaze, capable of bringing together economic transformation and quality of life.
Here lies the political point.
There is no need to repeat a twentieth-century lexicon, nor to adopt a purely conflictual vision. But neither can we think that the market alone produces equilibrium. The fundamental lines – rights, protections, dignity – are not a legacy: they are what allows change not to become arbitrary.
Within this general framework, the issues here too are very concrete.
1. The renewal of the public employment contract cannot be limited to a salary negotiation. It is a passage that concerns organization, responsibilities, the quality of the service and the work itself.
2. There is an increasingly evident problem of attractiveness: some of the best-prepared young people build their career path elsewhere. It is not just a question of salary, but of perspective, of professional environment, of real possibility of growth.
3. The gender gap continues to impact careers and wages, and therefore the very structure of our economy.
4. Purchasing power is under pressure in an unstable international context, and this directly affects social cohesion.
5. Added to this is a fact that cannot be ignored: between demographic dynamics and the choices of the new generations, sectors and professions are emerging that are increasingly struggling to find workers. It’s not a detail,
but a sign of imbalance between the training system, the job market and people’s expectations.
6. And the rapprochement with the European Union introduces a change that will not be neutral: it requires new skills, continuous training, adaptability that cannot be left to improvisation.
7. Even job placement tools show clear limitations: in many cases they remain backward, do not intercept all situations and offer responses that are too weak or insufficient. Here we need a leap in quality, because without effective access and reintegration paths, work risks remaining a possibility that is not truly open to everyone.
If the work is described only as a defense, as a line of resistance, it ends up losing its appeal. It becomes something to suffer, not to choose. And this, especially for the younger generations, is a serious problem.
Work must be able to return to being a credible space for personal construction. Not in the abstract sense of “realization”, but in concrete terms: quality, stability, possibility of influencing one’s own path. A possibility that must truly exist for everyone, even for those who start from more fragile or disadvantaged conditions.
Keeping this dimension together with the strengthening of rights is a delicate but necessary balance. Without rights, work becomes empty. Without perspective it goes out.
May Day, if it still makes sense, lies here: in trying to read the present without shortcuts, and in measuring the ability of politics to intervene on what really changes.
Party of Socialists and Democrats
