Bianca Minetti is a research student visiting the Centre for Law at Work from the University of Macerata, Italy. 

Bianca will be delivering a seminar on her current research on Thursday 25 July

All those interested in labour, environment, sustainability and constitutional issues may find this interesting. 

The paper aims to investigate a possible integration of the labour law paradigm that could lead to the inclusion of environmental sustainability among the values that labour law regulation is called upon to pursue. This study finds its normative basis in the amendments made by Constitutional Law no. 1 of 11 February 2022 to Articles 9 and 41 of the Italian Constitution, which enshrine the protection of the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems, also in the interest of future generations, and add environmental ends to the social ends to which public and private economic activity can be directed.

The work will be articulated along two lines. The first one concerns a possible extension of the cause of the contract of employment, which could come to include environmental sustainability as a common interest of the parties, also in deference to the UN 2030 Agenda (being sustainability the leitmotif of its action programme). The second one hopes for the affirmation of the participatory dimension as a privileged channel for re-interpreting the employment relationship under the lens of the principle of sustainability.

The general interest in the healthiness of the environment and sustainability would also justify homogeneous risk management within companies: it will be examined the possibility of remodeling the employer’s safety obligation, as well as the legal basis and possible tools for an integrated prevention system. Given the processes of dematerialization of work and dispersion of production sites triggered by digitalization, the concept of the working environment will necessarily evolve.