The reality of the contemporary world continues to be full of contradictions.
We are told about highly advanced robots capable of performing expert tasks down to the smallest detail.
They tell us about communication means and capabilities capable of accelerating all economic and social life to a point never before imagined.
We are told about artificial intelligence systems capable of relieving humans of uninteresting and repetitive tasks and even capable of replacing human work in critical or sensitive areas.
At the same time, we are faced with the prospect of enormous setbacks in working and living conditions for millions of people.
We are told that it is necessary to make work more flexible by increasing and deregulating working hours and imposing greater conditioning on workers’ lives based on the needs determined by companies and an even greater disarticulation and disregard for workers’ family and social lives.
Science and technology allow us to produce more in less time, but they want to increase the working day to 12 hours a day and force workers with children under 12 to work at night, on weekends and on holidays. Not even women who are breastfeeding find in this circumstance a sufficient reason to escape the impetus of this social setback.
What the contemporary world confirms is that scientific and technical development is not automatically replicated in social development.
Who exercises economic and political dominance determines who will benefit from scientific and technical development. And it may even try to impose conditions that determine that the vast majority are prevented from taking advantage of these benefits.
That’s the point we’re at. The point at which political power seeks to impose conditions so that a small minority derives colossal benefits from scientific and technical development while the vast majority sees their exploitation worsened and their working and living conditions degraded.
This happens on a supranational scale but also on a national scale.
The movements of multinational companies on an international scale and the coverage that the European Union gives to their objectives are a striking example of this. The options made, on a national scale, by the PSD/CDS government translate the same options.
The labor package presented by the government is one of the central pieces of the political path towards unequal social exploitation of scientific and technical developments. With the worsening of inequalities and social injustices that result.
It is not due to malice or perfidy on the part of government protagonists that this happens. Much less due to ignorance of the world of work or ignorance of their circumstances. Accepting this would be to absolve the government and rulers of the political role they consciously assume in making policies that, serving large economic and financial interests, harm the immense majority who make a living from their work.
The confrontation with the government regarding the labor package is a struggle to immediately stop the setback that is intended to be imposed, but it is, above all, a great battle for a future with a fairer distribution of the benefits of scientific and technological development.
MEP. Write without applying the new spelling agreement