This research project investigates the relationship between the crisis of trade union representation in Italy and the transformation of the meanings attributed to work, with particular attention to the growing experience of meaninglessness. Unions increasingly struggle to engage with workers in precarious and externalized forms of employment, who often perceive their jobs as fragmented, individualized, and deprived of collective or personal significance. This transformation reverberates within unions themselves, where officials' professional identities and sense of purpose are challenged by the difficulty of interpreting and responding to workers' evolving demands, especially those shaped by job insecurity.


The central question is: to what extent does the experience of work as fragmented and meaningless, especially among precarious workers, contribute to the ongoing crisis of trade union representation, and how are these dynamics reflected in the internal tensions and identity struggles within trade unions themselves?


Grounded in a critical psychosocial framework, the study conceptualizes work as a socially and emotionally constructed experience. Drawing on theories of collusion (Carli, 2006) and affective symbolization (Fornari, 1976), we explore the interplay between workers' experiences of meaningless work and the erosion of trade unions' representative capacity.


Data collection is underway through interviews and focus groups with trade union representatives and flexible categories of workers as "atypical," "agency-based", and "self-employed". Data are being analyzed using Emotional Text Analysis (Carli & Paniccia, 2002) to identify the affective symbolizations that shape participants' experiences of both work and union representation.


The findings are expected to illuminate how the erosion of work's role as a source of collective identity, replaced by individualized logics of self-interest, manifests in tensions within unions themselves. The research aims not only to generate analytical categories to interpret these transformations but also to collaborate with unions in developing strategies to renew their representative function and sustain workers' emerging demands for meaningful work.