The reaction of social partners to the application of the “Jobs Act”: a comparison between digital communication strategies

Labour policies represent one of the thorny issues within the agendas of governments around the world. The public debate on this issue is being sorely tested by the economic market revolution, on one hand, and by the need for both of new regulation and job creation. Despite the dialogue between international players, the actions of governments are not always able to collect all the requests submitted for integration and improvement, due both to political willingness and budgetary policies. Specifically with the Italian case, the “Jobs Act” (which passed by Parliament with several legislative texts created between 2014 and 2015, under Renzi Governance) began within a context of strong controversy, especially from trade union representation. The principle that gave birth to this law is the will to overcome Art. 18 of the Workers’ Statute, 1970, considered obsolete and strongly opposed by employers. This climate of tension did not generate a genuine participation, but a debate around the issue. In this legislative scenario, Digital Platforms have played a vitally important role. Without going into considerations of the law, but by focusing on the information and communication aspects of the law itself, we can notice a strong production of editorial and multimedia contents, which are designed by the social partners in order to promote the various aspect of the act. The impact that the communication of social partners obtained in the territory represents itself the state of “sharing” and subsequent acceptance of the new law. In this specific case, the considerable and daily work aimed at establishing connection between politics and population was largely played by the stakeholder we intend to take into account in this research. Therefore, this study will investigate the media representations of the “Jobs Act”, starting from documents and initiatives used/employed by the social partners. In particular, through lexicometric analysis, we intend to examine some texts published on: - Most visited blog; - The websites of the most important Italian Political Institutions connected with this issue, and among these, even those of: a) the workers unions: CGIL, CISL, UIL; b) Confcommercio, Confindustria and so on. Finally, a focus will be dedicated to multimedia communication strategies (meetings, events, video, conferences, and so on) dealing with this topic and that have been activated by the studied subjects.