Working conditions and quality of work in the digitized factory

The recent debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e. Industry 4.0) focuses mainly on the issues of the substitution of human labour with robots, the disappearance of old jobs and the emergence of new ones. The impact on workers’ conditions and the quality of work within the production plant are much less explored and often only in an indirect way. This paper represents a contribution in this direction. After discussing some general and controversial aspects of the 4IR, we will present a stylized model of a 4.0 production plant, inspired by several interviews to a sample of highly automated manufacturing companies located in the province of Modena (in the Emilia-Romagna region, one of the most industrialized and innovative regions of Italy). We use his stylized model to critically discuss the idea, often taken for granted in the existing literature, that the quality and working conditions in the digitized factory are clearly better than those present in factories not yet affected by the Fourth Industrial revolution.