Chapter 14: Italian Families and Work–Life Balance: Post-emergency Regulatory Frameworks and New Workplace Organization

In the post-pandemic scenario, a morphogenetic process is taking place that is changing family relationships and work–life balance, into a framework of great complexity. To understand what is happening and hypothesize the possible directions of the changes taking place, it is crucial to examine social and labor policies by checking their ability to look at the person as a subject-in-relationship, that is, a subject of care that challenges social and corporate welfare policies. Updating a previous analytical model (Mazzucchelli et al., 2019), based on the complexity of structural and cultural dimensions, we consider work–family arrangements within a broader framework of care-work instruments (public social policies, work organization models) and cultural ideas about care tasks. As of September 2022, Italian legislation provides a new regulatory framework in both social and family policies and labor organization. Thus, a new phase has opened, which is determining the need to seek a new work–life balance for a significant part of Italian workers: one of the most important novelties, for example, is the large-scale use of remote work models, which are particularly impactful in a country where the diffusion of these organizational models had previously been almost zero. After reconstructing the social and labor policies developed in Italy in the area of family and work–life balance, we will analyze the new reconciliation practices, the problems encountered by people in the “new normality” phase, and the workers’ judgments and attitudes regarding their new conditions, also using original data collected during 2023.