The disadvantaged in the real world

Vittoria and that algorithm that changed her life on her fortieth birthday. A party turned into a nightmare from which it is very complicated and difficult to get out. It is the real world that changes very quickly, where people 'have become numbers' and where the 'less performing' are off the merry-go-round. It is a journey into this 'precarious' universe, beyond a work contract, that Giuliana Sias, a 43-year-old journalist born in Cuglieri but with experience in Bologna, Milan and Rome, recounts in her novel I senzalavoro (Edizioni il Maestrale, 240 pages, 20 euro) in bookshops from 23 July.

In Vittoria's life, but the protagonist could also go by another name, there is the real world where all the characters she meets become part of her everyday life. After that cursed message, "no longer knowing how to fill her days, she starts stalking people she casually meets on the street" and becomes "a follower of them in the real world".

'Everyone,' says Giuliana Sias, 'beyond the contract, is 'jobless'. And it is not the contract that makes the difference, it is the social system that is no longer there'. On her journey, Giuliana Sias recounts the taboos that have partly been defeated, but also the others that have arisen. 'When it comes to work, there is not only Vittoria, but with Vittoria there are others,' she adds. 'Unfortunately, we do not go beyond the individual case, yet there is a whole system that is going wrong and in which people are getting worse and worse.

In this journey, a psychological novel as Giuliana describes it, the journalistic slant is not lacking and the narrative is that of a chronicle that, although fictionalised, mirrors reality. "In recent years, the sense of social rights has been lost," she adds. "There has been a lot of talk about civil rights, and this is certainly good and positive, but the others that have held and should hold up existences have been sacrificed. The lifesaver for those who fall behind and have to deal with the unexpected. "If you get sick and you are at work, you try to hide your illness because you are afraid that the condition is a disadvantage," he says. And you think, precisely because social rights are no longer a reason for commitment, that they can kick you out because you have a disadvantaged condition and you are underperforming'.

The sign of the times, of a 'world running at a thousand paces' and where 'humanity hardly exists anymore'. A world where it can also happen that an algorithm can fire you on your fortieth birthday with a whatsapp.