Sustainable Agriculture and Quality of Working Life: Analytical Perspectives and Confirmation from Research

We begin by examining the multidimensional nature of sustainability, a concept we generally understand in terms of three overarching dimensions (environmental, social and economic), and propose that the concept of social sustainability be translated in terms of those aspects that we believe connote good working conditions. Stepping beyond a concept of sustainability that is dependent on the imposition of limits, we take as our starting point the concept of decent work adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and argue that it is possible to conceive of, and even design, a sustainable job within a sustainable economy and society by thinking in terms of quality of working life. Subsequently, having introduced some of the changes we are witnessing in the world of work, and in the agricultural sector in particular, we provide a theoretical and methodological description of a model framework we propose for analysing quality of working life. In the concluding part of the essay, we include some of the results of a research project that investigated quality of working life among employees of farms and agricultural businesses in a province in northern Italy.