In the field of labour, new production and organisational techniques created by unprecedented technological development and by increasingly globalized competition, have aggravated a serious problem in most countries: unemployment. While unemployment is not a new phenomenon, most relatively developed countries have traditionally managed to balance it against a general condition of social well-being, provided that it did not exceed certain levels. The population not hit by unemployment was able to finance appropriate social security services to make up for the loss of income of households hit by the "scarcity of employment as a god". The current situation calls for new and creative solutions based on an attentive observation of reality and its changes. The challenge is to fight the effects of a phenomenon that, as stated above, has serious consequences, human as well as economic, for it precludes access to an occupation that entails personal achievement i.e. that makes people feel capable of helping others and of cooperating in the struggle to minimise the rationing that nature imposes on us. The problem is approached from the viewpoint of man as the centre of the issue, since man is the subject and protagonist of social life. This much repeated statement needs to be made true by means of institutions that are fully in force in community life, i.e., that become a part of our culture, of our way of living and of regarding the value of co-existence, of the dignity and of the things we use to live. The other subject discussed; international dimensions of collective bargaining: legal aspects, deals with a fundamental question that is the outcome of a process now affecting most countries: globalization.