Community is the space of expression of solidarity. It is the key word that connects different issues about solidarity: in social security, in transnational perspective in the EU, in the gig economy era, in the labor law of the pandemic. Solidarity means going beyond every kind of individualism to consider the needs of other persons, within the same community. Our focus is on a specific area of social security, the one that entails directly circulation of economic resources. We reserved attention to transnational solidarity to take into consideration problems of a larger community (the European Union) with different welfare state systems. New jobs, for example platform jobs but not only, represent a section of the present world of labor that is particularly in need of solidarity. The fragmentation of the employment forces us to articulate the answer to the need for protection. It is important to widen the dimension of solidarity toward universalism: all the citizens are involved – should be involved – in the supply and redistribution of resources (i.e. the dimension of solidarity); the perspective we represent is a system in which general taxation provides for the relevant resources from citizens not in need to citizens in need. The pandemic that threatens our lives and societies makes more and more evident that only solidarity can save humanity from an epochal disaster.

In recent decades the contribution of collective labor law as a core element of social democracy has been questioned. The existing institutional pathways that deepen democracy have eroded, for labor organizations and the workers represented by them. Unions and workers have reoriented their strategies in order to recover spaces of participation and influence – deeply shaping democratic outcomes through new types of mobilization. The case of platform workers’ mobilization is an emblematic example of local strategies in the face of global problems. New types of mobilization by new actors have reaffirmed labor’s ability to foster democracy’s depth despite the erosion of older institutional channels supportive of that same end.