Testo rivisto e integrato, con l’aggiunta delle sole note essenziali, della relazione svolta al forum «Il lavoro e la sua pena. Le ragioni del diritto del lavoro, gli strumenti del diritto penale» (Università degli Studi Magna Græcia di Catanzaro).  Il testo è destinato agli atti.

The essay takes its cue from the recent investigations of the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office in the logistics, food delivery and fashion industries to explore a deeper transformation in the way labour is regulated. Through the incorporation of Article 603-bis of the Criminal Code into the system of preventive measures (Articles 34 and 34-bis of the Anti-Mafia Code), criminal law no longer merely punishes irregular work: it directly shapes the organisation of the firm along the entire supply chain, according to a technique – analytically reconstructed here – of negotiated compliance under procedural coercion. While acknowledging the reality of labour exploitation and the measurable effectiveness of the so-called “Milan model”, the essay examines its legal costs: the functional distortion of preventive measures, the structurally unequal “negotiation” between prosecutors and companies, and the tension with the requirements of statutory authority and proportionality under Article 41 of the Italian Constitution. At a systemic level, the convergence between penal expansionism driven by public prosecutors and the neo-interventionism of labour courts signals a paradigm shift: from negotiated rules to authoritative decisions, displacing the founding categories of labour law. Judicial gap-filling, symptomatic of a threefold weakness in industrial relations, labour administration and legislation, risks becoming a permanent feature of the system. The answer proposed is not a return to the past, but the re-institutionalisation of supply chain responsibility and the recovery of trust as a regulatory category, so that control does not become the only language of labour law.