Il saggio riproduce l’intervento svolto al Convegno nazionale AIDLASS su Diritto antidiscriminatorio e diritto del lavoro, tenutosi a Messina il 23-25 giugno 2024, destinato agli Atti di tale Convegno.

The paper focuses on the "heretical" reading of the anti-discrimination law suggested by those who maintain that the expansion of anti-discrimination protection of some “factors targeted” workers has occurred at the expense of those workers who are "protected only by the factor of subordination", that is, the original protagonists of labor law. This attempt to "unmask" the anti-discrimination law arises, in the author's opinion, from a disavowal of the social reality of discrimination and from a reversal of positions, according to which injustice is located downstream and not upstream of discrimination. On the basis of these premises, it is argued, there is a risk that the "unmasking" of anti-discrimination law turns out to be only an ideological operation, a delegitimization of its legal and moral foundations. The essay then focuses on the question of whether the fight against discrimination or the fight against poverty is more important and whether there could be a conflict between two of the policies underlying the anti-discrimination protection, namely recognition policies and redistributive policies. Starting from the debate between Nancy Fraser and Alex Honneth on the contrast between the paradigm of recognition and that of redistribution, the author argues that anti-discrimination law, while it cannot eliminate inequalities by itself, can make them evident and, in this way, turn them into a political problem.