With a trip down memory lane, the author takes us by the hand through Professor Mariucci’s thinking on the issues of collective action and union representation. In particular, in a critical manner, the professor’s increasingly pessimistic thinking, as the years go by, is addressed on the challenge that widespread liberalist economic-political thinking posed and still poses to the representativeness and effectiveness of the protection that unions can still give workers in such an evolved system, where their institutional role is replaced by the legislature, with measures such as the minimum wage. A spreading pessimism, the result perhaps of an unfounded confidence that collective action and union representation could act as a curb on any drift that might tangle with individual rights. The analysis then touches on a transnational aspect, where the multiple voices analyzed all point toward a revitalization of the union’s role, even if the ways in which this necessary reform would be achieved do not appear to be in agreement. It is pointed out that the issue of the union’s crisis and representation is a cyclical, inexhaustible, and omnipresent one, but one that should not be overstated: in fact, the union does what the union must, raising to the occasion when it needs to act for protection and remaining muted when its action is not needed. Today, labor relations appear casual and contingent. Fragmented essentially. Politically irrelevant. What differs from Mariucci’s vision are the eyes with which one looks to the future: if one looks to the future with hope, nothing seems lost.