This book deals with the transformations that work has undergone under the pressure of the end of Fordism, the globalization, the knowledge economy, and the technological revolution. The main thesis is that such a transformation is also a challenge to affirm freer, more creative, and responsible work, capable of actively responding to the new productivity needs of innovative companies and the request for a new democratic protagonism of workers. The author, Bruno Trentin (1926-2007), was an intellectual with Marxist background, an Italian trade union leader, and a member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. He is one of the most significant figures of the Italian left in the second part of the twentieth century and can be compared to Antonio Gramsci and Carlo Rosselli. His books have been translated in French, German, Spanish. This is the first English translation of one of his works. The volume is enriched with unpublished pages from his Diaries and articles published by Trentin in the same years in which he wrote Freedom Comes First, as well as in-depth texts on his thinking written by Sante Cruciani, Axel Honneth, Giovanni Mari, Alain Supiot, and Nadia Urbinati.