Destruction by fire of the Gran Ghetto in Puglia. Liminal geographies. Some rights reserved.…we cannot tell from contemplation of any object in
the supermarket what conditions lay behind its production … We can take our
daily breakfast without a thought for the myriad people who engaged in its
production. All traces of exploitation are obliterated in the object (there are
no finger marks of exploitation in the daily bread)’. (D Harvey, 1989)
March 3, 2017. Early in the morning in the working camp
known as the ‘Great Ghetto’, a shanty town in the lowlands of the Italian
Apulia region, two young Malian agricultural labourers, Mamadou Konate and
Nouhou Doumbia lost their lives in the fire that had raged through the night in
huts made of plastic, wooden and cardboard.
The Gran Ghetto has for more than two decades ‘housed’
hundreds of migrant workers under modern slave-like conditions as daily farm
labourers in nearby fields. A number that in the tomato harvesting season
reaches thousands, adds to the hundreds thousands of migrants exploited in the
countryside. Cheap and underpaid labour contributes to making Italy’s agricultural
sector (but not only that sector) internationally competitive on the global
markets.
The Gran Ghetto was undergoing a clearance suddenly ordered
by local authorities and motivated
by alleged criminal infiltration. The
Gran Ghetto is “[a] disgrace, which has grown out of years of indifference”, if
you listen to the president of the Apulia region, Michele Emiliano. Fine. But why
such a hasty clear-up after decades of tolerated (co-)existence? Well, interestingly
the action coincides with Emiliano’s political challenge to former PM Matteo
Renzi over the leadership of the centre-left Democratic Party, to which both
belong.
One cannot avoid pondering to what extent the decision
to intervene here and now corresponds to a hasty attempt to appease an electorate
increasingly resentful towards the migrants. Nevertheless, the tragic death of two
young, exploited farm workers, who had refused to leave the camp on the grounds
that they would lose their only source of income, was soon dismissed by the
mainstream media. It read as so often before: another fatal casualty of two
illegal migrants working without a permit in Italy on one of the many makeshift
camps scattered throughout the territory that need to be wiped out. End of
story.
End of story, perhaps for all those still unwilling to
look deeper into the inequalities and exploitation enabling this neoliberal
system to work and reproduce itself on a daily basis in the way that it does. Unwilling
to contemplate something with a much closer relationship to the way our
breakfast has been produced, to paraphrase David Harvey.
Agricultural labour
In recent decades, the agricultural sector has been severely
affected by price reduction, productivity de-regulation and increased labour
exploitation. This has had a direct negative impact on all levels of agricultural
production, but particularly on labour. The agribusiness sector has traditionally
got away with exploitative and illegal labour practices, in several cases helped
by the tacit complicity of local administrations and governments. This is particularly
the case when it comes to the exploitation of the more vulnerable categories of
daily waged farmworkers: women and irregularized/undocumented migrants.
The latter group in particular provides a significant and
growing pool of cheap labour that can readily be exploited and forced to accept
inhuman working conditions that in turn take advantage of migration regimes fostering
illegalization through dispossession. What we see here is an example of the Italian
case, where migrant labour exploitation in agriculture is embedded in the structural
economy of the country, creating a ‘Ghetto Economy’ that facilitates the supply
of a cheap, non-unionised, labour force without any rights. At the same time
and in response to these conditions we are witnessing cumulative processes of
politicization – struggles and organization involving migrant workers and
activists setting out to build awareness locally, but link up globally.
Forced labour and exploitation in agriculture have been
the subject of political debate in Italy for decades. Recently the discussion
was reignited among the institutions on the brink of an approval of Law decree
no. 2217, better known as the Caporalato
Law; and also by plans at EU level to accelerate practices of incarceration and
deportation of undocumented migrants in the country. The dramatic worsening of
the living conditions of the migrant farm workers in these worker slums scattered
all over the Italian territory manifestly goes hand in hand with the tightening
of migration and asylum laws in Italy and in Europe. These are conditions ripe
for the prompt reorganisation of local
and global struggles for labour and civic rights, as called for by many of the migrant
activists we have talked to and with over recent years.
Italy’s red gold: but
who’s profiting?
Pizza, pasta and red sauce: the basics of the Italian cooking,
and of the country’s economy too. Italy is among the world’s leading tomato-producing and -exporting countries,
whose profits have given the coveted red fruit the name, ‘Red Gold’. Hardly
surprisingly, the tomato industry is considered the crown jewel of Italian
import-export agriculture.
As reported by the Italian
ANICAV (the National Industry Association for canned food) the estimated sales
of Italian tomatoes for 2015 amounted to around 3 billion euros, with a
production of 5.5 million tons of tomatoes and 70 thousand hectares of arable soils.
Only about 40 per cent of the processed tomato products are marketed
domestically, the rest is sold worldwide. Truly a ’red gold’ product for Italian
agribusiness. The geographical area for tomato production is predominately
located in the Italian South, particularly in the regions of Campania and
Puglia. In Puglia the rural lowland area known as la ‘Capitanata’ is among the largest
manufacturer of tomatoes in Italy, with a production zone covering up to 40 per
cent of the national market. But these huge profits cover up the enormous social
and labour costs associated with this sector; in particular, the intensive labour
exploitation and modern slave-like conditions that make the life of thousands
of migrant farm workers a daily hell on earth, deprived of access to basic
labour rights, decent housing, healthcare, dignity. And Labour conditions have
further deteriorated since the economic crisis in Italy, as elsewhere, led to a
downturn in the whole agribusiness system.
The ‘Caporalato’
system: labour exploitation as a structural problem
The sectoral crisis has worsened the phenomenon of illegal
hiring of migrant farm work, known as the caporalato
practice. This system highly relies on the activity of the middleman, the caporale. The caporale is often a former worker made responsible by the farmer for
the recruitment and transport of the labour force. This grants the caporale an economic profit, which is often
directly – and illegitimately – deducted from the worker’s salary. The illicit activity
is not limited to the form of payment, but also to the authority vested in the caporale, who arbitrarily decides who to
recruit, when, for how long, bidding the lowest salary and preventing forms of organised
protest and rebellion through the use of violence, coercion, and threat. The caporalato system mainly indicates forms
of exploitation in agriculture, but – as pointed out by Perrotta and Alò (Perrotta,
2014; Alò, 2010) – today it thrives also in other sectors of the precariat
labour market, as for instance in the construction industry, in the tourist
sector.
Worker organisations have throughout the years and
with varying tactics striven to address this problem, but overall with very poor
and unconvincing results, as manifestly proven by places like the Gran Ghetto, or
the slum of San Ferdinando in Rosarno, as well as in several other rural areas
both North and South of the country.
The caporalato
is a symptom of structural economic and socio-political factors that have an interest
in maintaining, reproducing and letting this practice thrive. In the Capitanata district, for instance, the caporalato was a historical product of the
turn made by the capitalist system to an intensive and largely monocultural
agriculture, which replaced the more diverse activities of local rural communities.
In this sense, “the caporalato [is] functional to the increasing productivity
demanded by the factory farms” (Alò 2010: 42). This transformation also promoted
forms of exploitative, precarious and oppressive labour that take advantage of
the availability of a cheap (migrant) labour force. In this sense, migration flows
since the beginning of the twentieth century have already revealed the role
played by the caporalato system in
the recruitment and exploitation of workers coming from the Southern Italian regions
to the rice plantations of Piedmont and Lombardia in the North. Their object, a
ready supply of cheap and exploitable labour, mostly provided at that time by internal
migration.
Where is the state
in all this?
While labour exploitation is not new, the composition
of the workforce has changed over time and the levels of exploitation have worsened.
At present, it is mainly migrants who contribute to making the Italian
agricultural sector competitive on the global market. According to a
CGIL-FLAI estimate, ca. 3.5 million
people are employed irregularly, bound to exhausting working days,
deprived of their basic rights, unable to denounce those who exploit them.
Since the 1960s and 1970s Italian authorities have
made some, but often mild and unsuccessful attempts to prevent the spread of
these practices. With the increasing liberalization and de-regulation of the
agricultural sector in the 1990s (e.g. with the introduction of the so called ‘Treu
Reform’) employers were given almost free hands to decide recruitment,
employment conditions and working contracts. The consequences were manifest and
are today well documented: tax frauds, use of irregular labour and working
conditions characterised by serious human rights violations.
The anti-caporalato
law
The recently implemented anti-caporalato law sets out,
once again, to mend earlier mistakes and combat criminal practices. The penalty
for labour exploitation is one to six years’ imprisonment and a fine from 500
to 1000 euros for each exploited worker. If the offence involves the use of violence
or threat, the punishment entails imprisonment from up to eight years and a
fine between 1,000 to 2,000 euros for each recruited worker. However, penalties
against the caporali leave unresolved
most of the structural and deep-rooted problems in the farming chain.
For the USB independent
trade unionist and national executive delegate, Aboubakar Soumahoro, the
law leaves unaddressed such inhumane and degrading conditions experienced by migrant
farm workers as lack of housing, lack of healthcare and of basic labour and
civil rights. Also, the illegalized condition of the field worker makes it difficult
if not impossible for them to denounce those who are exploiting them. To get the
necessary support from local authorities, while having no-status, being undocumented,
illegalised and dispossessed, is virtually impossible. This situation is also a
direct product of the infamous 2002 Bossi-Fini law, which institutionalized
the crime of ‘clandestinity’, leaving migrant labourers even more vulnerable
and exposed to exploitation. In th estimation of the USB delegates, migrants today
are literally blackmailed: on the one side the caporale promises them the chance to obtain a residence permit when
they are hired; on the other the residence permit request is never issued and keeps
the worker in a condition of complete illegality.Denouncing exploitation would furthermore
entail having to declare one’s-self ‘employed’
but without a residence permit – which for the above law qualifies you for
deportation.
Building local,
linking global: migrant struggles for rights
The independent trade union USB has in recent years been
very active in promoting the unionization of migrant farm workers, aiming also
at giving them a platform on which to raise their voices, with which to participate
and claim their rights.
As explained to us by USB delegates Aboubakar Soumahoro
and Patrick Kondè, this is still a work in progress, which is yielding positive
results, but needs to deal with a system based on control, intimidation,
violence and threat used by the farmers through their caporali to keep oppressed workers silent.
However, there are concrete examples of how forms of politicisation
and unionization help to achieve concrete results. Take Venosa, a municipality in
the Basilicata region. In summer 2016, several demonstrations organized by the
USB and denouncing forms of labour exploitation and enslavement gathered sizable
support from the migrants working in the surrounding fields. As a consequence,
the President of the Basilicata region, Marcello Pittella, had to publicly address
the problem and find prompt solutions for the farm workers, who were given
better housing facilities and labour conditions. As Soumahoro observed: “our
mission was to press the institutions to acknowledge the existence of these
people, whose situation and labour conditions were totally invisible before our
arrival”. Unions and other organizations can work by, with and for migrants and
against those “professionals of migrant reception”, who profit from migration
by providing assistance, but without really any interest in addressing concrete
problems, such as the attainment of residence permits, housing, and security at
work.
Similarly, the 2011 strike of migrant farm workers in Nardò,
a small town in the south of the Puglia region, led to significant improvements
in labour conditions and rights. Migrant workers went on strike for days to raise
their media profile, and alert politicians and public opinion to their lack of
rights, exploitation and deprivation. They were able to claim a better life and
working conditions for themselves; many decided to sue the farmers and the caporali who were exploiting them. Significantly,
approximately 80 per cent of farm workers now employed in this area have a
regular working permit. Also, the mobilization triggered alternative forms of
cooperation; for example between farm workers from different ethnic backgrounds,
who established entrepreneurial activities for the production of tomatoes at sustainable
prices, alongside fair and sustainable working conditions for the workers
involved.
There are lessons and experiences to be learnt from
these migrant-led collectives that politicians, institutions, and local
administrations should heed. They should discuss together with the workers, their
trade unions and local organisations how to arrive at sustainable alternatives
that can put an end to today’s practices of modern slave-like labour
exploitation; those that killed Mamadou Konate and Nouhou Doumbia this month at
the Gran Ghetto in Italy and the many others before them.