Migrant Farmworkers in 'Plastic Factories’: Investigating Work-Life Struggles 3030745082, 9783030745080

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Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’ Investigating Work-Life Struggles

Valeria Piro

Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’

Valeria Piro

Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’ Investigating Work-Life Struggles

Valeria Piro University of Padua Padua, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-74508-0 ISBN 978-3-030-74509-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many years of research, many hours spent in the countryside, many coffees and beers offered to people who were willing to talk about their lives, many phone calls, many sleepless nights sharing thoughts with friends and colleagues, many mornings embittered by the frustration that things never change, despite our passionate commitment to creating that transformation, and many days spent grappling in front of an empty Word document, stressing myself out as well as my poor friends and family. Now that this project is finally completed, there are many people who deserve my wholehearted thanks. First of all, I want to thank Giuliana Sanò, the person with whom I shared the fieldwork experience and ensuing years of deep friendship. Our endless discussions and her brilliant intuitions have always given me food for thought and helped sharpen my understanding, and not just in terms of what was happening in the field. I would like to thank every single one of the people and friends that gave their time to this research, although I have to alter some of their names to preserve their anonymity. I want to thank the person I call Ahmed, without whom this research would have lacked important insights and pathos. I am grateful to his family for welcoming us in Tunisia and making it possible to take part in their family events. I want to thank Hassan and all the members of his family who allowed us to work with them and spend time in their house; in particular, I want to thank Hassan’s daughter, who we enjoyed spending time with in Tunisia v

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and in Vittoria. I want to thank Franco, our employer at Gurrieri, for giving us the go-ahead in his company, trusting that our work would not damage his business. And, above all, I want to thank those whom I have called Afrim, Wera, Mimmo, Peppe, Antonio, Gigi and Alessandro, all the wonderful members of the Gurrieri team who made us genuinely welcome, from the very beginning of this experience until the very last visit to the greenhouses a few months before this book was completed. Many thanks also to our foreman and our workmates at Tomato Artists, and to Camila and Constantin. Finally, I want to thank Lorina and Patricu, both for introducing us to many of their Romanian friends and fellowworkers and for all these years of unconditional trust and long-lasting friendship. I would love to thank Giuseppe Scifo—in 2013 the Secretary of the FLAI-CGIL in Vittoria, now Secretary of CGIL in Ragusa—for the huge amount of time he dedicated to replying to my questions during all these years, and, on the top of that, because he has sincerely believed in the ‘moral value’ of this undertaking—as he said few years ago. I want to thank him for pursuing his conviction that empirical research can actually provide a contribution to the trade union’s everyday initiatives with farmworkers. Our presence in the trade union offices and during the outreach work in the countryside wouldn’t have been so fruitful and pleasant without the presence of Bernadette Di Giacomo, Sami Rhouma and Emanuele Bellassai, at that time a social worker with the Proxima Cooperative. My research was made possible by many other people on the field. I want to enthusiastically thank the staff of the migrant clinic who allowed us to observe their work, and Dr. Afonina in particular; I thank the social services of the municipality of Vittoria, and Giovanni Consolino, in particular. Further on, I want to thank Michele Mililli, from the grassroots union Unione Sindacale di Base, and Vincenzo Lamonica from Progetto Presidio of Caritas Italiana-Ragusa (many thanks also to Piera Campanella for providing his contacts) for their time and their interest in discussing with me the hardships and abuses of workers in the TLS countryside which they work every day to tackle. My stay in Vittoria would not have been so comfortable and pleasant without the huge amount of love and moral support I received from the Battaglia family (Giovanni, Rosalba and their parents, and the ‘newcomers’ Giulia and Niccolò). To all of them, and to all the numerous people

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I met in Vittoria during these years, I want to express my endless gratitude. I hope they can forgive me if, due to the English translation or to the translation into the rigid categories of social science, their words and thoughts have been misunderstood or misused in these pages. This research started in 2013 thanks to financial and academic support from the University of Milan through a Ph.D. scholarship. For the significant suggestions provided during those important years I am indebted to Maurizio Ambrosini and Roberta Sassatelli. The analysis carried out in this book is the result of many years of collaboration and discussion with a network of researchers and friends with whom I share interests and practices. I am very thankful for, among others, Logmane Bara, Lamine Bodiane, Cristina Brovia, Mamadou Dia, Fred Décosse, Carlotta Ebbreo, Romain Filhol, Anna Mary Garrapa, Salif Guéibré, Oumarou Guene, Giulio Iocco, Arturo Lavorato, Giovanni Notarangelo, Pietro Saitta and especially Martina Lo Cascio. Some of the data collected as well as the arguments raised throughout these pages have often emerged though our collective thinking in Sicily, in Calabria and in many other Southern places. This book would not be possible without the enormous amount of support and advice that I received during these years from friends and colleagues at the University of Bologna and the University of Padova. In particular, I am extremely grateful to Maurizio Bergamaschi for his stubborn conviction that this book needed to be written. Many thanks also to Pierpalo Ascari, Lorenzo Betti, Emanuela Dal Zotto, Cassandra Fontana, Alice Lomonaco, Ilaria Pitti, Harriet Rowley, and Marco Semenzin for taking part in this project and making our everyday routines within and outside university more enjoyable. My sincere gratitude goes to Devi Sacchetto for the productive suggestions, and for helping me to be ‘braver’ and to clarify my arguments. Many thanks for the huge amount of time that he devoted to reading and commenting on an earlier version of this book. I am extremely grateful also to Gabriella Alberti, Rossella Ghigi, Domenico Perrotta and Roberta Sassatelli who provided valuable insights into several chapters of this book and for our constant discussion. Many thanks to Gloria Dawson for being so accurate in making the manuscript readable by choosing the most appropriate expressions in order to translate arguments that I sense she also shares. Of course, any shortcomings and limitations in this book are to be attributed solely to me.

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Finally, I would like to thank my sister, Ilaria, and my parents, Angelo and Laura. Without their love, support and patient collaboration in making my life easier at every stage of this project, this book would never have seen the light of day. My final thoughts go to my grandfather Giovanni, who has now passed away, and who was genuinely surprised and doubtful about my ethnographic undertakings. To him and to all of my family members, who teach me to be curious, stubborn and to express complex thoughts with simple words, I am endlessly grateful. Summer 2020

Valeria Piro

Contents

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The Agri-Food Business and Labour Mobility References

1 15

2

Entering the Workplaces 2.1 The Organization of Food Production in the Transformed Littoral Strip 2.2 A Workplace Ethnography 2.3 Working in the Greenhouses and Packinghouses 2.4 From the Workplace to the Home References

21

3

4

Bargaining Over Contracts in a ‘Day Labour’ Market 3.1 Unpacking Day Labour 3.2 Paternalistic Labour Relations: Shaping a ‘Good Farmworker’ 3.3 Everyday Uses of Employment Contracts 3.4 Mobility Power and Farmworkers’ Coping Strategies References Struggling for a Fair Wage 4.1 What is Deemed a Fair Wage? 4.2 Workers’ Accommodation and Wage Racialization 4.3 Work Effort, Time and Wage Negotiation in the Greenhouses 4.4 Withholding Salaries

21 29 35 53 54 57 57 61 68 73 82 85 86 88 96 102 ix

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CONTENTS

4.5 Working Without a Wage References

106 110

The Body at Work 5.1 The Body/Work Nexus 5.2 ‘The Greenhouse Is Not a Place for Italian Women’: Embodied Labour and Employers’ Recruitment Strategies 5.3 Learning Bodily Postures and Enduring Monotonous Routines 5.4 The Strategic Uses of Farmworkers’ Bodies: Concealing or Manifesting Illness and Pain References

113 113

Conclusions References

139 146

Index

115 121 127 135

149

List of Figures

Map 1.1

Transformed Littoral Strip

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Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

The ‘plastic sea’ Greenhouses in the Transformed Littoral Strip Greenhouses in the Transformed Littoral Strip Inside a greenhouse Inside a greenhouse Greenhouse in production Live-in farmworkers’ accommodation, Vittoria Live-in farmworkers’ accommodation (outside), Marina di Acate Live-in farmworkers’ accommodation (inside), Marina di Acate The “rabbit posture” At work Danger zone

22 23 24 37 37 38 90

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 4.1 4.2

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

91 92 123 124 127

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The Agri-Food Business and Labour Mobility

Abstract This chapter aims to summarize the main findings in the field of agri-food studies and labour mobility by singling out four streams within the debate: (1) food supply-chain restructuring; (2) migration regimes and the recruitment of a transnational workforce in agriculture; (3) current transformations in rural areas; (4) farmworkers’ collective organization and mobilization. Within this lively debate, the agency of unorganized migrant farmworkers has remained so far largely overlooked. This book aims to fill this gap by studying, through an extensive ethnography, the labour process dynamics and the workplace struggles in the biggest greenhouse area in South-eastern Sicily (Italy), known widely as the Transformed Littoral Strip (TLS). Keywords Greenhouse agriculture · Food supply chains · Migrant labour · Labour Process Theory · Italy

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020, agriculture has been widely recognized as one of the pivotal sectors in regularly suppling our homes with essential goods. The necessity to contain the pandemic through mobility restrictions, however, immediately clashed with the need to prevent labour shortages, especially in key industries such as agriculture which heavily rely on a mobile workforce. The outbreak © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Piro, Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7_1

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of the pandemic thus laid bare the fundamental role played by migrant workers in the core sectors of the European economies. Consequently, food producers and national governments began to discuss several measures in order to facilitate the mobility and recruitment of seasonal migrants to harvest the summer crops. For example, in May 2020, the Italian government launched a regularization scheme for undocumented migrants already working or willing to work in the agriculture, care and domestic sectors. Due to several shortcomings, in July 2020, the result of this measure was that the number of applications was much smaller than expected. Moreover, the limited possibility of regularization caused a backlash from migrants, grassroots unions and NGOs who immediately called for industrial action. Strikes and protests were aimed to show that the Italian agricultural sector does not lack labourers, but labour rights. This new wave of demonstrations, like several others occurring in the previous years, has highlighted that the working and living conditions experienced by both Italian and migrant farmworkers are characterized by due to low levels of remuneration, high workloads, employment uncertainty and unsafe workplaces. The aim of this book is to dig down into the ordinary working lives of the labourers doing demanding but nonetheless essential work in the agricultural industry, by highlighting the everyday labour conditions to which farmworkers adapt and around which they shape their needs and desires. So far, several scholars have dealt with labour conditions in the agricultural sector worldwide by adopting different perspectives and developing various streams of lively debate (see, among others, the essays collected by Corrado et al. 2016a; Gertel and Sippel 2014; Bonanno and Cavalcanti 2014). Much of this scholarship has analysed agri-food market restructuring around the world and its implications for the workforce and workplaces. From this perspective, these scholars illustrate the impact of policies implemented by supranational players such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization and the European Union, which since the 1980s have strongly pushed for the liberalization of the agri-food trade (Buttel and McMichael 2005). Their policies have fostered an expansion of export-oriented and standardized production, leading to the concentration of capital and land, and consequently to the dispossession of many small farmers and peasants unable to meet the required standards (Corrado et al. 2016b; Bouchelkha 2016). Moreover, scholars have focussed on the restructuring of power relations

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among the actors taking part in global food supply chains. As explored within the edited volume by Burch and Lawrence (2007) which identifies the 1980s as the beginning of a ‘retail revolution’, distributors have progressively turned into the driving players, able to determine not only prices but also the quantity, quality and schedule of food production and delivery. The spread of ‘private label’ products, namely commodities directly processed and branded by the large retailers, epitomizes the strong penetration of these actors into the domain of production (Grunert et al. 2010). Furthermore, in the last twenty years, retailers have increasingly followed consumer demand for organic, healthy and ‘socially just’ food by placing on their suppliers the responsibility for guaranteeing the quality and fairness of produce through the adoption of private standards and certification systems, such as GlobalGap, IFS, SQF and others. Consequently, the number of companies able to meet these requirements has progressively declined. Moreover, there has been an increase in the polarization between small/medium-sized farms, squeezed by fierce competition and rapidly diminishing in number (Van Der Ploeg 2008), and large multinational companies which vertically integrate their supply chain by controlling food production from seed patents to distribution. As scholars have argued, in order to adapt to this global scenario defined as a ‘corporate-environmental food regime’ (Friedmann 2005; McMichael 2005; Corrado 2016), migrant labour became a pivotal factor, allowing some small and medium-sized farms to survive with zero or few investments, and large companies to strengthen their economic position (cf. Corrado et al. 2016a, 10; Gertel and Sippel 2014, 4; Rogaly 2008; Berlan 1986). Accordingly, a second stream of the debate has analysed more specifically the connections between labour mobility and agri-food market restructuring by investigating the ways through which migrant mobility is managed, filtered and channelled in order to supply labour to agricultural enterprises and then move it back to the countries of origin, which are mainly burdened with the social cost of workforce reproduction. By looking at the interplay between policies enforced by states, labour markets’ needs and migrants’ mobility strategies, scholars have outlined several types of migration regimes which can be roughly grouped into two models, although they are not deemed to be mutually exclusive. According to the definition by Biao Xiang (2012), the first model can be termed as a ‘point-to-point’ migration regime and is characterized by the presence of government schemas aimed at recruiting migrant

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labourers and transplanting them into specific industries or companies in order to fill labour market gaps: ‘Instead of mobile capital racing to the bottom to exploit immobile people, labor transplant moves labor to meet immobile capital’ (728). In other words, we are dealing with a délocalisation sur place, i.e. an ‘on-site delocalization’, as defined by Terray (1999). These migration programmes are currently pervasive and generalized in the Asian context (Ceccagno 2019; Yea 2017). In North America and Europe, state-led temporary recruitment schemas emerged after World War II, and the most notable examples are the Gastarbeiter programme in Germany (1955–1973) and the Bracero Programme in the USA (1942– 1964) (Ruhs 2006; Calavita 1992; Cohen 2011). Since the 1980s, many other countries have launched similar temporary programmes that exhibit several common features: they are generally implemented through bilateral agreements with third countries and enforced through public agencies or private transnational intermediaries; migrant workers leave their countries on short-term contracts and are usually tied to their employers, i.e. they are unable to leave the workplace and/or the employment sector for which their visa was first issued; moreover, migrants recruited under these schemes are often housed in dormitories or other similar types of accommodation provided by intermediaries or directly by the employers; finally, labourers are compelled to return to their countries of origin upon the expiry of their contracts, under pressure from employers and labour contractors who often risk being themselves blacklisted if migrants abscond. These schemes aim to channel labour mobility through countries and industries in order to provide a migrant workforce where and when it is mainly needed; moreover, they may hamper workers’ bargaining power in the workplaces and in the labour market and deprive migrants of the possibility of solving disputes concerning their previous employment relationship, aside from lobbying their countries of origin once they have returned (Xiang 2012). Consequently, in relation to these recruitment programmes, scholars have often spoken of ‘captive’ (Basok 2002) or ‘unfree’ migrant labour (Strauss 2012; Strauss and McGrath 2016; Yea 2017; Décosse 2016). Many scholars describe ‘unfree labour’ in relation to the Canadian agricultural sector, where since the 1966 growers have recruited farmworkers, initially from the Caribbean and later mainly from Mexico, through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) (Basok 2000, 2002; Preibisch and Binford 2007; Preibisch 2010; Piché 2012; Strauss and

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McGrath 2016; Cohen and Hjalmarson 2018; Castracani 2019). Likewise, scholars discuss the Recognized Seasonal Employer scheme (RSE), launched in New Zealand in 2007 to import migrant labour from targeted Pacific nation, a programme that has also stimulated the emergence of a similar Australian initiative (Lewis 2014). In Europe, the positive effects and numerous shortcomings of these temporary worker programmes have been widely studied. The French government set up similar schemes from 1945, primarily managed by the Office National d’Immigration (ONI) and aimed at recruiting Southern European and ex-colonial citizens1 ; since the 1990s, these programmes have allowed French farmers to hire mainly Maghrebi and Polish workers (Morice 2008; Décosse 2016). Since the 2000s, Spain has implemented the contractos en origen scheme (Contracts in Countries of Origin) to employ workers mainly from Romania (till 2007), Morocco, Ecuador and Senegal, thanks to the collaboration between farmers’ recruitment associations and third-country staffing agencies (Hellio 2014, 2016; Linder and Kathmann 2014; Mannon et al. 2012). A similar programme, the Seasonal Agriculture Workers Scheme (SAWS), has also been implemented in the UK, although it is limited to foreign students (Rogaly 2008; Ivancheva 2007). In Italy, the seasonal workers’ quota (the socalled decreto flussi per lavoro stagionale), although existent, has been largely underused by the employers to recruit migrant workforce and for this reason has received much less attention from the scholars (Corrado 2013). Adopting the term used by De Genova and Peutz (2010), a second model of migration regime, that better fits the Italian context, can be named a ‘deportation’ regime. In this case, the number of undocumented migrants illegally crossing the border or overstaying their visa is usually much higher. Nevertheless, as illustrated by scholars, illegality is produced ‘as an effect of the practical materiality of the law’ (De Genova 2002, 424; Anderson 2010): on the one hand, immigration law shrinks regular channels for accessing the country, while on the other hand it provides for periodic amnesties or other possibilities of regularization. Moreover, by connecting migrants’ legal status with their labour contract, once ‘legality’ 1 These programmes have changed their name according to the public agency in charge of their enforcement: in 1988, it was the Office des migrations internationals (OMI), renamed in 2005 Agence nationale d’accueil des étrangers et des migrations (ANAEM), and in 2009, it became the Office français de l’immigration and de l’intégration (OFII).

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is obtained it is also necessary to maintain it by staying in regular employment, although not necessarily in the same sector or geographical region. This temporary and uneven legal status, meanwhile, places migrants in a vulnerable position both as workers and as citizens. As explained by De Genova (2002), the point is that even if migrants are not necessarily deported, they are still deportable. Thus, the experience of illegality— or the threat of it—plays a disciplining role towards migrant labourers, whose permission to legally reside in a third country actually depends on an employment contract. Several states rely on a significant number of irregular migrants to harvest their crops, such as the USA, where ‘according to the US Department of Agriculture estimates (…) nearly half of all workers engaged in picking fruits and vegetables are undocumented’ (Chand and Schreckhise 2015, 1632; cf. also Holmes 2013; Martin 2002). Similarly, Southern Europe records a notable share of irregular migrants in various sectors of the labour market, including agriculture (Ambrosini 2018; Papadopoulos and Fratsea 2016). Moreover, the irregularity of work in this sector is also experienced by migrants who are entitled to temporary legal status, therefore hampering their possibility of renewing their documents in future. The irregularity of migration status as well as the irregularity of the employment often paves the way for the emergence of informal intermediaries2 and reinforces migrants’ dependence both on gangmasters and on the employers (Ambrosini 2017; Avallone 2016; Perrotta 2014; Enright 2013; Anderson 2010). In both the models discussed so far, namely the ‘point-to-point’ and the ‘deportation’ regimes, which are not mutually exclusive, policymakers and management are engaged in the joint effort of filtering labour mobility by pigeonholing migrants into classifications that determine their ‘differential inclusion’ in the labour market (Mezzadra and Nielsen 2013). The multiplication of migrants’ status and forms of access, including, among others, intra-European or forced migrants, produces additional diversifications and stratifications (on refugee farmworkers, for

2 Although their presence is limited in the Southern Italian context studied throughout this book, formal intermediaries, such as brokers or temporary work agencies, also play a relevant role in recruiting and disciplining migrant workers in the agriculture and foodprocessing sectors. See, among others, Fudge and Strauss (2014) and cf. also Wagner and Hassel (2016) and Wagner (2018) on ‘posted workers’.

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instance, see Dines and Rigo 2015; Erturk 2016). As a result, agricultural labour markets worldwide have become highly segmented and hierarchized according to nationality, gender, skin colour, migration status, type of indenture (formal or informal), forms of intermediation (public or private) and so on. Within the burgeoning literature on agriculture and labour mobility, while some scholars deal with current transformations of food supply chains and others focus mainly on migration regimes and transnational recruitment strategies, a third strand of the debate pays attention to the deep transformation taking place in rural areas as a consequence of the ongoing processes of agri-food market restructuring and population mobility. As argued by Nori and Farinella (2020, 1): ‘These areas, in particular, have suffered from the geographical and socio-economic polarization of development patterns and have paid a relevant burden to the recent crisis. In these areas, immigration has, to an extent, helped counterbalance the dynamics of an ageing and declining local population, with immigrant communities today relevant not only as an agricultural workforce, but also as new citizens of rural communities’. As highlighted by rural sociologists and geographers (see, among others, Ortiz-Miranda et al. 2013; Nori and Farinella 2020; Rye and O’Reilly 2020; Rye and Scott 2018; Natale et al. 2019), the restructuring of the agri-food business and the increase in the migrant population have radically affected rural areas by reshaping both their human and physical landscape. The latter has been transformed through several interventions: the 29,000 hectares of greenhouses in Almería (Southern Spain), namely the largest ‘plastic sea’ in the world, represents one of these examples of ‘a human imprinting in the landscape visible from space’ (Gertel and Sippel 2014, 17). Moreover, both the natural and social landscapes are redesigned by the presence of internal and international migrants living in and consequently transforming the countryside. Migrant farmworkers, in fact, usually reside near their workplaces, often in informal dwellings known as ghetti, chabolas, douars, which reshape the rural environment and also spark conflict with local inhabitants (Filhol 2016; El Haiba 2018). These self-constructed and ‘secluded’ spaces (Perrotta and Sacchetto 2013), where migrants experience difficult living conditions (such as a lack of drinkable water, electricity and public transport), are able to potentially lodge thousands of people. As argued by scholars, migrant spatial segregation in the countryside actually reflects and in turn strengthens

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their segregation in the labour market (Perrotta and Sacchetto 2013; Semprebon et al. 2017; Brovia and Piro 2020). A fourth axis of the debate dealing with migrant labour in agriculture has investigated the forms of mobilization and trade unionism involving migrant workers as well as small producers and a broader community which acts in solidarity with workers’ rights (Perrotta and Sacchetto 2013; Caruso 2015; Oliveri 2015; Gana 2016; Filhol 2017; Iocco et al. 2019). Within this area, it is worth distinguishing between scholarship investigating collective forms of mobilization and trade unionism, which generally refer to outstanding cases of successful union organizing among agricultural workers (such as the United Farm Workers in the 1970s California, studied by Wells and Villarejo [2004]—or the contemporary Sindicato de Obreros del Campo—Farmworkers’ Union— in Andalusia described by Caruso [2015]), and the scholarship which is more concerned with the non-organized forms of agency expressed by temporary farmworkers. Apart from some important exceptions (Rogaly 2009; Cohen and Hjalmarson 2018), farmworkers’ agency, ‘understood as both the intention and the practice of taking action for one’s own selfinterest or the interests of others’ (Rogaly 2009, 1975), remains so far largely overlooked. Grounded in a fine-grained ethnography, this book aims to fill this gap by adopting the lens of Labour Process Theory (LPT)3 to investigate everyday farmworkers’ and employers’ struggles within workplaces, and the subtle forms of agency migrant workers develop to cope with their demanding and degrading routines in the agricultural industry. One of the assumptions underpinning this analysis is that the relationship between employers and employees is structured by what Chris Smith (2006, 390) calls the ‘double indeterminacy of labour power’: Labour power, what the employer hires and the worker exchanges, is indeterminate because the precise amount of effort to be extracted cannot be ‘fixed’ before the engagement of workers, machinery and products for purposeful (profitable within capitalism) action in the labour process. The 3 Beginning with Braverman’s seminal work (1974) on the degradation of labour under

monopoly capitalism, labour process debate has been enriched by several contributions. For a review of the different approaches and themes within LPT, see in particular: Thompson (1989); Smith (2015); the special issues of the Journal International Studies of Management & Organization edited by Grugulis and Knights (2000–2001); the two volumes edited by Knights and Willmott (1990) and by Thompson and Smith (2010).

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contract to sell labour power is open-ended, subject to the direction of employers (or supervisory labour) to enforce or create through consent, a definite measure of output from workers over a definite period of time. […]. Such dynamism requires the involvement of workers, through compliance as much as consent, but remains open-ended as labour is a special commodity (wilful, mobile, but productive) within production. Indeterminacy allows labour process theory to explore management strategy and worker resistance.

To reckon with indeterminacy thus means conceiving of the labour relation as always unsettled and open-ended. For this reason, it seems worthwhile to examine through empirical research the processes of negotiation and bargaining that constrain the everyday life of workers and employers, with the aim of investigating how the double indeterminacy of labour power actually structures labour relations: firstly, by determining workplace struggle over labour effort, namely over time, intensity, pace, productivity, wage and so on; secondly, by engendering struggles concerning labour mobility and turnover, namely conflicts between workers’ mobility choices and employers’ retention strategies. The element of labour mobility assumes a certain relevance when considering migrant workers, a share of workforce that is mobile by definition, although often ‘immobilized’ through national state policies and employers’ retention strategies. Gabriella Alberti (2014), for instance, revisits the concept of labour mobility power by merging it with the perspective of the autonomy of migration and points out that while some migrants are trapped in low-skilled and low-paid sectors, others are able to ‘strategize around their mobility and ‘temporariness’ to escape degrading jobs’ (866). This implies that migrant labourers’ mobility practices are not carried out exclusively in order to solve workplace disputes or as a mere individual exit strategy; they are also used by migrants to acquire new skills, enrich their social life and improve their overall living conditions. They do this by changing jobs or sectors, accessing education or engaging in onward migration (see also Alberti 2020). Although often perceived as an individual act, and so deemed less valuable than other collective forms of organizing, especially in the case of unorganized migrant workers, quitting (or the threat of quitting) and mobility actually remain crucial strategies. These actions inevitably have a disruptive effect on the labour process, at the same time representing a subtle expression of migrants’ agency.

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Within the scholarship dealing with labour process analysis, the organization of agricultural production, especially within small and mediumsized companies (SMEs), has remained largely understudied.4 Nevertheless, using the agricultural industry as a case study can provide valuable insights into at least two directions: firstly, it helps us better understand how SMEs (often characterized by a rare propensity to innovate and a low level of mechanization) are able to survive and to adapt to a global scenario marked by a shrinkage in public subsidies and an increase in competition, mainly by reshaping their workforce composition. Secondly, the analysis of workplace relations in a migrant-rich sector such as agriculture allows us to look through some extra lenses (i.e. those of nationality, race, migration status, etc.) to better frame and understand the everyday conflicts between employers and employees, as well as the social conflicts currently exacerbating local contexts. In order to empirically investigate these aspects, this book relies on extensive ethnographic research focussed on the largest area of greenhouse agriculture in Italy. This rural district located in the South-east of Sicily produces several types of fresh crops, such as tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes, largely exported to Northern Italy and abroad. The area is well known as the Fascia Costiera Trasformata, a name roughly translated throughout this book as the Transformed Littoral Strip (from here on, TLS). With its 6,000 hectares running along the coast for 150 km from Licata (in the province of Agrigento) to Pachino (in the province of Siracusa), mainly encompassed by the province of Ragusa, the TLS represents the biggest greenhouse area in Italy (see Map 1.1). Compared with other enclaves of industrial agriculture in the country, the labour process and the composition of the workforce present several similarities and some differences as well. The main difference relates to the de-seasonalization of greenhouse agriculture, which consequently requires that the workforce, which is usually more skilled, is needed during the entire year, stimulating processes of settlement of migrant farmworkers in the area. By contrast, Italian industrial agriculture, especially in the South, is mostly based on seasonal production which demands a temporary, cheap and flexible workforce, especially during the harvesting season, and ties migrant labourers to ‘seasonal circuits’, 4 Although the authors do not expressly refer to the LPT, among the contributions studying the labour process in agricultural companies, see also Holmes (2013) and Castracani (2019).

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Map 1.1 Transformed Littoral Strip (Credit: Enrico Beghelli - WeBerry)

namely circular patterns of internal mobility throughout the country5 (see, among others, the contributions collected by Colloca and Corrado 2013; Garrapa 2016; Lo Cascio 2016). Although in the TLS the introduction of greenhouses has allowed producers to overcome seasonality, guaranteeing continuous production cycles, temporariness and uncertainty in employment persist and are reproduced through labour and migration policies and through employers’ attitudes, which in turn affect migrant workers’ experiences and opportunities (Anderson 2010). In order to carry out this ethnographic research, in January 2013, I moved to Vittoria, a city of 63,000 inhabitants, which represents the core of the TLS (see Map 1.1). Vittoria, like the nearby cities of Acate, Santa Croce Camerina, Donnalucata and Ispica, has been totally transformed by the presence of greenhouses from the 1960s onwards. Moreover, many other types of business connected with the greenhouses—such as seed companies’ laboratories, nurseries, packinghouses, fruit and vegetable 5 Temporary workers bound to seasonal circuits usually harvest tomatoes in Puglia and Basilicata in the summertime, olives in Sicily in the autumn, grapes and fruit in Piedmont and Tuscany in the same period, and then often move to pick citrus fruit in Calabria during winter. Hellio (2016) describes a similar rueda temporera (seasonal cycle) taking place in Spain.

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markets—have mushroomed in the area, attracting workers and capital, both local and foreign. As soon as I moved to Vittoria, with a Ph.D. scholarship in Sociology provided by the University of Milan, I met Giuliana Sanò, a Ph.D. student in Anthropology from the University of Messina, and we decided to conduct our fieldwork together.6 The first period of our fieldwork lasted ten months and was for us particularly fruitful because it was mainly devoted to covert and overt participant observation in workplaces, in a trade union office and in a migrant public health clinic. While the latter contexts were relatively easy to access (thanks to the willingness of trade unionists and medical staff), getting hired by the agricultural businesses themselves required much more effort. Relying on word of mouth and engaging with all the opportunities provided during the fieldwork, it was possible to undertake short periods of work by being informally hired by three greenhouse companies, and then being formally employed and paid by a packinghouse. These were all small or medium-sized enterprises with a diverse workforce of less than twenty people, both Italians and migrants, where employers and employees were informed about the purpose of the research (apart from in one case). Although workplace ethnography usually deserves much more time than a few months, employers’ availability was indeed quite limited. Nevertheless, it was extremely useful to experience farmworkers’ everyday routines both within and outside the workplaces, and to see, feel and smell greenhouse and packinghouse work for ourselves. As is the case in classic and contemporary workplace ethnographies (above all Burawoy 1979), participant observation allowed us to gain in-depth insights into the labour processes, the employers’ strategies to control and retain labour, the employees’ tactics in resisting these constraints, as well as on the ongoing conflicts between the workforce. At the same time, the embodied experience enriches the analytical perspective by encompassing some reflexive stances while learning, on and through my own body, how agricultural work looks and feels. Participant observation was coupled with methods of shadowing, semistructured interviews and long periods of observation in key public spaces, such as squares, cafes, discos, mosques and churches, where migrant farmworkers spend their spare time. Shadowing consisted in following a broker during his daily activities selling and buying produce in the local fruit 6 Her research is now published in the book Fabbriche di Plastica: Il Lavoro nell’Agricoltura Industriale (2018).

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and vegetable markets (on this experience see Piro and Sanò 2018). Finally, sixty-eight interviews with a diversity of participants, including farmworkers, employers, trade unionists, local politicians, volunteers and priests, were collected in 2013 and during shorter visits in 2014, 2015 and 2019. These conversations were carried out in the interviewees’ houses or workplaces, and in the latter case, they were generally followed by a visit to the plant or the fields. By conducting this research over a long period, it was possible to follow for several years the life stories of the people I met in the field, sometimes in addition visiting their families in the countries of origin, or having them visit me in the town in the North of Italy where I usually live. Moreover, coming back to the field allowed me to interview several people more than once and to encounter new emerging actors, such as grassroots unions or associations engaged with charitable and lobbying activities to improve the situation of migrant workers. Finally, during these years, a variegated and stimulating community of scholars and journalists visited and worked on the TLS from several perspectives and this allowed me to engage in fruitful conversations and mutual help. These conversations, as well as the interviews, were generally recorded, fully transcribed and analysed jointly with fieldnotes, in order to systematize the research findings presented throughout this book. Chapter 2 aims to understand the local context, starting with an analysis of the historical dynamics shaping agriculture and migration in the TLS. Drawing on the fieldnotes recounting the first working days in greenhouses and packinghouses, this chapter takes the reader into these workplaces by using thick description to evoke their social and spatial environment. Names of the companies, like the names of the people encountered, are anonymized in order to preserve their privacy. The following chapters focus on day labour in TLS agriculture and, with no claim to be exhaustive, they centre on three pivotal topics: the employment contract, the wage and the bodily experience of work. Chapter 3 discusses employers’ and employees’ struggles around the labour contract. Firstly, it shows how the promise to sign a contract represents a fundamental means for the employers to tie farmworkers to workplaces, shape their ‘moral’ behaviour and intensify the workers’ effort. Secondly, the chapter exemplifies some of the everyday forms of bargaining over contracts and social security contributions. Finally, it demonstrates how unindentured farmworkers are able to wield their mobility power and to strategize around the uses of a contract, to adapt

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to immigration and labour regulations and bend them in their everyday life. Chapter 4 deals with conflicts over the definition of a fair wage. It shows how the establishment of a conventional wage largely depends on farmworkers’ living arrangements, which in turn produce a racialized definition of pay. Moreover, it investigates employers’ retention strategies—such as payment postponement and the provision of side benefits—as well as workers’ attempts to increase their wages by quitting (or threatening to quit) or by reducing their work effort. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the body/work nexus, examining how workers are selected according to gender, ethnicity and other bodily characteristics, shedding light on workplace conflicts around bodily postures and routines, and lastly analysing farmworkers’ various uses of their bodies to conceal or show their physical pain in order to express distress or compliance towards an interlocutor. Chapter 6 draws conclusions and summarizes the book’s contribution to current debates as a stimulus for further inquiry. Throughout the chapters, workplace struggles are never depicted as disembodied conflicts performed by a unique, homogeneous agent (the ‘farmworker’); rather, the purpose of the analysis is to unpack this class-based category, considering the workers intersectionally in terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality, skin colour, legal status and other social divisions that locate them in different social positions both among themselves and in relation to the employers, while producing different subjective experiences (Crenshaw 1989; Browne and Misra 2003; Anthias 2012; Collins 2015). These social divisions are embedded in the labour process and at the same time are reproduced by it. As explained by Anna Tsing (2009, 150), diversity is in fact not only a pre-existing resource that supply chains (and, within them, the employers) merely use; rather, diversity is something that companies revitalize and actively contribute to creating by producing ‘niche segregation through advising economic performance’. Informed by Tsing’s work, and echoing Edwards’ words (2003, 4), this book aims to demonstrate that the output of the agricultural labour process is not just tonnes of vegetables. Every day, employers and employees also fashion the structures of advantage and disadvantage, hierarchies and power relations based on class, gender and ethnicity that feed back into wider society.

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CHAPTER 2

Entering the Workplaces

Abstract This chapter aims to describe the local context in which this ethnographic research is based by presenting the main characteristics of the labour process and examining the historical dynamics shaping agriculture and migration in the Transformed Littoral Strip. Drawing on the fieldnotes which recount the first working days in greenhouses and packinghouses, the chapter takes the reader into these workplaces by using thick descriptions to evoke their social and spatial environment. In this way, it allows the reader to become familiar with the atmosphere, the tools and the language of the workplaces and with some of the people alongside whom this research was conducted. Keywords Transformed Littoral Strip · Sicily · Greenhouses · Packinghouses · Embodied ethnography

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The Organization of Food Production in the Transformed Littoral Strip

The Transformed Littoral Strip (TLS) owes its name to the deep transformations which have occurred in this area over the last sixty years. These mainly consisted in the restructuring of the labour process and supply chains in the agro-industrial sector, which affected in turn the social © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Piro, Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7_2

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and spatial landscape of the area, namely the land, the environment, the material conditions and the social relations among its inhabitants. Agriculture has always constituted a source of income for local families, but since the 1960s it has turned into an industrial enterprise, thanks to growers’ initiative to introduce the greenhouse technique, aimed at protecting seedlings and allowing crops to ripen faster, reducing the level of uncertainty caused by meteorological conditions. Meanwhile, the diffusion of more resistant and standardized patented seeds, together with widespread use of fertilizers, allowed farmers to progressively increase the volumes of production and their revenues. These innovations are often described by inhabitants of the TLS as a ‘miracle’: something like a spell cast over the land, with apparently no effort, so that the South-eastern coast of Sicily was transformed into a huge ‘plastic sea’ (see Figs. 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3). The ‘miracle’ is mainly attributed to resources, such as sunlight and soil composition, with which the area is deemed to be ‘naturally’ endowed. Nevertheless, this rhetoric has for a long time obscured the great efforts that women and men have made in order to make this land

Fig. 2.1 The ‘plastic sea’ (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

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Fig. 2.2 Greenhouses in the Transformed Littoral Strip (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

productive, as well as the side-effects of industrial agriculture, namely its social and environmental costs (Gertel and Sippel 2014). Throughout Italy, the TLS is well known for producing non-seasonal fresh crops available on supermarket shelves, and in particular for highquality types of tomato, such as the ciliegino and datterino varieties (both cherry tomatoes), exported all over Europe. Aside from tomatoes (in 2019 around 160,000 tonnes, 30% of the total Italian crop), growers also cultivate in greenhouses zucchini (40,000 tonnes), aubergines and peppers (16,000 tonnes of each), cucumbers (5000 tonnes) and other rarer products (i.e., watermelon [4500 tonnes], and other melon varieties [1500 tonnes]).1 Similarly to other areas of intensive agriculture in Southern Europe (Corrado 2016, 5; Ortiz-Miranda et al. 2013), in the TLS the productive structure is characterized by a high level of fragmentation of land ownership: if we consider the 3331 greenhouse companies registered in the municipalities of the TLS, around 70% of them use less than two 1 Data available online at: http://dati.istat.it/ (Accessed July 21, 2020). Elaborated by the author.

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Fig. 2.3 Greenhouses in the Transformed Littoral Strip (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

hectares of land, while less than 1% use more than fifty hectares (ISTAT 2012).2 94% of these enterprises are registered as ‘individual companies’, meaning that they are directly managed by the landowner (or renter), who works in the fields together with one to four waged workers that are employed for six days per week, eight or nine hours per day, for almost the entire year. This land fragmentation was widely fostered by post-war policies in agriculture, through which the local government, led by the Italian Communist Party, promoted a campaign aimed at pushing landless peasants to buy (instead of occupy) lots of land, in order to guarantee at least one hectare for each household (Miccichè 1980). During the last twenty years, the number of greenhouse companies registered in the province of Ragusa decreased, from 4203 in 1990 to 3331 in 2010. In particular, the last Census records a significant reduction in the number of companies farming an area of less than two hectares (from 3029 in 1990 to 2317 in 2010), and a slight reduction in the 2 In comparison, the average utilized agricultural area (UAA) in 2010 was 24 ha in the EU-15 countries and 15 ha in the EU-27 countries (Corrado 2016, 5).

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number of companies with an area of less than ten hectares.3 Meanwhile, the number of enterprises using more than ten hectares of land has slightly increased (from 175 in 1990 to 186 in 2010). Data registered for the province of Ragusa, therefore, confirms the ongoing process of concentration of land, which is widespread not only in Italy, but also throughout Europe,4 North America and Middle East and North Africa countries (cf. Corrado et al. 2016; Castracani 2019). As largely highlighted by scholars studying the dynamic of global food supply chains (Burch and Lawrence 2007), in the TLS growers have been progressively marginalized and have experienced a reduction in their profits, due to fierce international competition and to retailers pressure. These dynamics have directly affected labour conditions in greenhouses, since producers, in turn, have aimed to progressively drive down labour costs, which constitute the only cost they have agency over, since the price of other inputs (such as plastic, agrochemical products and grafted seedlings) are beyond the control of the agricultural enterprises. Due to the structural need for cheap labour all year round, since the early 1970s the Ragusa district has attracted a growing number of foreign workers who have settled into the area, turning the TLS from a sending to a receiving migration context much earlier than Italy as a country (Cole and Booth 2007). Starting in the early 1970s, Tunisian migrants—initially male—entered the TLS labour market, gradually substituting Sicilian internal migrants (Colucci 2018; Giglioli 2017; Saitta and Sbraccia 2003; Cusumano 1976). In the 1980s and 1990s, Tunisian wage labour continued to increase, while at the end of the 1990s a few numbers of Tunisian small entrepreneurs began to set up their own greenhouse companies by renting or, more rarely, by buying the land.5 During the 2000s, the TLS labour market underwent a significant transformation in terms of the gender and nationality of its workforce due to a significant increase in the number of male and female Romanian labourers hired in the agricultural sector. The Romanian citizens

3 The last Census data in agriculture was collected by the Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT) in 2010 and published in 2012. The next Census will be undertaken in 2021. 4 Cf. Data of farms structure in Europe at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/agricu lture/data/database (Accessed August 16, 2020). 5 According to Census data (ISTAT 2012), farms owned by foreign citizens in the district of Ragusa were still small in number, only 51 out of 12,770 (counting both greenhouses and open field cultivations). Nevertheless, our informants often discussed this phenomenon, considered one of the most significant ongoing tendencies in the TLS.

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turned out to be much more visible—including in official statistics— since 2007, with the European Union eastwards enlargement, and they currently represent the largest national group settled in the area. According to the National Social Security Institute (INPS), in 2013 there were 26,979 farmworkers in the district of Ragusa, and about half were foreigners.6 In 2019, the proportion of Italian and foreign farmworkers was almost equal. Official data, nevertheless, fails to investigate the share of informal labourers, and this implies that the number of foreign workers remains greatly underestimated. As regards the figure for migrants who have settled in the TLS, Caruso and Corrado (2015) highlighted that: Concerning the labour offer in agriculture, the most relevant demographic data [all over Italy] is the record held by Acate, a small town historically devoted to agriculture and now encompassed within the agro-industrial district of Vittoria. Here 25% of the local population is made up of EU and non-EU migrants, with a significant increase of almost 400%, from 691 migrants in 2008 to 2672 in 2013, with a proper “ethnic colonization” of the area of Marina di Acate, driving this town to be the leading city in the Centre-South of Italy by percentage of migrant population [and] the fourth at national level. […] The consistent housing offer, due to the boom in holiday construction in the past decades, has also fostered the settlement of a migrant population. The nearby town of Santa Croce Camerina records the same exponential growth of its migrant population, having reached in this case the number of 2077 foreign inhabitants, namely almost the 20% of the total population [compared with a national mean of around 8.5%].7

Figures from 2013 onward record a significant increase in the number of foreigners residing in the province of Ragusa: in 2013 there were around 23,000 (among them 7103 Tunisians, 6509 Romanians and 3211 Albanians) while in 2019 foreigners residing in this area numbered more than 30,000, with the figure of Romanians surpassing that of Tunisians (9135 Romanians, 9040 Tunisians, 4686 Albanians).8 6 Among them, 5964 were Tunisians, 4349 Romanians and 1102 Albanians. Data collected by INPS in 2013, elaborated and shared with the author by the FLAI-CGIL trade union. 7 Author’s own translation. 8 Data available at: http://demo.istat.it/index.html (Accessed July 14, 2020).

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In the last few years, in the aftermath of significant geopolitical transformations (from the 2011 uprisings in North Africa to 2014–2015s humanitarian crisis), according to local informants around 1500 refugees and asylum seekers have been hosted in camps and reception centres scattered within the TLS countryside, and many of them started to be employed in agricultural companies. The presence of different national groups leads to labour market segmentation and harsh conflicts between settled farmworkers and newcomers. Moreover, salaries become also segmented according to nationalities—ranging from e15 to e40 a day—and their variation mirrors workers’ different living arrangements (see Chapter 4). Tunisian farmworkers and their families usually reside in the city centres in the municipalities of the TLS, in neighbourhoods where there is a high concentration of migrants. Asylum seekers, by contrast, are living in institutional camps scattered in the area. Finally, the majority of Romanian labourers, often hired as a couple, reside in the countryside, on-site or near to workplaces, although this situation is changing somewhat (cf. Brovia and Piro 2020). This overlap between the spaces of work and life implies, first of all, a flexibilization of working hours: overworking is common in periods of picking, while unpaid days off are also frequent when production slows down during the summertime. Furthermore, the combination of work and home is a key deterrent to farmworkers abandoning their jobs, as loss of employment would also mean having to search for new accommodation. Thirdly, for farmworkers living near the greenhouses, these companies represent the space where they generally spend the entire day, both working hours and time off, due to the difficulties of leaving the countryside without a private car, and without money to pay for an informal taxi. Accessing supermarkets, hospitals, schools, trade union offices or bars is thus expensive, time-consuming and often not affordable for many farmworkers, who are consequently forced to reduce their needs to a minimum or to rely on charities to make their ends meet. Finally, the overlap between the workplace and the domestic sphere leads to a loss of intimacy, de-structuring a place which is not safe or secure, as a home is meant to be, since it is not private or protected from the employer’s gaze and requirements. Consequently, employers often exceed their role by giving farmworkers extra tasks or by invading their employees’ private sphere. When considering the situation of live-in farmworkers, it is worth also addressing the peculiar position of female Romanian farmworkers. Due

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to the existing interplay between gender, ethnicity and class, they are structurally located in a highly vulnerable social position, especially in relationship to Italian men. In the last few years, many have denounced the fact that that this social position, coupled with live-in dwelling conditions, exposes Romanian women to a higher risk of harassment and abuse, which is mainly perpetrated by Italian employers. Palumbo and Sciurba (2015), for instance, speak about an unjust ‘double blackmail’ of Romanian female farmworkers, when they are forced to be sexually available to their employers in order to keep their jobs in the greenhouses. This phenomenon has led in the last few years to an increase in the number of abortions sought by Romanian farmworkers,9 and to a (slight) increase in the number of reports to the police, to which newspapers and institutions have paid some attention.10 All in all, what has distinguished TLS from other enclaves of intensive agriculture in Italy is the presence of a de-seasonalized system of production, which in turn has favoured the settlement of migrant farmworkers and their families in the small municipality of the Ragusa coastline and in the countryside near or within the agricultural companies themselves. In the last few years, producers have employed farmworkers of different nationalities, implementing different living and labour conditions, and this has increased the level of competition among migrants in the area, hampering the possibilities of establishing organized forms of solidarity 9 As stated by Palumbo and Sciurba (2015): ‘It certainly does not follow that all Romanian women who have decided to have an abortion in Vittoria have been victims of sexual exploitation. However, the high number of abortions in proportion to the few thousand inhabitants of this city is an important fact that must be considered in order to grasp the problematic conditions faced by female workers on the farms in Ragusa’. 10 See, in particular, the research paper requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, at: https://www.europarl.europa. eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2018/604966/IPOL_STU%282018%29604966_EN.pdf; Moreover, see: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/12/sla very-sicily-farming-raped-beaten-exploited-romanian-women; https://www.theguardian. com/global-development/2017/oct/31/terrible-conditions-police-uncover-abuse-andexploitation-on-farms-in-sicily; https://voxeurop.eu/en/the-romanian-slaves-behind-thesicilian-tomatoes/ (Accessed June 6, 2020). Since 2003 in the TLS has been operating Proxima, an organisation that offers support to victims of trafficking and labour exploitation and is engaged in tackling violence towards Romanian female farmworkers. In July 2012, Proxima started a cooperation with the FLAI-CGIL trade union, and then with the project Presidio Caritas (see Chapter 4), with the aim of providing a bus service (Solidal Transfert) to disseminate information about how to report sexual abuse and get help.

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and jeopardizing trade union activities.11 Several scholars, as well as trade unionists and social workers, have acknowledged that migrants’ labour and living conditions in the TLS deserves far more attention and policy intervention (Campanella 2018; Cortese and Palidda 2018; Palumbo and Sciurba 2018; Sanò 2018; Kilkey and Urzì 2017; Urzì and Williams 2016). Starting from these considerations, this book has a twofold aim: firstly, to shed some light on the everyday practices and the ongoing conflicts taking place inside and outside the TLS workplaces, examining social relations between employers and employees and among workers of different nationality, gender and age. This in-depth gaze at the micro-level is fundamental in order for us to draw more general considerations at a mesoand macro-level, fulfilling the second aim of the book: to show how the labour process is embedded and shaped around workforce social divisions while at the same time actively producing them by positioning workers into social hierarchies that extend out from workplaces into society as a whole. In order to study farmworkers’ everyday routines, this book relies on data collected throughout extensive fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2019. In 2013, in particular, I engaged in periods of covert and open participant observation, taking up the opportunity to be hired as a worker in greenhouses and packinghouses. The next section explains why and how these workplaces were selected as a case study, informing the reader about some methodological considerations before directly ‘entering’ the workplaces.

2.2

A Workplace Ethnography

The presence of greenhouses in the TLS has fostered the mushrooming of numerous types of enterprises connected with food production, that constitute the local nodes of a global food supply chain. The seedlings growing in the plastic factories usually germinate in nurseries that, in turn,

11 During our presence in the field and throughout the interviews, we collected infor-

mation about trade union initiatives and became involved in some of them. The most active unions at a local level were the territorial branch of FLAI-CGIL (The Federation of Agro-Industrial Workers, within the left-wing union Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro), and, since 2018, U.S.B. (Unione Sindacale di Base), a rank-and-file union particularly engaged with farmworkers’ struggles in the South of Italy.

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buy patented seeds. Several seed companies among the very small number of corporations controlling the market worldwide have branches in the TLS.12 In these laboratories, Italian and foreign breeders are committed to creating and testing new varieties of vegetable which are then reproduced in massive quantities abroad. Patented seeds are then sown and germinated in the nurseries’ protected environments. In these workplaces, the hands of many women, constituting the biggest share of the workforce inside nurseries, work to graft the seedlings, preparing them to be sold to greenhouse companies. In the covered fields, seedlings are typically transplanted annually (campagna lunga) or sometimes twice or three times a year (campagna corta), according to the grower’s decision and to the greenhouse structure and equipment. In the greenhouses a workforce composed of both male and female farmworkers, often migrants, is required to toil for eight or more hours per day, for nearly the whole year. They are employed in a wide variety of tasks, such as transplanting, cleaning and fertilizing plants, harvesting crops and finally sterilizing the ground for a new cycle. As stated above, the majority of the companies in the area occupy an area of less than two hectares, which usually means that they hire between one and five waged labourers on each farm. To process and distribute vegetables, growers rarely aggregate in consortium or cooperatives. More often, they sell their crops directly to a packinghouse, namely a processing plant dedicated to washing, wrapping and re-selling vegetables. The packinghouses’ workforce is composed mainly of women, who are required to be quick and precise when processing crops, making them look enticing for supermarket customers. Alternatively, growers sell their products to the local fruit and vegetable markets, that distribute produce throughout Italy and worldwide. The main fruit and vegetable market of the region is located in Vittoria, and it represents the biggest hub at the site of production in Italy: from here, around 70% of the TLS crops reach the North of the country, while around 30% is exported to Northern and Eastern Europe. In this context, several types of broker ply their daily trade, negotiating the prices of the produce in search of good bargains and trying to avoid fraudulent sellers. Their work is based on exchange, barter, trust ties, accountability and 12 Among these multinational corporations, there are Seminis (belonging to the Monsanto/Bayer group), Syngenta, Gautiers Semences, Enza Zaden, alongside with some local companies such as Southern Seeds and Med Hermes.

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all the social norms that establish a proper ‘moral economy’ of these marketplaces (on this topic, see Piro and Sanò 2018). Among this complex texture of small and medium enterprises, two types of workplace attracted my attention, namely greenhouses and packinghouses. In particular, they were selected because they constitute the core of the local supply chain, mainly employing the migrant workforce. Moreover, in these workplaces labour composition is differentiated according to gendered patterns of recruitment: while the majority of packinghouse workforce is composed of Italian and foreign women, greenhouses are commonly represented as a male work environment (although both male and female workers are employed there). The specific selection of the greenhouses and packinghouses companies in which to conduct a period of participant observation largely depended on fieldwork contingencies and employers’ availability. Nevertheless, according to some preliminary considerations concerning the ‘typicality’ of these workplaces (cf. Gerring 2008) and the workforce composition, large companies were not prioritized as case studies for participant observation (although they were targeted for interviews). As local informants suggested, in fact, companies occupying an area of more than ten hectares were less representative of the characteristics of the local labour market for several reasons. Firstly, in terms of the organization of supply chains and labour processes, these tend to specialize on the production of higher-quality crops, relying often on foreign technologies and knowledge and exporting their produce directly abroad. Secondly, concerning labour conditions, big companies frequently hire workers with permanent contracts, higher salaries, and a practically fixed shift schedule. The probability of meeting Italian farmworkers in this context is thus higher than the average. Among the small firms in the area, some of them—albeit a limited number—are managed by Tunisian entrepreneurs. The opportunity to investigate a workplace where the employer was Tunisian was definitely appealing and relevant to the research purposes. Thus, in March 2013, my colleague Giuliana and I started work in a company that I named Kamari, initially underestimating the fact that all our workmates were relatives of the employer or his paisani (i.e. Tunisian fellow citizens). On the one hand, this experience helped us to access the working and private spaces usually reserved to Tunisian migrants; but on the other hand, due to the use of Arabic during working hours, we were generally excluded from random conversations when we were not directly addressed.

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For this and other reasons, we decided to spend another period inside a medium-sized firm, named Gurrieri, in which the workforce was composed by four Italian farmworkers, an Albanian couple and a Tunisian worker. The different employees’ mother tongues obliged team members to communicate in Italian almost all the time, enabling us to take part in their everyday conversations. Moreover, the mixed team composition allowed us to observe the relationship between the Italian and migrant employees and the Italian employer. A third occasion to be hired in a small greenhouse company, named SicilSerre, was a breath of fresh air in June 2013. The opportunity to be employed informally for a few days was directly offered by a Tunisian worker, Ahmed, who I met in Kamari. Ahmed, who was well-acquainted with the purpose of my presence in the TLS, invited me to work in the greenhouse without informing our employer of my research interest for putting myself forward as a farmworker. I was enthusiast about this proposal, since it allowed me, even if just for one week, to access a workplace where the labour force was usually composed entirely of migrant farmworkers. Moreover, due to the circumstances of the covert observation, this was the only place where I worked without my colleague Giuliana and in addition where I directly negotiated my daily wage with my boss. Entering the packinghouses was unexpectedly much more complicated, due to the resistance of both employers and employees alike. On the one hand, the entrepreneurs expressed concerns about hiring workers with no contracts, generally refusing our proposal of an informal period of unpaid labour like those undertaken in the greenhouses. On the other hand, employees—mainly young Italian women—perceived us as direct competitors, notwithstanding our efforts to clarify the purpose of our presence in the plant. Therefore, our first attempt to work inside a packinghouse, in a company called JustTomatoes, was a total debacle and we decided to abandon the workplace after the first working day. Later on, thanks to our stubbornness and to another available employer, Giuliana and I managed to be hired formally inside a packinghouse that I have pseudonymously named TomatoArtists. The plant used to be quite big, but at the time of our approach the company was experiencing a period of restructuring, and as a consequence the workforce was reduced to around twenty people, mainly foreign women, working in two separate teams. It is relevant to state, once again, that in a situation in which it was extremely difficult to find a job for two young high-educated Italian

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female researchers, the case study selection was necessary dictated by contingencies and thus underwent several changes during the fieldwork to adjust rapidly to the fluid situation. Moreover, the periods of work agreeable to the entrepreneurs, ranging from two to four weeks in each company, were relatively short when compared with a proper workplace ethnography. Nevertheless, these experiences allowed us to ‘enter’ workplaces and to perceive—even extremely partially—the disorientation of being the ‘newcomers’. As suggested by Wacquant (2005) the ‘apprenticeship’ that we experimented within the greenhouses mirrors the apprenticeship undertaken by the subjects of our inquiry. The patient attention that our workmates devoted to us when explaining the assigned tasks, introducing us to their daily routines, was incredibly useful, since it conveyed with spontaneity the set of meanings they usually attribute to their daily activities. Moreover, the physical and mental stress experienced during these working periods, accentuated by the fact that our bodies were not (and did not become) fit or accustomed enough for the required level of physical strain, allowed us to focus in particular on the body, considered both as an object and as a means of our ethnographic inquire (Wacquant 2000, 2005). It represents an object since the research highlights the effects of day labour on workers’ bodies, as well as workers’ embodied tactics of resistance (on this topic, in particular, see Chapter 5). Moreover, it represents a means since the practical learning of how to work and the experience of physical pain were useful to better understand farmworkers’ experience and ‘social suffering’ (Holmes 2013). Borrowing the words of Seth Holmes (2013, 34–35) reflecting about his own ethnographic experience among Triqui farmworkers in California: The body is not something that “I have” or that “I use” to find data; rather, “I am” my body, and my body “itself/myself” produces field data. In my own fieldwork, my bodily experiences lent valuable insights into social suffering, power hierarchies, and the implications of field work relationship. It was not only my eyes and ears that collected valuable field observations but also the back of my neck as cold rain seeped down the inside of my farm-issued rain gear; my sore knees, hips, and lower back from bending over all day in strawberry fields; my acidic stomach showing signs of stress before a day of racing against the clock to keep my picking job; […] These were several ways in which my body offered important field

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notes on social suffering. Without paying attention to my bodily experiences, I would have missed out on much of the valuable data about the everyday lives of migrant laborers.

Finally, putting ourselves in the workers’ position helped us not only to perceive things differently, but also to be perceived differently. For me, this assumed a meaning especially in the experience of covert participant observation, when my position was not declared to the employer. One episode, in particular, provides a good example. I was at that time employed inside SicilSerre. Around eleven o’ clock in the morning, I was cleaning the plants together with my Tunisian friend and our employer, when all of a sudden the boss’ son entered the greenhouse. Without even saying “good morning” he started yelling at us, shouting that we were doing “a shitty job”. He arrogantly showed us how we were supposed to work: quickly and precisely. I replied promptly that, at six in the morning we were also quick and precise, but that at eleven, after five hours without a break, in a very warm temperature, our eyes could no longer distinguish the small green leaves we were expected to pick off. The fierce way in which he gazed me back after this reply stands out in my mind: in that situation I actually felt like an undisciplined employee to be admonished, although this was not my actual status. Spending short periods inside greenhouses and packinghouse, working side by side, sweating and swearing together, was truly an attempt to reduce the distance between us, the researchers and our workmates, although we were aware of the deep differences in our social position. And the genuine openness with which our workmates shared with us their thoughts, speaking about their current and future worries, asking us explicitly to ‘pay attention’ and to ‘not forget their life stories’, was for us (and I hope for them) a curious and intense experiment. By accounting for the first working days within each of the companies where participant observation was conducted, the next sections aim to provide an overall description of the physical and social environments of the workplaces under analysis. As Goffman states (1989, 130): ‘The first day you’ll see more than you’ll ever see again. And you’ll see things that you won’t see again’. That is why the fieldnotes from this period are extremely rich and full of detail, reporting the specific names of objects and the definition of the tasks which constitute the basic vocabulary that a newcomer to a greenhouse and a packinghouse needs to learn and be familiar with. Moreover, the fieldnotes tried to keep the freshness

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of everyday language: it was striking, for instance, to talk to Tunisian migrants fluently using Sicilian dialect. The following pages attempt to retain this richness, leaving some quotations in the original language with a suggested translation in square brackets. All in all, these accounts will allow the reader to become familiar with the atmosphere, the tools and the language of the workplaces and with some of the people alongside whom this research was conducted.

2.3

Working in the Greenhouses and Packinghouses 2.3.1

Kamari

The first opportunity to experiment with working in the greenhouses came at the beginning of March 2013, when, thanks to a mutual friend, Giuliana and I met Hassan. This Tunisian man in his fifties immediately declared his willingness to help us ‘with our studies’ by consenting to a period of participant observation inside his small company—essentially a family-run business—although we would have no contract and no remuneration. Hassan was renting a property of 12,000 square metres,13 where two different varieties of tomatoes (insalataro and ciliegino) were grown. As he explained during our first meeting, he had reached this position after several years as a day labourer, picking grapes, apples and tomatoes both in the North and in South of Italy. When we asked him to compare his previous and current situation, he explained that in 1984, when he first arrived in Vittoria, there was a small number of Tunisians in the region. In that period, due to companies’ labour shortage, it was easier to find a job in agriculture and earn a relatively good salary. “I was working eight hours per day, earning 80,000 lire [around e40], and I had no worries. Now that I’m self-employed”, he said with his strong Sicilian accent, “c’haiu cchiu penseri e cchiu debbiti [I have more worries and more debts]”. However, even though he was always complaining about the lack

13 The unit employed to measure the greenhouses’ area is generally the square metre. 12,000 m2 corresponds to 1.2 hectares. To provide an intuitive idea of the dimension in terms of required labour, consider that, according to our informants, an employer hires on average one worker per 4000 m2 of land.

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of time and money, he preferred this current occupation, because “if you work by the day, you have no worries but also no future”. The first working day, we agreed with Hassan to meet in front of his place, together with Aida, his wife, who usually joined him to work during the picking season, and Karim, his son-in-law, only partially remunerated for his work in the firm. On our way, we picked up another Tunisian worker at the roadside. When we reached the “countryside”, as Hassan calls his rented property, we had a quick look around while getting ready to work. Aside from the greenhouses, in the property there was also a canopy which was used to store products; a house where Hassan’s brother was living at that moment; another hut hosting one of the Tunisian employees; a large yard equipped with a Tunisian traditional oven to cook bread, a garden to grow vegetables and a plot to breed animals for household consumption. The spaces and the objects scattered in Hassan’s rented property mirrored the mixed nature of this kind of place, namely something halfway between a family farming and a company relying on waged labour. Once we reached the workplace, we set foot inside a greenhouse for the first time. In the huge tunnel, a black-and-white plastic cloth, used to reflect sunlight and to stop weeds from growing, covers the ground entirely; the tomato plants, neatly arranged, are tied at the top of the structure with nylon strings, and are fixed with some plastic clips [rings]; thin black manichette [tubes], dripping water and chemical fertilizer, are overlaid across the soil (see Figs. 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6). “The tomato is like a child: you have to feed it so it can grow up”, Hassan explained. He showed us how to deal with the plants that needed to be periodically tied around a nylon string to grow straight and strong, named locally with the expression fare la girata [to turn around]. As soon as I tried to do it myself, he warned me to pay more attention, behaving like a father guarding his offspring. Hassan explained that the greenhouse is in production for the entire year: We generally transplant in October, and then we wait for 110 days till the tomatoes get ready. Then we transplant again in April and the crop needs 70-75 days to ripen. Then in July or August we transplant for the third time in the year and in this case tomatoes need only 60 days to ripen. This means that the crop cycle is continuous: you eradicate and you sow, you eradicate and you sow again. I actually preferred the traditional way

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Fig. 2.4 Inside a greenhouse (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

Fig. 2.5 Inside a greenhouse (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

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Fig. 2.6 Greenhouse in production (Photo credit: Valeria Piro)

of harvesting, because now agriculture it is more tiring, both for land and for people. [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 4 March 2013]

After these brief explanations from our boss, we joined the rest of the team. A soon as we came closer to the group, we started to hear clearly the metallic and rhythmic sound of the workers’ scissors. Three Tunisian men were picking green insalataro tomatoes. We greeted them and were met with silence. Karim, the employer’s son-in-law, replied with a smile, as he knew the purpose of our presence there. Another Tunisian guy said “Hi”, without stopping his work, while the third one just turned his face towards us with both a rude and puzzled expression.

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The workers were collecting tomatoes in red panari [buckets]; soon after completing a vasca [line], they had to pour the tomatoes into some black casce [plastic boxes] situated outside the greenhouse, bending with their arms and their upper body outside the greenhouse plastic wall. When the boxes were full, Hassan carried them on his van. On the back of the van, he and his wife began to separate the tomatoes, dividing them into a first, a second and a third category, according to the quality of the produce. Without knowing exactly what to do, we started shyly to help them to separate the tomatoes, discovering ourselves to be very slow in deciding the quality level of the vegetables. On the contrary, Hassan and Aida were precise and quick. They immediately recognized and separated the “most beautiful” (the biggest, with the nicest colour), that they called facce [faces]. When I asked the reason for this name, Hassan shrugged, saying that he simply learned it from “the Italians”. The work was segmented into various tasks: Giuliana, Hassan and I were filling the first half of the boxes, putting medium and small-sized tomatoes in them; then Aida added the facce, trying to make a nice arrangement, since she was the person assigned to take care of the aesthetic aspects. These boxes were now ready to be sent to the fruit and vegetable market in Vittoria, to be sold at e1 per kilo for the highest-quality tomatoes, and 80 cents for the second level of quality. A few hours later, we were also asked to come into the greenhouse, this time harvesting ciliegino tomatoes. None of the workers, including us, were wearing gloves or other protection. I started to collect tomatoes in the same line as Aida, asking her suggestions before cutting every tomato bunch. She was accomplishing her task in a calm and precise way, showing enthusiasm for every “beautiful” tomato she was picking. Aida spoke a broken Sicilian (and almost no Italian, like her husband); nevertheless, the conversation was easy and pleasant. She spoke about their four children and her family and their business activities in Tunisia. After some time, I was keen to turn the conversation back to the workplace, and so I asked her about the other members of the team. Chadi, the man with a sweet expression that greeted us at the beginning of the working day, had been informally employed by Hassan for two and a half years. He was undocumented, and so unable to have a job contract and also unable to visit his three daughters in Tunisia. “Now he is marrying a girl from Ragusa to get Italian citizenship. It costs just e5000” —continued Aida with spontaneity—“but they don’t need to actually sleep together! It’s just a matter of papers!” I was amused and at the same time surprised

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to notice how fast intimacy between us grew while working side by side. Soon after, I questioned Aida about the other team member who behaved so rudely to us that morning. She did not know his name, since he had been working with them for only four days. Attracted by his apparent rudeness, I moved to work close to this guy. “Ca bbanna, drra bbanna [one side is yours, the other is mine]”, he admonished me curtly in Sicilian dialect. His style of work was completely different from Aida’s. He rushed and was imprecise, putting together tomatoes and leaves, without taking too much care over the quality of the output. As we worked, we talked: Ahmed: Valeria: A: V: A: V: A: V:

A:

So, you’re doing an internship here in the greenhouse! Yes, sort of… And you look at what the job looks like, and then you go back home, and you write it down, isn’t it? Yes, it works kind of like this. So, why couldn’t you stand outside and look without working? Uhm, I thought it would have been very different to simply look compared to how it is to do things practically! And now that you are in, do you like it? Well, it’s getting harder and harder, here it’s too hot, there are strong smells of plants and fertilizers – I’m not used to them, and I can’t breathe properly – and my back is beginning to ache now… but it’s still ok. And you? Do you like this job? Are you fool or what? Nobody likes this job! You do it just to fill your stomach, for e30 per day! As Tunisians here, you can work only in agriculture! [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 4 March 2013]

Ahmed was not a rude guy, as I thought at a first glance, but he was bitter about spending his time either in search of a job or toiling in the plastic factories, with no other options, according to him, to better his lot. He was a 32-year-old man from Gafsa,14 where he used to work as a glassmaker. He had been in Italy for five years, and after a short period of

14 Differently from Ahmed, the majority of Tunisians moving temporarily or settling in the TLS come originally from Tunisian coastal cities, such as Mahadia, Sousse or Sfax.

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unemployment spent at his brother’s place in Pordenone, in the North of the country, he attempted to eke out a living in Vittoria. When I asked how he knew Hassan, he replied: I don’t know him. He picked me up few days ago in Piazza Manin. I work here and there, from time to time… I don’t have a fixed job or a contract. I work by the day. [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 4 March 2013]

His account of the employer’s recruitment practices corresponded to the one provided by Hassan. Aside from two fixed labourers, Karim and Chadi (only the former employed with a contract), during the harvesting season he recruits casual workers a jurnata [by the day], relying on word of mouth or picking them in Piazza Manin, a square in Vittoria’s city centre where Tunisian men gather to look for a job and pass the time. He says that he hires exclusively paisani [Tunisians fellow citizens]. Hassan: [I go in the square and] I ask to the guy: “How much do you want?”. Usually, the wage here is around e30 or e20 per day, but someone could accept work for even less money. And then, if he is experienced, I actually give him the amount we previously agreed. If he is not able to keep a tomato branch in his hand, he won’t get e10! You have to be smart to select a good worker: it is not convenient, for example, to hire those who are undocumented or just arrived in Vittoria. You can recognize those living here for ages and those who just moved from Tunisia or from the North of Italy. [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 4 March 2013]

While speaking with Ahmed, I could hear Giuliana, who was working beside Karim, talking with him about Italian politics, a topic that he seemed to know very well. Karim was a 31-year-old man from Sousse, where he used to work in a shoe factory. In Tunisia one of his cousins suggested that he come to Italy, asking him for money in exchange of a visa and a seasonal contract as a fruit picker in Bolzano. According to Karim, when he arrived in the North of Italy, he realized that that contract was actually fake, and after three months, his seasonal residence permit expired with no possibility of renewal. He therefore moved to Vittoria, where another relative (Hassan in fact) could offer him an informal job. Soon after, Karim married Hassan’s elder daughter, regularizing his legal status, but binding his future to a life and an occupation that he strongly dislikes.

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In the following months of our stay in Vittoria, both Ahmed and Karim got very close to us, introducing us to numerous others paisani, offering us their company in several situations and places where Tunisians passed the time, chatting about this and that, exchanging news and gossip, and, in the case of Ahmed, also providing one important opportunity to work together at a company. Meeting them was thus pivotal for our fieldwork, as well as marking the beginning of a long-lasting friendship. At the end of this first working day, Hassan thanked us, giving Giuliana and me several kilos of vegetables that he had produced for his family. Before leaving, I felt really uncomfortable replying to his last question: H: V: H:

Do you like this kind of life? Well, it’s tough indeed! Yes, it’s tough and you always run out of money! [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 4 March 2013] 2.3.2

Gurrieri

Thanks to a young agronomist we met in Ragusa, we were introduced to Franco, a tomato grower for whom we worked in April 2013. Franco, a Sicilian man in his sixties, owned a medium-sized company in Donnalucata, a small town 30 km South of Vittoria. The Gurrieri is a company managing 40,000 square metres, producing different varieties of tomato (insalataro, ciliegino and datterino), exported in the North of Italy or abroad. Franco explained ironically that “here in Sicily we grow tomatoes, over there, in Milan, they grow money. They left us just with labour, and if we are not clever enough, also with debts”. His perception of his own business’ marginality compared to Northern Italian companies represents quite a common narrative among Sicilian entrepreneurs. Franco was hiring seven fixed workers and for the harvesting season he was employing one or two additional casual pickers. In Spring 2013, Giuliana and I occupied these two vacant positions without receiving any remuneration. The entire team was very happy to ‘host’ us for a short period, hailing us as a novelty that could break the monotony and repetitiveness of their job. Franco introduced us to Mimmo, his foreman that, at the time of the fieldwork, has been working for Gurrieri for almost nine months, although he already had twenty years’ experience in agriculture. His story epitomizes the situation of numerous Italian people affected by

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economic crisis, who have then experienced pathways of downward social mobility, ‘coming back’ to waged labour after a period of self-employment in agriculture. Mimmo started to work in his father’s family-run business when he was very young, till 2004 when a huge hailstorm destroyed their greenhouses, and the family did not have enough savings to rebuild them. After seven years working as a truck driver, at the time of fieldwork he was employed by the day. The other Italian members of the team recounted us similar stories, stressing specific turning points when their life had changed drastically, and the situation forced them to rely on day labour. Antonio, for instance, was a 34-year-old man who started to work at 15 in his family firm. After his father’s death, Antonio had to dismantle the greenhouses and pay back his loans, a situation that obliged him to look for job. Peppe, a 53-year-old man, had an equally precarious work experience: he used to work as a sharecropper, then he was employed in the construction industry and finally he ended up in agriculture again, working for short periods in several companies. They all refer to their current job position as alla jurnata [“day labour”], an expression that for Mimmo, Antonio and Peppe entails and emphasizes their paths of downward social mobility. Alessandro, the youngest team member (aged 19), was instead experiencing his position as a day labourer differently, namely as an initial step in his working life. He had left school when he was 14 years old to start working, for five years, in his uncle’s greenhouse. At the time of fieldwork, he was informally employed by Gurrieri, knowing well that sooner or later he would quit the job to move abroad in search of better opportunities in the hospitality sector. During our first day at the company, Peppe introduced me to the only Tunisian member of the team (Yassin, who had been given the Italian nickname Gigi), by advising me to not talk to him, because he was “a fucking bastard”. Even if these statements appeared to me, at a first glance, as a form of subtle racism and I initially sided with Gigi, a few hours later, after working alongside him, I was also bored of his presence. He was working fast and “dirty”, as my workmates said, meaning that he was very imprecise, and with his quick pace forced the other team members to keep his speed. Additionally, he was constantly making annoying jokes or singing the same tune for hours on end to disturb the team. Moreover, none of us could trust him, since we feared he might report to Franco our attempts to take unauthorized breaks or slow down the pace of work.

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With the other two members of the team, the relationship was much more relaxed and pleasant. Afrim, an Albanian energetic man in his sixties, had a very troubled migration background, living as an undocumented migrant in Italy for several years since his arrival in 1994. Wera, Afrim’s wife, an active and sweet Albanian woman in her fifties, joined her husband in Italy in 2003. Soon after her arrival, they both started to work at Gurrieri in order to be employed in the same workplace. With Wera, the only woman in the team apart from Giuliana and me, it was quite easy to create spaces of intimacy, discussing our lives and worries between the tomato rows. While the migrant farmworkers had spent several years working at Gurrieri, the turnover among the Italian members was actually higher. Even if it was a recently-formed team, aside from the role of Gigi, the atmosphere within the group was friendly and relaxed. When Mimmo introduced us the other team members, he described them as a “family”. They actually showed a familial attitude towards each other, for example using nicknames or being more protective (and sometimes rather paternalistic) with the youngest team members, including us: When we move into the new greenhouse, Peppe explains what to do: we have to take away the burgi of the tomato plants, namely the small branches that start at the plant’s fork. At the beginning, I almost can’t see the burgi, then little by little I become quicker at noticing them. Peppe teaches me with a lot of patience, without being too pressing, overseeing me gently. He says that this is the type of task that he prefers. He teaches me several curious things: for example, that the parts growing at the bottom are “wild” branches of the tomato plant, so they have a different smell. During the day, he tells me couple of times that I’m doing well. He seems quite proud of my work! [Fieldnotes, 5 April 2013]

The first working day was a curious experience both for us and for our workmates. Getting out of the greenhouse we all had the feeling of getting rid of a sort of ‘character’: leaving the workplace was like leaving a stage and coming back to our respective everyday lives. At the end of the day, Peppe said promptly: “The greenhouse is not a place for you, girls. Please, don’t come tomorrow! It would be nice to meet you again, but not in such an ugly place”; and Alessandro agreed and added: “This workplace is not appropriate for a woman” (in fact implying “a middleclass Italian woman”). Before leaving, Wera and Afrim insisted on giving

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us as a present a packet of candies “As if you were our daughters”, they said with a sweet smile. 2.3.3

SicilSerre

In June 2013, Ahmed, the Tunisian man I met at Kamari, offered me the opportunity to be hired for a few days by a small greenhouses company. Giovanni, his temporary employer, asked him to look for another worker and he invited me to join without informing Giovanni of my research interest. This experience of covert observation, on the one hand, allowed me to observe from within forms of negotiation, in which I took part alongside my workmates. On the other hand, unlike in the other workplaces where it was possible to come to an agreement with the employers securing longer period in the field (from two to four weeks), in this circumstance I found myself entangled in the dynamics and strict rules of day labour: those who work at the pace decided by the employer can keep the job, while the others are promptly fired. Although in the previous experiences I had been able to learn some of the techniques used in greenhouses, my slowness and my lack of physical endurance made me completely inadequate for this job. Since the difficulty of the work did not allow me to reach a sufficient yield, at the end of each day I was in the situation of having to rely much more on my persuasive skills than on my skills as a farmworker in order to convince my employer to hire me again the following day. All in all, the interactions in this workplace were observed for one week, which severely limited the possibility of analysis. Nevertheless, the covert participant observation proved to be a key tool for investigating and taking part in some of the dynamics, such as daily wage negotiations, not experienced elsewhere. It is my first day of work. The appointment was set at 5.30 in Piazza Busacca. I climb in Giovanni’s car, not without worry. I try to talk as little as possible, as Ahmed advised me to do. The uncle (as Ahmed calls him) asks immediately if I am Romanian. He expects just Romanian women to look for this kind of job, in fact. “No, I am Calabrian”, I respond. “Ah, in Calabria you all eat spicy food”. [Fieldnote, Vittoria, 10 June 2013]

It is the only sentence I wrote down in my notebook about that first conversation, the only thing Giovanni managed to utter to mask his sense of disorientation at finding himself in the car with a young Italian woman,

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and “with schooling” (as he would say to me a little later), rather than a robust Tunisian guy, as he had expected. From that moment on, Giovanni made several assumptions about my presence in the greenhouse, all more or less plausible. From time to time, I tried to take advantage of his beliefs and fit around myself the persona he offered: the girlfriend of Ahmed, a friend to whom Ahmed owed favours, or a person who is paying for intermediation, thus imagining Ahmed in the role of a gangmaster. As time passed, his suspicions towards me diminished, rendering the climate between us more relaxed, though even now I doubt they have been completely dispelled. SicilSerre, where we were informally recruited to work, was a small farm of less than two hectares, producing mainly insalataro tomatoes and a smaller crop of aubergines. Ahmed, who previously worked in greenhouses where they grew other types of vegetables, investigated the reasons for this choice.15 “The pepper, for instance”, said the uncle, “is actually more profitable and requires the input of less labour. The tomato instead is less profitable and requires more work. Yet, while the tomato has a very short production cycle, the pepper is slower. The tomatoes that have just been transplanted [in June] will be collected in August. If you need cash more quickly, therefore, you are pushed to plant tomatoes”. This explains why most of the land in the district is designated for the cultivation of different varieties of fresh tomatoes. During the first day of work in the greenhouse, Giovanni told me that before us a couple of Romanians were employed in the company, Gabriela, 28, and Petru, 31. They had worked with him for about two years before deciding to return to Rumania. “I like the system here!” He stated. “The system” consisted of the employment of Romanian labour at a salary of e25 per day, rather than the e30 usually paid to a Tunisian or Italian worker. ‘In return’ the employer provided a ‘house’, namely a toolshed or cabin, generally very small, badly insulated—thus always either too cold or too hot—often overcrowded, located right in the middle of the greenhouse area. A further advantage of employing a Romanian worker, Giovanni explained, is that “they usually do not ask for a work contract, whereas the Tunisians do, because they need it for their papers”. 15 In my fieldnotes this is reported as an unusual episode, because in the different contexts observed, it was more common that day labourers, especially informal ones, showed little interest in the dynamics of the produce’s distribution. The most common reply to my questions was: “I don’t know! The boss deals with these things”.

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Despite the fact that the ‘system’ is well known and taken for granted in the area, I asked myself why the uncle let his guard down with me— an employee—with these kinds of confidences. The answer arrived in another conversation in which Giovanni told me: “Mind you, because you’re Italian, you should understand me too. It’s not that I’m taking advantage of the situation. You have to understand!” From the very first day we discovered that my presence and that of Ahmed in the greenhouse was temporary. The uncle had already contacted a Romanian worker, Nicola, inviting him to replace the previous farmworkers. Nicola was a 40-year-oldman from Bac˘au, in North-east Romania, like many people living in Vittoria.16 In previous years, he had a construction job in Rome. He had already been employed in the greenhouse in 2011 and experienced the difficulty of a job from which he had tried to escape, but the closure of many construction sites in the capital had brought him south yet again. Repeating the frequent myths, Ahmed often complained that Romanians were actually “stealing their jobs”, because they were willing to be hired for a lower salary than Tunisian and Italian workers. Thus, since the very first day at SicilSerre, competition became tangible through the form of an everyday “contest” (as Giovanni termed it) between Ahmed and Nicola, in order to decide which of them would be informally hired for an extended period. Although the ‘participants’ clearly recognize the crushing logic of the competitive game that obviously demands a frantic increase in the pace of work, they cannot dispense with it. Their work pace was therefore marked by a constant scramble to be considered the faster, the better and the more productive worker (while in the meantime, I was almost not considered as a competitor). For that whole week, the work at SicilSerre was really tough for both me and Ahmed. The first day, in particular, we were assigned a task deemed to be among the hardest, namely cleaning the greenhouse: In the afternoon we begin ‘throwing out’ the tomato plants from the greenhouse. This is one of the tasks which takes place at the end of picking. When the plants are dry, they are cut, weeded, grouped in small heaps and gradually thrown out of the greenhouse. Initially Ahmed is inside the greenhouse and passes me the plants that I take and throw out. At first

16 Botosani, Iasi, Bac˘au and Gala¸ti are the cities along the eastern edge of Romania, , , from where the majority of migrants move to work in the TLS (cf. Campanella 2018).

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for me it isn’t too difficult a task, because staying out at least has the advantage of not suffering from the heat of the greenhouse. The tomato plants, however, are very dry, so they completely scrape our arms, so much so that, going forward, every time we take the plants in hand, both he and I, we continue to scratch ourselves and feel a sharp burn. At one point, I realize my whole neck is red and irritated, as well as my arms! They are completely covered in scratches and cuts! In this difficult moment Ahmed says: “This is a really dirty job! It’s the worst that can be done in the greenhouse! We should get at least e40!” At that moment I don’t have a clear response, and I only say: “So why do we get e30?”, “Because there is no work, do you know what I mean?”, he concludes, exasperated. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 10 June 2013]

At the end of the first working day, Ahmed and I both received a payment of e30. Nevertheless, the uncle complained that I “was not worth e30”, because I was not as fast as the others. So, I was not worth e30! This expression stuck in my mind, but even though I was terribly upset, I had no other option apart from accepting a lower salary of e25 in order to continue my covert fieldwork. As a consequence, Ahmed, who was as upset as me, advised me to slow down the pace the next day. 2.3.4

JustTomatoes

In March 2013, we had our first opportunity to experience working inside a packinghouse, with the possibility of being hired later on. JustTomatoes was a small company employing sixteen Italian workers, four men and twelve women. The manager introduced us to our supervisor, Carmela, explaining to her that we were enrolled in the University, in search of a sort of internship. The overseer showed us our desks and explained our tasks: we were expected to work in lines, packing several types of vegetable (cherry tomatoes, aubergines, zucchini) into small plastic vaschette [boxes], and then inserting them in larger vassoi or padelloni [cardboard boxes]. The packing process was organized so as to take both appearance and volume into account. Depending on the type of crop, we were expected to do the cushion, use the hanky, do the pressed on, work the (zucchini) 20 or 23 separately and so on: expressions and tasks that were as nonsensical for the novice worker as they are for the reader. As often happens to people not accustomed to manual labour, we felt awkward and uncomfortable in our positions, and we immediately became the target of the other employees’ jokes and subtle disdain.

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Carmela, in particular, laughed at us mockingly and commented: “You maybe thought that this was an easy job… Well, actually now you know that it’s not! I don’t think they teach you these kinds of things at school! Do they?” The other employees barely talked to us, but they spoke loudly among themselves, pretending we were not there or that we were not able to understand their language. I also became the target of fierce jokes concerning the city they supposed I come from—Milan—because of my University affiliation at that time: “Have you ever seen an eggplant in Milan? Maybe not!”; “These tomatoes we are processing here are so expensive that only rich Milanese people can eat them”. Even though I reminded myself that this reaction was somehow predictable, nevertheless I was unprepared for so much hostility in a workplace. And moreover, during the morning shift Franca, a 31-year-old Italian employee, arrived in the warehouse. She was one of the numerous female packinghouse workers forced to combine their family caring tasks with more than one job. Very often, in fact, as employment in the processing plants was so sporadic and poorly paid (on average e4 per hour), it was not sufficient as a single source of income. Thus Franca was having to take random night shifts at another company and, more frequently, day shifts for JustTomatoes. That day, however, she felt too tired to avoid sleep completely, and she pretended to be sick, in order to stay at home and rest. Unfortunately, though, she was warned by her colleagues about our presence in the lines and suddenly showed up, screaming: Franca: Carmela: F:

I’m off work for just one day, and you lot immediately replace me with these two girls? No, calm down, they’re only here to learn. They’re from school. School? I’ve been to school too! [Informal conversation, Donnalucata, 4 May 2013]

Franca’s aggressive reaction towards us epitomizes the high level of uncertainty experienced by the packinghouse workers, who were all seriously concerned about losing their job and being rapidly replaced. High turnover and high shift flexibility characterize this kind of employment: workers spend their days at the mercy of a phone call asking them to be on-site in twenty minutes, for a number of hours that they generally do not know in advance, and in addition, they may not get a call at all

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for several days. In most of the small companies, shifts are not planned, since workload depends on the orders that the company receives daily and on the quantity of produce locally available. The just-in-time system of production, thus, transfers onto packinghouse workers the social costs of eating fresh food. The unpleasant atmosphere inside JustTomatoes lasted the entire day, even during the lunch break when people mostly avoided talking to us. At the end of the shift, removing our uniforms, Giuliana and I shared our opinions about the experience, agreeing that maybe JustTomatoes was not an appropriate location for participant observation. The day after, we kindly declined the employers’ offer to hire us for the following weeks. 2.3.5

TomatoArtists

Our negative experience at JustTomatoes badly affected our perceptions of the accessibility of packinghouses. It took quite a lot of time, in fact, to recover from the feelings of frustration generated by this experience, and to look for a similar kind of job once again. In middle of June 2013, we finally found a 15-day contract at a packinghouse with a company named TomatoArtists. Before hiring us, our prospective employer, Mario, met my colleague and me several times, during which we conducted a long and detailed interview regarding his life-story. He depicted himself as a self-made man, who started to work as a day labourer in his father’s firm, and, through his genuine efforts and stubbornness, was able to enlarge the family-run business. At the time of our fieldwork, Mario was a medium-to-large local entrepreneur, managing different type of business in the agriculture, hospitality and construction sectors. Concerning agriculture, aside from the packinghouse he owned and managed thirty hectares of greenhouses and a warehouse for distribution of produce in the local fruit and veg market. Nevertheless, his interest in investing in the clean energy sector, driven by the possibility of receiving public funding, was currently pushing him towards shrinking his investments in agriculture and restructuring of his companies. The number of employees inside greenhouses and packinghouses was thus reduced from around 300 to few dozen in almost five years, leading the company to numerous disputes with workers and trade unions. When we started working at TomatoArtists, employees were facing a period of extreme uncertainty: they were working for a few hours per day,

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with shifts never planned in advance, and worst of all, they had not been paid for several months. The environment in the workplace mirrored this situation, conveying a sense of emptiness and abandonment: inside the plant many of the lines were not in production anymore; there was no canteen and workers ate their food standing in front of the truck entrance; in the changing rooms closets were broken and the coffee machines did not work anymore; even the car park was empty because it was unsafe for the management and administrative staff to park their cars in front of the warehouse. During our first day, we were surprised by this awful situation. When our shift started, in the lines there were just me, Giuliana, Davide, our supervisor, and Pavli, an Albanian man in his 40s. Davide, a 30-year-old man, was very friendly towards us. He showed us how we were expected to wrap the pinto beans, without caring much about teaching us a precise technique, and not requiring us to be fast or confident. Each of us was assigned a number, printed on a piece of paper, and given a desk equipped with a scale. On our left was a pile of cardboard and plastic boxes. On our right there were two conveyor belts: the first one, filled by Davide when necessary, transported the row vegetables; on the second one, we were expected to upload the processed produce, including the piece of paper with our number, enabling Davide to check our individual work. Cherry tomatoes were the most common vegetable we needed to clean and pack in half-kilo plastic boxes. We were taught that the average speed was twelve cardboard boxes filled with ten plastic boxes in one hour, which meant processing five kilos of tomatoes per hour. However, the quickest and most experienced workers were able to double this rate (20– 22 cardboard boxes per hour, almost ten kilos of tomatoes), although this largely also depended on the quality of the produce. After a cardboard box was uploaded on the conveyor, it reached the end of the line, where Davide was checking, labelling and piling it, before moving several of these boxes into the refrigeration room. While processing vegetables, Davide was very chatty and loved gossiping about our boss. He discussed with us the alleged crisis in the company, raising some doubts about it. According to him, production was doing well, revenues were increasing, so the only reason for not paying workers was to simulate a failure and move investments towards much more convenient businesses. The company had enlarged in the previous years, thanks to great political support that was epitomized by the frequent visits from local politicians, asking for some free vegetables

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as an exchange for other favours. Davide was not impressed by this situation, which according to him was typical all over Sicily, and in addition he was trying to get his own advantages by networking with politicians during those visits. During the first day, the other team members, five women and one man, none of them Italian, reached the packinghouse at a different time, which means that each of them had a different shift. Me, Giuliana and Pavli started work at 9am; one hour later, Darjiana and Magi, Pavli’s cousin and wife, arrived; finally, Aleksandra, a Polish woman in her sixties, Fathima (42), a Tunisian woman, and Sahara (28) an Algerian woman, joined the line. Almost all of them were friendly and came to introduce themselves to us, except for Sahara who was sceptical about our presence and asked Fathima about us in Arabic. Fathima promptly replied in Italian that we were “just two new friends”. All the workers had been living in the TLS for more than ten years and had spent several years working for TomatoArtists. Among the women, some of them started working for their husbands in greenhouses without receiving any salary and for this reason they had looked for a waged job inside a packinghouse. Since none of them could drive or had a car, they had to rely on paid lifts, or had to give over several hours of walking per day from the nearest city, Santa Croce Camerina, which in the past had been very difficult due to them being on night shifts. During the first working day, we were invited to the admin office to sign our contracts. The consultant explained to us that according to the system that is widespread in Sicily, we would work for 15 days, but the employer would pay just 2–3 days to the social security services. Our actual salary would be e4 per hour, instead of e6.50 as was written on our payroll, and just part of the wage would have been officially registered. We could not know in advance how many days per week and how many hours per day we were expected to work, because it depended on the customers’ orders. Every day we would receive a phone call from Davide, our supervisor, asking us to be in the warehouse within 20– 30 minutes. These were the labour conditions, but, according to the consultant, they were pretty much the same everywhere, as he kindly invited us to check. His suggestion was that we should be happy and relieved that at least we had found a job, give the high number of unemployed people in the area. We came back in the lines feeling quite anxious about what the coming days would be like. The other workmates explained to us that in this

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situation “you can never organize your life”. You cannot refuse to work, because you do not know when and if you will receive a second call. When we asked about the salaries, they all laughed wholeheartedly: they had not been paid for the last nine months, with very few exceptions, and the employer owed each of them several thousand Euros. Nevertheless, none of them was thinking about looking for another job, because they felt to have no other opportunities. The discussion concerning this awful situation occurred in the plant at the end of the first working day. In the next few days, I was really worried about openly talking about these topics in the workplace. While waiting for the supervisor’s phone call, I was wondering whether the employer had realized the purpose of our presence, perhaps deciding to terminate our period of observation of the workplace without notice. I was suspicious that Davide or the other employees might have reported the ideas we expressed so wholeheartedly and naively, and our harsh criticisms of the boss. Soon after, I realized this suspicion towards the other team members and our supervisor was a common feeling, due to the high level of uncertainty faced by all the employees enduring such a precarious situation.

2.4

From the Workplace to the Home

Coming back home after work, every night Giuliana and I took fieldnotes individually, and additionally, we recorded our conversations while discussing the workday. Conducting our research jointly felt obviously advantageous, since it had important implications concerning the possibility of accessing the field in an easier and safer way, and therefore being able to take bigger risks and to feel much more comfortable in a wider variety of situations. Furthermore, working together allowed us to sharpen our reflexive approach towards the field. After long and tiring sessions, Giuliana and I could share our observations, perceptions and feelings, minimizing the sense of disorientation and frustration usually felt by the ‘lone researcher’ in the field (Salzman 1994). Moreover, the double process of data recording, first individually and then in dialogue between us, was extremely useful in terms of developing our analytical framework. Many times in our conversations and written notes, we openly expressed doubts about the efficaciousness of participant observation, a method that forced us to work for 8–9 hours, losing concentration among simultaneous conversations with teammates, and making us too exhausted

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to take detailed fieldnotes at the end of the workday. At first glance, observation seemed excessively time-consuming, while offering limited results. In those moments, we wholeheartedly agreed with Ahmed and other teammates, wondering why we “couldn’t stay outside and look on instead of working”. After several months, however, we became more and more conscious of the fruitfulness of participant observation as an in-depth research method which provided valuable insights concerning the labour process and the everyday routines of Italian and migrant farmworkers. In the following chapters, I am going to present the data collected through participant observation in the workplaces described above, coupled with interviews collected from January 2013 to September 2019. As previously mentioned, in the following chapters I am going to examine struggles around employment contracts, the wage and the body in order to provide a broader understanding of day labour relations.

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Urzì, Domenica, and Colin Williams. 2016. “Beyond Post-national Citizenship: An Evaluation of the Experiences of Tunisian and Romanian Migrants Working in the Agricultural Sector in Sicily.” Citizenship Studies 21 (1): 136–50. Wacquant, Loïc. 2000. Body and Soul. New York: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 2005. “Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership.” Qualitative Sociology 28 (4): 445–74.

CHAPTER 3

Bargaining Over Contracts in a ‘Day Labour’ Market

Abstract This chapter explores the everyday negotiations centred on employment contracts in agriculture. Firstly, it shows how the promise to sign a contract represents a fundamental means to tie farmworkers to workplaces and to shape employees’ expected performance and ‘moral’ behaviour. Secondly, the chapter exemplifies some of the everyday forms of bargaining over contracts and social security contributions. Finally, it demonstrates how employers’ power to decide whether or not to provide a contract is counterbalanced by day labourers’ mobility power between companies, sectors, regions and throughout Europe, which is further increased by their ability to bend formal rules and welfare system to their advantage as a way to cope with day labour. Keywords Day labour · Labour mobility power · Migrant farmworkers · Employment contracts · Unemployment benefit

3.1

Unpacking Day Labour

In Piazza Manin, a square in Vittoria’s city centre where many Tunisian men gather to chill out and chat under the palm trees, most of the conversations centre on the topic of work. Their main concern is how to find a

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job, even just for a few days, with an employer who can pay them straightaway. People discuss the number of days they work per month or per year, counting how many days they are still missing in order to apply for welfare benefits. If you ask the straightforward question: “What kind of job do you do?”, the reply most of the time is “I work by the day”, while the industry—mainly agriculture—is implicit rather than mentioned directly. A few hundred metres away is Piazza Cavour, the central square of Vittoria. Here, Sicilian men gather in front of the main church and the neoclassical theatre and most of their conversations also centre on the topic of work. Their main concern is how to find a worker for only a few days, one who is reliable and also willing to wait until the produce ripens and is sold to the marketplace, after which they will finally be paid and this cash can then be used to repay loans and workers’ wages. In recounting their life stories, many of these small entrepreneurs depict themselves as self-made men who started their career as day labourers. According to them, their life paths are characterized by savings and sacrifice, and so they diverge from those people ‘living by the day’, namely shirking and living hand to mouth. To ‘work by the day’ (in the Sicilian expression travagghiari a jurnata) is the most widespread definition used by both workers and employers to refer to the uneven, casual and partially un-registered type of work in greenhouses and packinghouses in the TLS. Day labour, as a specific form of nonstandard and contingent employment, has been explored by a number of scholars. Among others, Abel Valenzuela, by combining both survey data in the USA (1999), direct observations and a literature review (2003), distinguishes between two basic types of day labour industry: the informal and the formal. According to his definition (Valenzuela 2003, 308): ‘Informal day labor is characterized by men (and, in a few cases, women) who congregate in open-air curbside or visible markets such as empty lots, street corners, parking lots, designated public spaces, or store fronts of home improvement establishments to solicit temporary daily work’ while ‘the formal day labor industry is primarily connected to for-profit temp agencies or ‘hiring halls’ and places workers in manual work assignments at or around minimum wage’. In the informal sector, the workers seeking day labour are mainly migrants, usually men, recently arrived and therefore often with a poor command of the local language, sometimes with an irregular migration status which impedes their search for a job in the formal sector and puts them in a highly vulnerable position

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in the labour market. Among the participants in formal day labour, Valenzuela also includes non-immigrants, women and a substantial homeless population (309). Day labour is widespread and highly visible in several countries and across an array of sectors, from construction (Perrotta 2011) to domestic work (Apostolidis 2018), in both urban and rural contexts, assuming forms that often fall between formality and informality. Researchers on this topic (Valenzuela 1999, 2003; Theodore et al. 2006; Rogaly 2009; Apostolidis 2019) identify some common features which characterize day labour: workers can be hired to undertake a great variety of activities, usually those which are labour-intensive, demanding and unsafe; they commonly face underemployment, since they do not secure work every day; on average, they manage to find a job for a few days a week, so their income is scanty and uneven. Moreover, the salary assumes the form of a cash payment, which may be received on a daily basis, but may also be withheld and, in numerous cases, not even paid at all; workers can be remunerated hourly, daily or sometimes on a piece rate and they have to haggle over their wages before accepting a compromise. At hiring spots, competition is cutthroat, and this fierce struggle to secure the few available offers exacerbates workers’ atomization, weakening collective strategies to address abuses (Theodore 2014; Camou 2009). Lastly, due to the very structure of the day labour market, several typologies of intermediary can emerge, in the form of both recruitment agencies and informal brokers (Enright 2013). The definition of day labour is much more appropriate to describe the work relations in the TLS than the definition of seasonal labour, which is more frequently used to designate work in several other enclaves of intensive agriculture worldwide (cf. Corrado et al. 2016; Gertel and Sippel 2014). In the latter cases, the seasonality of production coupled with extensive monoculture usually leads to a standardization in the crop cycles among the companies located in the same area and, consequently, to a standardization of labour and migration cycles. Conversely, this homogeneity is lacking among the companies in the TLS, where each firm demands labour according to the type of vegetable cultivated and to the phase of production of the selected crop. This means that farms usually hire a small number of stable workers (indeed they indenture them through a temporary contract) and, at the same time, rely on casualized day labourers already present in the area in order to adjust to peaks in production in different seasons during the year. In terms of migration

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processes, this has led to a progressive stabilization of migrants employed temporarily or daily in the TLS, differently from other enclaves of seasonal agricultural production around the country. Although the majority of workers define themselves as ‘day labourers’, in both the formal and informal sectors, their situations are actually highly differentiated according to nationality, migration status, gender, skin colour, age and living situations (onsite or outside the workplace). Informality, for instance, affects day labourers differently according to their nationality and migration status (as Italians, EU or non-EU citizens, asylum seekers). For Tunisian farmworkers, unindentured labour constitutes a serious concern, since to apply or renew a residence permit they need to provide evidence of a job contract. By contrast, Romanian workers, endowed with European citizenship, do not need to apply for documents to work in Italy; nevertheless, by working ‘under the table’ they are excluded from their possible share of public subsidies and welfare benefits (such as access to public health services, pensions, etc.). Finally, for refugees and asylum seekers, legal status is independent from their work situation in the short term, although a job contract is pivotal to assuring their legal position when documents based on a temporary humanitarian protection expire. Notwithstanding these differences, the necessity to secure work every day is a common concern, and the opportunity to sign a job contract with a local company is always greatly welcomed. However, in a labour market characterized by high levels of informality like the TLS, a contract is generally established after a long-lasting relationship between an employer and an employee. The promise to sign a legally-binding agreement, meanwhile, motivates workers to display maximum stamina and adaptability and to avoid ‘misbehaving’. In this sense, as explored in Sect. 3.2, the contract represents a significant tool in the employers’ hands, in order to shape a ‘good’ farmworker according to their needs of flexibility and trustworthiness and, moreover, to tie labourers to their workplaces in the longer term. When an employment contract is established, in the overwhelming majority of the cases, it is a temporary one, which entails for farmworkers the possibility to access a specific agriculture-related unemployment benefit and for the employers the opportunity to reduce social security costs thanks also to the low risk of their business undergoing labour inspections. The provision of unemployment benefit depends on a company’s daily payment to the Social Security National Institute (INPS), and

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this means that the number of working days actually registered represents a highly contested terrain, fuelling disputes between employers and employees (see Sect. 3.3). In everyday negotiations around the contract, it is the employer that usually decides to issue (or not) a formal agreement as well as to pay social security contributions. Nevertheless, farmworkers are able to carry out strategies that allow them to cope with these uncertainties and to strategize around their actual lack of legal agreement: they can opt to leave jobs without notice, putting at risk the employer’s ability to harvest perishable crops on time; moreover, as they are usually aware of the local rules of the game concerning public subsidies, they can bend them strategically in order to improve their situation in the labour market (see Sect. 3.4). The following pages, therefore, describe some of the ways through which employers and employees engage in struggles around contracts, at the same time adapting to immigration and labour regulations and bending them in their everyday life.

3.2 3.2.1

Paternalistic Labour Relations: Shaping a ‘Good Farmworker’ ‘Good’ Farmworkers’ Permanent Availability

In the TLS, as well as in many other areas where informal day labour is widespread, signing a job contract is almost never a prerequisite for working. Indeed, it may occur only if a strong bond based on trust emerges gradually between the employer and the employee. Therefore, the formal agreement does not usually mark the actual beginning of a labour relation: it more often symbolizes the strengthening of a pre-existing tie, an actual demonstration of the long-lasting informal conventions established between the employer and the employee in the workplace. It confirms, in fact, the mutual expectation that several unwritten rules (regarding wages, working hours and pace, level of output, forms of control and attempts of defections) are going to be followed in the workplace. During the conversation with Lorina, she told me that she was going to move with her husband Patriciu to work in another company, thanks to an offer of a couple from the same town as them in Romania. She went with Patriciu to visit their new place and found that this ‘house’ was definitely

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better that the previous one, being bigger and with a nicer kitchen and a better toilet which would only be shared with one other couple. She thought this arrangement was fine, although the wage was the same as usual, e25 per day. When I asked her about the contract, she promptly replied that of course, for the time being, the employer was not giving them one. “We have to start working for him first, so he can trust us”, she argued. At that moment, I sensed this explanation as obvious, although now I find it puzzling. [Fieldnote, 10 December 2015]

As exemplified by the case of Lorina and Patriciu, the job contract is often deemed to be ‘granted’ by the company as a ‘favour’, and only in a very few cases is it considered as a form of bargaining or mutual agreement between the employer and the employee. Since it is conceived as a concession, to receive it workers are required to deserve it by demonstrating efficiency at work and by showing the ‘correct’ behaviour towards their employers, including not reporting them to trade unions. The possibility of stabilizing labour relations through a contract thus pushes workers to show compliance towards their employers’ requirements. The first requirement for a farmworker generally consists in demonstrating both their comprehensive availability for overwork in cases of peaks in production and their willingness to remain at home with no wage when labour demand is slack. In the greenhouses, for instance, the request to overwork is common during the picking season, although daily wages do not increase in line with the hours of work. When growers need to harvest during their employees’ days off, such as weekends and festivals, they usually rely on migrant workers, especially those living onsite, taking for granted their permanent availability and their assumed ‘work ethic’ (cf. also MacKenzie and Ford 2009; Castracani 2019). As many labourers have explained, far from reflecting loyalty to the firm, this attitude results firstly from the fear of being fired and secondly from an internal dynamic of competition emerging between the team members: whenever someone makes clear their tacit acceptance of overtime work, even if not expressly required by the boss, the whole team is expected to be in the workplace. These situations prevent workers from resting, increase the pace of work and clearly exacerbate latent conflicts between team members. In packinghouses, likewise, workers experience the same fear of being replaced or not having their shifts renewed. Darjana described these worries while she was working with me and Giuliana at TomatoArtists:

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[When you receive a phone call from the company] you have to show up in any case, even if they require your work for just ten minutes. Sometimes you even spend more money for gasoline from your place to get here than you earn in an entire shift. But you can’t say no, because this means that tomorrow there would be no more job for you. [Informal conversation, Santa Croce Camerina, 20 June 2013]

A similar situation was faced by Serena, a 50-year-old Sicilian woman employed at a small packinghouse company in Vittoria. When we first met, she immediately showed a great interest in participating in our study to talk about her experience. Nevertheless, it was difficult to meet up, as several times she was forced to cancel in order to go to work at short notice. When we were finally able to interview her in the peace and quiet of her home, she explained: We don’t have any planned shifts. We don’t know in advance when we will have a day off. It depends on the orders that the packinghouse receives and on the availability of tomatoes. Today, for example, there was an order, so we went there at 9 o’clock. But at 9 there were no tomatoes available to be processed. So, we had to come back home and wait till tomorrow. Sometimes the bosses plan the shifts. But each time it is at their discretion who gets to work, and so you never know if you are on shift and with whom. Four, five, ten people, it depends, there isn’t a stable team. [Interview, Comiso, 22 March 2013]

A few days after the interview, we had the opportunity to follow Serena into her workplace and to observe the labour process at the packinghouse. We happened upon one of these situations where workers have to wait around till produce is delivered. As I jotted down in my notes, I was surprised that the atmosphere outside the packinghouse was actually relaxed: women were chatting kindly, laughing, enjoying their coffees, asking questions about our presence there; no one seemed to be stressed out about waiting for more than one hour before starting work, and this unpaid time was filled with conversations and camaraderie. When the laughs in the parking lots were brutally interrupted by a bell ringing, meaning that the produce was ready, workers went to their positions in the lines without knowing how many hours they were expected to work for. The demand for the packinghouse workers (mostly women) is to be docile while waiting, as well as always ready to overwork if needed (cf. Moreno Nieto 2014). The decision or the actual impossibility of fulfilling

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these requirements is stigmatized by the employers, who subject workers to sanctions whenever they show less willingness to ‘sacrifice themselves for tomato’, as Serena put it in her interview. [In our packinghouse] those working less are always our Tunisian colleagues. […] That’s because they never wait till the truck with tomatoes arrives. Instead, my friend and I usually wait, even if these hours are not paid at all! But we usually wait… because sometimes the employers say you will work just for one hour, but then the actual number of hours become two or three. […] The Tunisians, instead, don’t care about waiting. And then when there is something to do, a short two-hour shift for example, the foreman calls just those who are willing to wait, those who sacrifice themselves for tomatoes. The boss says: “They are always here waiting, they are at our beck-and-call, so we prefer to pay those workers who behave in this way”. [Interview, Comiso, 22 March 2013]

Similar to the situation in the greenhouses, in the packinghouses employers usually take for granted the permanent availability of female labourers. This readiness to work arises from the labourers’ fear of losing their job, coupled with the engagement in internal competitions within the team members to be at work. These conflicts are usually recounted by labourers relying on widely accepted racialized scripts and stereotypes which reproduce divisions based on nationalities, while also obscuring the employers’ advantages derived from hierarchizing employees and fuelling forms of internal competition among the workforce. 3.2.2

Paternalism at Work

Aside from demonstrating their permanent availability, in order to obtain a contract securing their position or to have the shift renewed, day labourers need also to demonstrate other qualities to their employers. According to Karim, our Tunisian colleague at Kemiri, a farmworker needs to maintain “good behaviour”, namely “to be reliable, trustworthy, all in all, to be an honest person”. In his words, “good behaviour” has to do not only with specific workplace requirements, such as efficiency and accuracy, but also encompasses a farmworker’s moral attitudes that transcend the workplace and working hours (“to be an honest person”). Employees showing habits commonly deemed to be ‘immoral’, such as drinking or gambling, although not strictly connected with efficiency at

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work, are suspected by the employers to be troublesome and lazy, jeopardizing their possibility of obtaining a contract and even risking being dismissed. Gennaro, a fifty-five-year-old man hired as a foreman at Gurrieri before our arrival, experienced a similar story. Giuliana and I used to meet him almost every morning before starting work when we stopped for a coffee in a bar close to the greenhouses. Since he knew we were working at Gurrieri at the time, he often interrupted our breakfast by chatting to us. When speaking about his previous boss, he seemed to show more reverence than disappointment. This attitude puzzled me, leading me to ask to Peppe for further explanation concerning the relationship between the two men: Peppe replies that Gennaro was “like a son” to Franco. Since the two men are almost the same age, I realize that being “like a son” implies that Gennaro was adopting “childish” behaviour. According to Peppe, in fact, Gennaro used to go to Franco more or less once a week to ask for money that then he wasted on gambling or drinking. “Franco has no problem with standing us part of our wages ahead of time, he says that it’s our money in any case. But with Gennaro… he couldn’t do it anymore, it was too much”. However, Peppe does not criticise Franco: in his view, the boss was trying to “educate” Gennaro to save his money like any “good father” would have done. [Fieldnotes, Donnalucata, 9 April 2013]

The description of Franco as a ‘good boss’ and even, in the words of Peppe, a “good father”, implicitly prescribes farmworkers to maintain ‘moral’ behaviour within and beyond the workplace. This prescription was reinforced daily by some oft-repeated jokes within the team: in these circumstances, Franco enjoyed acting like a ‘father’ and asked the employees who was paying for their needs, such as an instalment of the cost of a car or a son’s university tuition. The employees, engaging with the boss’ jokes, usually replied promptly that it was him, Franco, who was paying. This kind of paternalistic relationship, which surrounded workers at Gurrieri, appeared to be even stronger between the employer and the foreign employees, due to the more imbalanced nature of this labour

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relation. According to the Italian migration law,1 in fact, for people from outside the EU migrating for work reasons, the issuing of a residence permit depends on the existence of a job contract. For a large number of migrants moving to Italy in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s, the experience of irregular migration status in Italy was quite common. Many migrants waited for the possibility of regularizing their legal status through a periodic amnesty2 or through the annual quota system (decreto flussi). Thus, these situations of transition from irregularity to regularity often depended on the employers’ ‘goodwill’ to formalize pre-existing work relationships. At Gurrieri, this was the case for Gigi, our Tunisian workmate. The whole team considered Gigi’s relationship with his employer as particularly meaningful, since Franco was the “first one to issue Gigi’s papers” and consequently to formalize a contract with him. According to my teammates, this denoted “unconditional mutual trust” and “full respect” between the two men. Within the team, Gigi was quite unpopular due to his nasty character and his imprecise and rushed way of collecting tomatoes. Nevertheless, whenever I asked why the boss did not admonish or even sack him, the reply was that this was basically impossible, because Franco ‘made’ Gigi’s documents for the first time and provided him a contract. Moreover, the employer also gave Gigi his Italian name, discarding his Tunisian one (Yassin) and in some way ‘baptizing’ him, reinventing a new persona and formally guaranteeing his residence in the country. Therefore, as the workers understood it, Franco played a pivotal role as ‘gatekeeper’ for the Tunisian man, since it was the employer—and

1 The Italian migration law in relation to these issues was last modified in 2002 (cf.

Colucci 2018). 2 Between 1986 and 2012, every reform concerning migration law in Italy was coupled with an amnesty. In 1986 (Foschi Law), the regularization concerned 105,000 people; in 1990 (the Martelli Law), 218,000 people were regularized; in 1995 (Dini’s decree), 245,000; in 1998 (the Turco-Napolitano Law), around 217,000; in 2002 (the Bossi-Fini Law), more than 645,000 (Colombo and Sciortino 2004); in 2009 (so-called domestic workers amnesty), around 215,000; finally, in 2012, the Monti government regularized 120,000 foreigners (Colucci 2018). In Summer 2020, under pressure from the workforce shortage caused by the COVID-19 emergency, the Italian government issued another amnesty (involving about 207,000 migrants), this time addressed exclusively towards agricultural, care and domestic workers.

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not the state—who was in charge of issuing Gigi’s documents and legitimizing his presence as a foreign worker (Ambrosini 2017, 1821; cf. also Anderson 2010). The fact that the relationship between the migrant worker and the employer who first ‘made the documents’ and formalized a labour contract is actually fraught with huge symbolic meaning is also confirmed when taking into consideration Afrim’s life story. This Albanian man used to talk about his past experiences while we were all having lunch together under the shade of a big tree in front of the greenhouses at Gurrieri. Afrim recounted that he arrived in Italy for the first time in 1994 by paying an Albanian smuggler. He lived and worked in Sicily for four years without documents and, in the meantime, he also received an expulsion order. In 1997, he started working on a farm looking after cows. He called the employer of that time ‘Don’ Lillo using the epithet ‘Don’, still quite widely employed in Sicily in order to indicate a reverential attitude towards powerful people, considered politically, culturally and morally influential. Afrim often said that Don Lillo “helped [him] a lot in making his documents”. In 1998, for instance, when it became possible for migrant workers to be regularized through an amnesty, Don Lillo used his influence to convince the local police officer to issue Afrim’s residence permit, which had been blocked because of a previous expulsion order against the Albanian man. Moreover, a few years later, Don Lillo made sure Wera, the wife of the Albanian man, could also move to Italy by allowing Afrim to declare that Don Lillo’s house was his place of residence. These acts, perceived as forms of solidarity, created a strong tie between Afrim and his previous boss, and this constituted the basis for their long working relationship, interrupted only by Don Lillo’s premature death. Endowed with the possibility of providing migrants with a labour contract and, at the same time, with the right to reside and work legally in Italy, the employers’ power is definitively strengthened through immigration law and through the everyday reproduction of paternalistic relationships within workplaces. Alain Morice (2007) defines these relationships as complex and ambivalent since they couple opposing behaviours, such as imposition and protection, exploitation and distribution of resources, dependency and autonomy. Moreover, as explained by Frédéric Décosse (2013, 118–19), debt—not just economic but also moral—represents one of the pivotal mechanisms by which migrant mobility can be controlled:

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It is very common that the worker perceives the job contract as a favour received from their boss, allowing the employer to treat the labour relation in a paternalistic manner, namely alternating punishment with favour. […] The debt, the paternalistic attitude, the obligations and loyalty all represent elements which actually strengthen worker exploitation.3

This paternalistic behaviour (as ‘good fathers’, that genuinely care about the well-being and legal status of their employees, and as bosses in charge of controlling and intensifying the work pace) leads the employers to often exceed their role, demanding their employees’ permanent availability, including outside of the workplace and working hours. This commonly affects live-in farmworkers, especially women. Camila, a Romanian worker in her 40s, recounted that employers frequently require female members of the work team to clean the boss’ houses or offices without any extra remuneration. Furthermore, paternalistic relationships embroil workers in a complex web of meaningful ties that hugely limit their decision to quit the job (cf. also Sánchez Saldaña and Lara Flores 2019). Thus, long-lasting work relationships and mutual trust ties, materially sealed through an employment contract, represent a means not only to shape the ‘good farmworkers’, but also to bind them to workplaces, making the decision to quit much more unlikely.

3.3

Everyday Uses of Employment Contracts

The type of indenture provided by an agricultural company in the TLS is often temporary and assumes the form of a ‘Temporary Farmworker Contract’ (contratto da operaio agricolo a tempo determinato), while other options are actually residual.4 The framework regulating the temporary farmworker contract consists in a basic arrangement between the employer and the employee, similar to a zero-hours contract, which establishes a timespan of validity of the agreement (widely known as an ingaggio) but does not specify in advance the number of days a labourer is expected to be at work. The actual number of working days has to be

3 Author’s own translation. 4 Permanent contracts, for example, are seldom used, generally to indenture adminis-

trative staff in large agricultural companies. In the TLS, we can also register the practice of sharecropping, established through a type of contract (contratto di compartecipazione) that formally designates employees as the employer’s ‘associate’.

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communicated by the employer to the Department of Social Security at the end of each trimester. Once a year, if farmworkers are cumulatively registered for more than 51 and less than 180 days, they are entitled to apply for an unemployment benefit (sussidio di disoccupazione agricola), in order to reach a minimum wage level. The rationale for this regulation is to guarantee flexibility to an industry defined by structural unevenness due to the seasonality of produce and weather conditions, which of course is not the case for greenhouse agriculture. However, this surplus of flexibility is very much welcomed by companies in the TLS because it allows them to reduce labour costs by adapting to the fluctuation in produce demand while binding farmworkers to a highly uncertain working schedule. Mostly, employers register a very small number of working days with the National Social Security Institute (INPS), and this is usually agreed in advance with the employees. Giuliana and I became well acquainted with these dynamics when signing our job contracts for TomatoArtists, when the company’s consultant explained to us straightforwardly: Now I’m going to tell you the way the system works in agriculture: within the agricultural sector there exists a job contract, on the basis of which we declare a certain number of days. In our packinghouse, for example, we register 51, 78 or 102 days. These are the different thresholds. Usually, for instance, you work for a month, but we pay your contributions for just eight or nine days in that month. As soon as you reach the 51-day threshold in one year you can apply for the well-known Agricultural Unemployment Subsidy. Companies usually do it like this because it is convenient both for the employer and the employee. You can ask around, go wherever you want, in all the companies it works like this. During one year you usually work for 320–330 days, your salary is paid for 330 days, but you have just 102 daily contributions5 . This is because if you exceed the 180-day threshold, you don’t get the unemployment benefit, do you know what I mean? […] Now we have to hire you because it’s compulsory by law! […] But with the agricultural contracts it works like this, not because this is what we want, but because it works like this everywhere! [Informal conversation, Santa Croce Camerina, 17 June 2013]

5 To reach the 102-day threshold is the most common agreement between employers and employees, since it allows farmworkers to access also family allowances, paid for the entire year, increasing the overall sum of the benefit.

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What is first noticeable here is that our interlocutor is not reticent in disclosing that his company is perpetrating a systematic evasion of contributions and taxes. As with the large majority of the employers interviewed, his total confidence reveals that this practice is largely accepted and normalized in the TLS. In the job consultant’s account, while some aspects of the recruitment procedures are deemed to be strictly bound by law (i.e. hiring workers through an ingaggio) some others are not (such as the requirement to pay taxes and contributions per day). Throughout this discourse, the system is described as a ‘win-win’ game, since it is said to be “convenient both for the employer and the employee”, although neglecting their divergent interests and not taking into consideration the state’s and community’s collective interest. Through this mechanism, companies are actually able to reduce their labour costs directly by employing workers ‘off the books’ due to difficulties in detecting these legal violations; furthermore, employers often ask farmworkers to pay entirely or partially for contributions in order to reach the 102-day threshold. Moreover, companies save money indirectly because they are not compelled to pay any salaries, contributions or taxes when production is slack, and workers can be left at home. Finally, the presence of a public subsidy allows companies to bargain with workers a lower hourly wage, as is exemplified by the situation at TomatoArtists. In fact, at the beginning of 2013, the hourly salary at the packinghouse was reduced from e4.30 to e4 per hour; at the same time, however, the number of social security contributions paid for each worker was increased from 51 to 102 days. Clearly, the possibility of getting more social security money prevented workers from quitting their job and compensated for their loss of income while at the same time reducing the company’s overall labour costs. From the farmworkers’ perspective, those who collect a maximum of 180 days are able to apply for the unemployment subsidy which actually supplements their salaries. The annual amount that a day labourer receives per year from INPS can vary consistently according to the number of days formally registered by the employer and the household composition. In approximate figures, a single worker with 102 days registered receives a state benefit of around e2000 per year, while a farmworker with 102 days and four dependent household members can receive around e6000 per year. Nevertheless, for the majority of labourers, work in the greenhouses and packinghouses is never interrupted and so they do not perceive themselves as unemployed. Consequently, the unemployment subsidy is not

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conceived as compensation for the actual loss of salary. Due to the specific way in which this money is transferred (i.e. in the form of a ‘lump sum’ paid by the state once a year), it is habitually considered as an extra payment and is earmarked for extra purposes, such as to repay a loan or to afford a mortgage, to buy a car or to go back to the country of origin during the holidays (cf. Zelizer 2011). From the employer’s perspective, unemployment money is also perceived as an extra benefit granted by the welfare system to farmworkers, coupled with the daily salary provided by the company. ‘It is not fair’, the employer often argues, that farmworkers are able to receive this sort of benefit ‘while earning their daily wage at the same time’. Their dismay is even stronger when the benefit recipients are migrant workers, as we can see from the words of Stefano, a Sicilian tomato grower in his 50s: To take the unemployment subsidy you need to get to 102 days. With the 102 days our Italian state gives them [migrant workers ], in July it doles them out e2800! Do you know what I mean? The Italian state gives them [such a large sum]! For each person… then, if they have children and wife, they’ll get a family allowance. […] When someone comes to look for a job in my greenhouse, I say to him: “Listen, I’ll give you 102 days for the entire year”. And then you need to explain to these people who don’t understand our language so well [how things work]… right? And I clearly say to them: “Listen, I’ll give you nine days per month. If you work with me for 12 months for one year, you’ll have 102 days. If you work just for one month, I can’t give you 102 days, but I’ll give you nine days for that month, right?”. There are those who reply: “All right, all right”, because they need to work and then they even go to a trade union! That’s because even if we give them nine days per month, we are not following the rules. We are supposed to pay them all the days they actually work, namely 26 days per month. That how it should be. And that’s why there can be some idiots reporting us to the trade union or to the police. But that’s not so common… it usually happens only if there has been an inspection of the greenhouse. [Interview, Vittoria, 11 May 2013]

The way Stefano confidently describes a form of irregularity which is widespread in the TLS is used to underline how, in his view, it is migrant farmworkers who are actually exploiting “our Italian state”. Moreover, foreign employees are depicted as being unable to understand the Italian

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language and somehow also incapable of acknowledging the informal and unwritten rules which are largely accepted in the TLS. Nevertheless, this set of rules is widely recognized by all the local actors, including migrants, labour inspectors and trade unionists. A fieldnote taken while observing the activities in a trade union office provides a good example of the everyday uses of the legislation regulating temporary labour relations in agriculture. On this occasion, I was attending a meeting between a trade unionist and a middle-aged couple of Romanian farmworkers: Paolo asks what the problem is. “The employer doesn’t want to pay for all the contributions!” says the man. The trade unionist prudently asks: “Have you talked to him? ‘Cos given this situation, why don’t you… suggest he ‘move’ the days to the same person, I mean… why doesn’t he pay all the days to one of you, so at least one of you could apply for the unemployment subsidy?”. “Of course we did!” replies the man “but he said that he couldn’t, ‘cos it’s illegal!”. Paolo: “So, what can I say? I suggest reporting him, ‘cos normally he has to register all the daily contributions! Then we can evaluate that maybe you cannot even apply for unemployment benefit… but if you worked for 200 days you should be paid for 200 days, and not for 102! This is how it should actually work!”. “Of course they know that!” replied the man, using Sicilian slang “they know, but they don’t wanna do it! They are too legal [ironically], too legal!”. The trade unionist interrupts “Then you should ask for all the days, so you are more legal than them”. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 24 January 2013]

This conversation shows how the concept of ‘legality’ is mobilized differently by the various actors. In this specific situation, both the trade unionist and the farmworkers share a pragmatic attitude towards coping with the employer’s abusive behaviour: initially, the trade unionist shows a conciliatory posture, considering the partial registration of daily contributions legitimate as far as the farmworkers are concerned, because at least one of the two could apply for the unemployment subsidy. Nonetheless, if this customary rule is not respected by the employer, the trade unionist and the workers may resort to the rule of law. Aside from a limited number of cases like the one described above, it is quite uncommon that workers report similar irregularities to trade unions. More often, farmworkers resort to strategies aimed at avoiding the trade union’s support and eschewing direct confrontation with their employers. Conversely, they enact other subtle strategies in order to increase their

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mobility power and other indirect forms of bargaining over labour effort within workplaces.

3.4 Mobility Power and Farmworkers’ Coping Strategies 3.4.1

The Purchase of Employment Contracts

In many rural areas in the South of Italy, it is quite common that people pretend to work in agriculture, registering their names at the local INPS office and paying a social security contribution out of their own pocket, because of the convenience of receiving an unemployment subsidy. This phenomenon is well known in Italy as the case of ‘fake farmworkers’ (falsi braccianti) (Pugliese 1984; Avola et al. 2005). In the TLS, many migrants become aware of the rules of the game and of the commonly accepted ways of bending those rules to enact similar strategies. To cope with day labour and informality, ‘selling’ and ‘buying’ days have thus become a widespread practice among migrant workers as well. Ciccio, a Sicilian man in his 30s, accounted for his activity as a seller, which he carries on from time to time alongside his main job as a photographer. Ciccio: In the province of Ragusa there is a phenomenon related to many migrants: here you can ‘buy the days’. Those who don’t work or work as dealers, for instance, couldn’t keep their legal status in Italy and for this reason they buy some days, since the residence permit depends on the job contract […]. V: How much do they cost? C: If you want to be correct, as I do, 10 days could cost e250. I have the price list made by INPS with the regular prices. However, if you want to take advantage of someone, 10 days could cost around e500. If someone, at the end of the year already has 80-90 days and needs just 20 more days [to reach the 102-day threshold], what can they do? Do they lose the unemployment subsidy? Of course, not… they are going to pay for the days on their own and get the unemployment benefit. In these cases, 10 days could cost e500, or even up to e1000. [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 1 June 2013]

‘To find a contract’, thus, is one of the main concerns for Tunisian young men, due to the expectation of receiving unemployment money and also to the necessity of applying for or renewing their residence permit. Since

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it is not easy to be hired regularly and common to face periods of underemployment, it is often necessary for workers from outside the EU to purchase a contract to avoid losing their legal migration status. As several farmworkers told us, the price of the days depends on the number of social security contributions that a person wants to collect: a payment of e800 is usually required to buy 51 days; for 102 days, it is necessary to invest e1600; nevertheless, for a smaller sum, and in order to fulfil immigration law requirement, they can buy a contract (the ingaggio) and register 20 or 10 days (for e400 or e200, respectively), without becoming entitled, in this case, to any unemployment benefit. During our fieldwork, we collected numerous stories around these practices. Ahmed, for instance, often complains about not having enough money to invest in unemployment benefit, while he is always forced to buy his ingaggio. Ahmed: I came to Italy with a contract and with documents, not like those clandestine migrants who come by sea and arrive in Lampedusa. V: But what is the difference? A: I had a contract! V: Yes, but you bought it! So, what is the difference between being undocumented and buying a fake contract? A: That document was not a fake. The police glanced at my contract, sent it to the Italian consulate in Tunisia, then they issued a visa for me to enter Italian territory, which is not fake. […] I’ve been in Italy for five years, and I’ve always had my documents. Once I bought a contract for e400, then another one for e200, then e200, and then e400 again. And my job has always been off the books! And when I say to my employer that I need a contract, he says that’s almost impossible. That’s how it goes! [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 20 July 2013]

Aziz, one of Ahmed’s best friends, who is living in Veneto, in the North of Italy, and once in a while comes to Vittoria to renew his residence permit, also endures a similar situation: he works informally, and he needs a contract to keep his regular migration status. Samir also explained us that in Lyon, where he lives and is employed as a painter, it is possible to buy contracts, but in Vittoria it is easier and is cheaper thanks to the widespread presence of ‘helpful’ agricultural companies selling jobs. I met Néjib on a bus travelling to Nice where he resides and works. He was very surprised to hear that I was aware of “how Tunisians in Vittoria usually get by”. “That’s our system!”, he stated, “We, the Tunisians, we are astute!”

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To cope with their marginal position in the labour market and to make ends meet, many Tunisian migrants elaborate similar strategies: buying a contract could be an inevitable choice (to fulfil a legal requirement), and at the same time, it could be an advantage, since it offers the possibility of receiving a conspicuous public subsidy and increasing migrants’ mobility between sectors, cities and throughout Europe. When describing such practices, as in the case with Néjib, Tunisian workers sometimes openly recognize them as tactics to manipulate Italian welfare system and cope with migrants’ structural vulnerability in the labour market which segregates them in low-paid and demanding jobs such as agriculture. Under specific individual circumstances, the practice of purchasing fake contracts does not increase workers’ mobility, but it does allow them to cope with their material difficulties. This is the case, for instance, with older Tunisian migrants, for whom finding a job in the greenhouses is quite difficult due to their age. Thanks to their experience with the Italian welfare system and their local social capital, they can opt to live the entire year in either Sicily or Tunisia with the annual instalment money provided by INPS as their only source of income. During my fieldwork, I touched on this topic with Samir, a Tunisian trade unionist in Vittoria, who explained to me: The phenomenon of the ‘fake farmworkers’ among Tunisians is actually problematic. If they do not have any other feasible alternative in order to earn some money, what do they do? Let’s consider the situation of older Tunisian workers: they can’t work anymore in the greenhouses as day labourers… here there are a lot of younger and more active lads! And so, what do they do for a living? How do they live here? How could they send money back home? They continue to pay contributions on their own, waiting till they reach retirement age and in the meanwhile get public subsidies. We cannot speak about the phenomenon of ‘fake farmworkers’ without taking into consideration their subjective motivations. [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 1 June 2013]

Samir and other members of the local FLAI-CGIL union are seriously concerned about explaining that these strategies enacted by Tunisian labourers often represent their way to cope with marginality in the labour market, in a context characterized by weak forms of collective worker organizations. They also engaged in a public campaign aimed at reducing the stigmatization towards ‘fake farmworkers’, while addressing at the

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same time the employers’ role in reproducing irregularity in the local agricultural labour market. There is something that for us is really important. We often read in the newspaper headlines, in a big font: ‘Fake farmworkers are stealing unemployment benefit without working’. It’s true, it’s definitely true [that the phenomenon exists ]! We totally agree on the fact that INPS – and not exclusively the INPS – needs to prosecute this type of frauds. However, in our trade unions, every day, at least two or three times per day, we see people that come to report that they worked but they didn’t have all their daily contributions correctly registered. For all these people there is not one line in the newspapers! So, when does the INPS actually step forward and really take a look at the countryside, to consider all the cases in which there is a worker who is working without the days? […] We declare that there are, in the province of Ragusa, more than 20,000 days evaded every year! And all this evasion of contributions is to the detriment of labour, to the detriment of workers! That seems to be even more relevant than the cases of ‘fake farmworkers’! [Public speech of the Secretary of FLAI-CGIL at that time, June 14 June 2013]

All in all, this speech highlights migrant structural vulnerability in the labour market, asserting that Tunisian labourers are often trapped in informal low-paid jobs in agriculture, formally excluded by welfare provisions and other public benefits. Nevertheless, I have showed how farmworkers are able to develop several strategies to deal with this structural marginalization: they often opt to purchase a job contract through an ‘illegal’ act in order to gain ‘legal’ migration status in Italy; at the same time, by applying for unemployment subsidies, they advantageously earn some money which is detached from waged labour. Through this practice, they improve their employability in the local informal labour market and increase their mobility across sectors and cities. 3.4.2

Working ‘Under the Table’

For Italian and migrant day labourers, another viable solution for coping with work insecurity is to hold down more than one job at the same time in order to give themselves other options in cases of unemployment

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or lack of salary.6 In these circumstances, workers usually rely on one employer as the contract provider, while keeping other jobs ‘off the book’ in other to avoid losing their right to unemployment benefit. I collected several of these examples and I specifically discussed these topics with Alessandro, my youngest workmate at Gurrieri: Alessandro this morning is extremely talkative, but I sense he is really tired. Looking at him in his black hoodie, he actually seems even younger than he is. I ask him how last night was, since I knew he went to meet his girlfriend. He tells me that in the end they couldn’t meet, because as soon as he finished in the greenhouse, he went to work in a packinghouse managed by one of his friends. He says that his buddy called him because he needed some help. “And what do you do? Do you refuse to go? Of course not! Work is work, and it means money!” We start talking about money: he says that he prefers to have his own savings, so he doesn’t need to ask for loans and then have to pay them back. “Almost the entire sum that I earn now, I manage to put it aside […] In August, for instance, Gurrieri closed for one week without notification, but I had no problem ‘cos I had put some money aside, so it was ok for me. It was like being on vacation”. Saving up and holding down more than one job has becomes fundamental for Alessandro, since he doesn’t know in advance for how many days and for how long he is going to be hired at Gurrieri. [Fieldnotes, Donnalucata, 13 April 2013]

As the story of Alessandro epitomizes, in the effort to ensure wage security to hold down more than one job drastically increases labourers’ workload with the risk of worsening their physical and mental health. Nevertheless, overworking allows them to experience their time as more lucrative, is useful to meet their personal or familial needs, and thus, according to some day labourers, is more satisfying and meaningful than leisure or idle time, as Alessandro explained to me (cf. also Cohen and Hjalmarson 2018). Moreover, keeping aside money and holding down more than one job sometimes allows workers to leave their workplace or engage in further migration plans: Alessandro, for instance, was able to move to the UK in 2018 and to find a job in the service sector. He

6 Similarly, Cohen and Hjalmarson (2018) recognize working ‘under the table’ as a form of everyday resistance enacted by Mexican farmworkers recruited through Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programs in Canada.

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considers his overall working situation as improved, thanks also to the acquisition of new skills and work experience. The practice of holding onto more than one job at the same time is also very frequent among migrant greenhouse workers and among female packinghouse labourers. As emerged from the story of Franca, a thirty-one-year-old worker at JustTomatoes, reported in Chapter 2, it is common for these workers to hide their second ‘under the table’ job from their main employers, thanks also to the complicity of the colleagues who cover for them by taking on extra shifts. To hold down more than one job, in fact, hampers employees’ permanent availability and makes it more difficult for the employers to command the workers’ time, endangering their possibility of coming into work at short notice. Therefore, these practices are highly discouraged by the employers, as reported by a packinghouse manager in her interview: Sandra: From time to time, it happens that some of the workers who I hired through an ingaggio look for a second job under the table in other packinghouses. If I discover someone doing this, I’ll sack her straightaway! I accept this kind of stuff in the summertime, because here [in my company] the work slows down. In these cases, we can find an agreement, I can allow them to work somewhere else because I understand that they need to work. But if someone takes a day off pretending to rest and then I discover she is hanging around and working somewhere else, I get really pissed. There are many employers who benefit from tax-free labour, do you know what I mean? But I don’t! Sometimes people ask me to work without a contract, and I say “no”. Today, for instance, I interviewed a girl who asked me to be unindentured so she could keep her subsidy and I had to reject her proposal. [Interview, Vittoria, 29 May 2013]

All in all, working without a contract is sometimes a preference for day labourers, who in this way can hold down more than one job at the same time, eventually couple wages with unemployment subsidies and, more generally, strategically use their mobility to change workplace, sector and even country in search of better opportunities. The ability to keep several jobs, to bend the rules governing welfare benefits, as well as to wield mobility power are specific skills that day labourers acquire over time and use to their advantage (cf. Ceccagno and Sacchetto 2020).

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Mobility Practices

As illustrated so far, access to welfare benefits as well as the practice of keeping more than one job at the same time allows workers to reduce their daily insecurity by increasing their ability to endure periods of underemployment or by allowing them to look for different job opportunities when their everyday working conditions become unbearable. These examples highlight that labour mobility power, i.e. workers’ possibility to quit the workplace—or threaten to—when other forms of bargaining power are not available, is a relevant resource to which day labourers can and do actually resort. This is particularly true in the case of informal farmworkers, namely in those situations in which a contract—a long-lasting social and legal bond between the employer and the employee—is actually lacking. The experiences undergone by Ahmed epitomize the situation faced by numerous daily labourers, bound by the necessity to accept whatever type of job is offered to them, but also attempting to improve their situation by frequently escaping inhospitable workplaces and crossing borders. As I reported above, Ahmed was periodically compelled to buy his labour contract in order to keep his legal migration status, due to the difficulties in finding a regular ingaggio inside greenhouses. Nevertheless, the lack of a social and legal tie between Ahmed and his temporary employers allowed him to frequently change jobs and cities in the attempt to look for better labour offers. Just before we met in March 2013, Ahmed had worked for a few weeks for a producer growing peppers in greenhouses, with a salary of e35 per day for eight hours of work. Then, Hassan recruited him in Piazza Manin, paying e30 for nine hours of work per day for almost ten days. After a couple of weeks with no jobs, Ahmed found informal employment in the construction industry. He worked as a bricklayer for two weeks, agreeing on a salary of e300 for twelve days, an amount that he had actually never received due to the employers’ wage theft. In May, he was contacted again by the previous employer who was growing peppers and required to work for the same wage (e35) extending the workday to 12 hours. Ahmed refused. At the end of May, he was recruited by a Tunisian informal broker to clean grapes in a vineyard in a nearby city, with a salary of e25 per day. Here, however, the employer demanded that the workers keep a high pace and quality while paying them a very low wage. According to Ahmed’s account, after a few days he responded to the employer’s

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requests by leaving the workplace together with other workers. In midJune, he found a job at SicilSerre and invited me to join him, knowing from the very beginning that our position was actually temporary. After one week, he asked the employer for a day off sick, as he was experiencing serious pain in his feet, and was immediately fired. A few weeks later, the boss contacted him again because of a shortage of workers, this time asking Ahmed to live on his property. After accepting that proposal, Ahmed worked and lived at SicilSerre for four months, although his work (and consequently his pay) was limited to two or three days per week. For the rest of the time, due to the distance from the greenhouse to the city centre, it was difficult for Ahmed to leave his workplace in order to reach the city’s main square and network to find other job opportunities. In November 2013, after a long dispute with the employer concerning the type of wage he was paid (namely a monthly fixed amount rather than a day rate), he decided to move back to Gafsa, the town where he was born, and left SicilSerre without notifying the employer of his decision. In a phone call from Sicily before he left, he boasted to me of his idea of stealing an expensive television from his shack and some equipment from the company, with the purpose of selling them. In the years that followed, he travelled back and forth between Italy and Tunisia, shifting from one precarious occupation to another. The story of Ahmed and his frequent mobility between different companies, industries and across borders is an example of the ‘migrant mobility practices’ which are enacted as a way to cope with day labour (Alberti 2014). As argued by Chris Smith (2006, 393), quitting a job remains a significant expression of conflict within capital-labour relations, although its importance is often underestimated. Moreover, as underlined by Gabriella Alberti (2020, 91), the case of Ahmed sheds light on the fact that ‘migrants make use of their ‘mobility power’ for reasons that transcend the workplace. They exercise their mobility practices to flee a difficult situation at work, but also move between different jobs or change sector all together, access education, or engage in onward migration’. Drawing on examples from his fieldwork in West Bengal (India), Ben Rogaly (2009, 1982) also writes of day labourers’ ability to use their mobility as a threat in order to negotiate better working and living conditions when confronting their employers’ demand for them to harvest perishable crops on time. Moreover, by quoting Mitchell’s study on farmworkers’ resistance in California, Rogaly defines these mechanisms

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connected with the spatial mobility of workers as ‘forms of subversion’, namely as informal mechanisms for achieving justice in employment (ibid.). Last but not least, Ahmed’s decision to steal some objects before leaving the workplace can be considered—in the well-known definition of James Scott (1985)—a proper ‘weapon of the weak’, which is frequently used by workers through history and countries as a way to increment their scanty salaries (cf. Van Der Linden 2008). Mobility practices and small thefts constantly represent a challenge to the employers’ attempt to manage workers’ time and daily life. For these reasons, employers try to stigmatize these behaviours, accusing day labourers, especially migrants, of being ‘incapable of keeping a job’, ‘too lazy’ or ‘volatile’. While working at SicilSerre, our employer often demonstrated this attitude: he dismissed Ahmed at his first request of a day off, but he also complained about Nicola, our Romanian workmate, for similar reasons. One day, I was surprised to hear that Giovanni threatened to sack Nicola simply because he did not pick up his phone for a few hours during his day off. The employer started shouting at us that the Romanian was “too lazy” for this kind of job, and if the employee did not answer immediately, he was going to throw all his personal belongings from his shack straightaway. This fierce behaviour in relation to our workmate also constituted a warning for Ahmed and me, compelling us to avoid showing any kind of tiredness—or “childishness” as Ahmed put it— in front of our boss, in order not to risk going through the experience of being picked for work at the roadside in the coming days. All in all, the issuing of a job contract for the employers constitutes a strategy to tie labourers to their workplace, reducing the possibility of workers quitting with short or no notice. On the other hand, the lack of a social and legal bond also represents a condition that actually increases workers’ mobility power. This arm-wrestling between employers and employees is reproduced every day when negotiating employment contracts, which also entails conflicting expectations of labourers’ performances and behaviours in order to secure work every day. In conclusion, I have shown how employers’ power to decide whether or not to provide a contract is actually counterbalanced by day labourers’ mobility power between companies, sectors, regions and throughout Europe, which is further increased by their ability to bend formal rules and the welfare system to their advantage as a way to constantly cope with day labour.

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CHAPTER 4

Struggling for a Fair Wage

Abstract This chapter centres on conflicts around the wage. Firstly, it shows how conventional salaries, far lower than those established by the employment contracts, are shaped around farmworkers’ living arrangements. Since migrants’ dwelling situation in the TLS differs according to national groups, salaries are also segmented according to ‘racial’ lines. Secondly, the chapter focusses on the everyday negotiations concerning work effort and expected level of output, illustrating several strategies enacted by the employers to retain labour (i.e. salary withholding or the provision of side benefits). The chapter aims to demonstrate that the ‘price’ of labour is conventionally established and negotiated daily according to several considerations that transcend the workplace and the working hours to also encompass the space and time of workers’ social reproduction. Keywords Wages · Dormitory labour regime · Work effort · Racialized salaries · Salary withholding

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Piro, Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7_4

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4.1

What is Deemed a Fair Wage?

Before starting the working day in the greenhouse, you usually agree on the pay first. Yesterday, both Ahmed and I received e30. Given the constant complaints of Giovanni, our boss, about my poor performance, it is quite clear that today will not be the same. As we prepare to enter the greenhouse, sharpening knives and cleaning scissors, Giovanni asks me what I think should be the fair wage for each of us. “As usual, we start at e30. If Ahmed is worth e30, how much are you worth?” It is clear where he wants to go. I’m too slow! I am worth less than Ahmed! Today I will be paid e25. “Is that okay for you?” This is actually a rhetorical question. Entering the greenhouse, I am really annoyed at this cut in my wage, although it is not totally unexpected. Ahmed feels guilty for not having “defended” me, for “not having behaved like a man”, as he puts it. “Ok, today you should only give the boss e25 of your labour!” he advises me. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 11 June 2013]

What is deemed a fair wage? How do employers and employees agree in their definition of the value of work when conventional salaries significantly differ from formally established minimum standards? What are the determinants of wages, or rather on what basis do we attribute value to the effort made by workers? Which forms of conflict and everyday bargaining are present in the discussion of wages? Struggles around reward are central to workers’ and employers’ interests and are therefore pivotal to understanding day labour relations. In turn they entail negotiations around time because ‘in abstract, workers are selling their time – they are ‘merchants of time’ – and there will always be debates around how this time is used (the intensity of labour) and for how long (the extensiveness of labour)’ (Smith 2015, 11). All in all, conflicts between labour and capital often turn around the use value of work, which is practically measured and monetized through salaries. In terms of day labour in greenhouses, the ‘fair’ wage is usually agreed according to a set of conventional rules which differ consistently from the rules formally established in the employment contracts, if they are signed.1 As highlighted in the fieldnotes which open this chapter, daily

1 Considering the agreement established at a national level (Contratto Collettivo Nazionale del Lavoro Agricolo) between the key trade unions and employers’ associations, revised at a local level, between 2012 and 2015, the pay was established at e54.10

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salaries are typically low and vary substantially among the workforce according to their individual performance (between e15 and e40 per day2 ). Moreover, as I will explain in Sect. 4.2, some other elements contribute to the definition of a conventional wage, and above all workers’ living arrangements. Since dwelling situations for greenhouse workers usually differ according to national groups, this in turn produces wage arrangements that are segmented along racial lines. Once employers and employees agree upon an amount, however, the negotiation is not over, since the labourers’ effort is kept variable. If it is not possible to reduce the salaries, the employers try to extend the working hours or the intensity of labour, or alternatively implement forms of piecework (as will be outlined in Sect. 4.3). On the other hand, farmworkers strive to reduce the work pace and the overall effort, as Ahmed recommended me to do while working in SicilSerre (“You should only give the boss e25 of your labour!”). Moreover, farmworkers can leave—or threaten to leave—the workplace when wage agreements are considered unfair, as my Tunisian workmate did after four mouths at SicilSerre. To avoid these risks, especially when day labour is unindentured, employers use several strategies to retain workers, constraining their ability to leave the workplace at short notice. A widespread practice which effectively ties workers to their job site is the withholding of farmworkers’ salaries, paid at the end of the harvesting season or depending on the employers’ own decision (see Sect. 4.4). Similarly, the provision of side benefits (such as the payment of social security contributions or the distribution of food) could also be considered as a strategy to tie farmworkers to their companies (see Sect. 4.5). Struggles around reward, especially in cases of wage theft or delay, are quite common in greenhouses and packinghouses, and represent those kinds of frictions that more frequently develop into overt conflicts

per day, for 39 hours per week. Between 2016 and 2019, the minimum salary increased slightly by 4%. The farmworker temporary contracts apply to dependent workers inside greenhouses and packinghouses as well as nurseries. 2 In packinghouses the conventional salary is usually calculated on an hourly basis (on average, e3.50–4.90 per hour). Since the working day can vary constantly depending on the produce the company needs to process, the total daily and monthly salary can also vary accordingly.

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between employers and employees, as highlighted in the examples concluding this chapter.

4.2

Workers’ Accommodation and Wage Racialization

In the casualized labour market in the TLS agriculture sector, the wage is haggled over every day on an individual basis when a farmworker is picked up at a hiring spot. Nevertheless, a set of informal rules defining conventional daily payments in the area are well known to employers and employees. In the time span in which this research was conducted, between 2013 and 2019, it was possible to record a salary variation over time and among different groups which make up the local workforce. In 2013, for instance, a daily salary for an Italian worker was around e40 per day, while for a Tunisian man it consisted of e30–35 per day, for 8–9 hours of work; by contrast, a Romanian male or female worker was paid e20–25 per day for 9 hours of work. In 2015, salaries were reported as being on average e5 lower. More recently, in 2019, wages have slightly increased for Tunisian and Romanian workers (e35–40 per day), who earn more than Sub-Saharan refugees and asylum seekers (e20–25 per day).3 These differences in salaries exist for workers who are usually employed with the same tasks and for a similar number of hours, and, consequently, they set the bases for the emergence of competition among national groups in the local labour market and in workplaces, as noted by several scholars (cf. Cortese and Palidda 2018; Kilkey and Urzì 2017; Urzì and Williams 2016). According to Anna Maria Cortese and Rita Palidda (2018), among others, differences in salaries between nationalities can be explained by considering the differences in migrant arrivals, and by assuming that those groups of migrants who first settled in the TLS have gradually experienced processes of upward social mobility, while the newcomers have taken up the ‘dirtiest’ jobs. This argument, however, shows two shortcomings. Firstly, it underestimates the role played by the employers in recruiting farmworkers of different nationalities with the actual purpose of

3 According to informants interviewed in 2013 and in 2019, salaries are generally lower for what concerns Roma Romanian migrants working in the area since the 2000s.

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fuelling competition, in order to intensify the work pace and repress wage demand, as has happened in other enclaves of intensive agriculture worldwide (Preibisch and Binford 2007; Hellio 2016; cf. also Pugliese 1985). Secondly, this argument is supported by a strictly linear understanding of migrants’ social mobility patterns (i.e. that the longer migrants stay in a country, the better their jobs opportunities are), which underplays the actual unpredictability of workers’ mobility strategies. As an example: differently from several Tunisian migrants that chose to settle in the TLS notwithstanding the fact that they were facing competitive labour relations, many Romanian farmworkers have opted to leave the area and look for a job in other countries or sectors as soon as their overall level of earnings started to decrease. In 2013, the great majority of Romanian workers we met in Vittoria were residing within the perimeters of the workplace itself. They were usually lodged in shacks, crumbling buildings, often with no plaster or paving, and sometimes no windows. According to the size of the companies, these buildings could host anything from one single worker to dozens of employees. Generally, each couple or single person occupied a room, the space properly experienced as ‘home’, while toilets were shared with other workers hired by the same company. Usually, employers provided spaces previously used to repair work equipment, which were turned into proper dormitories. The spokesperson of the local branch of the voluntary organization Caritas Italiana4 showed me some pictures to describe the situations experienced by Romanians living in the surroundings of the province of Ragusa (Figs. 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3): Here it’s winter, December, we are all wearing coats, while he [a Romanian farmworker] was sleeping with an open window because of the 4 Since 2015, Caritas Italiana set up a project named Progetto Presidio at a national level, with the engagement of 16 Caritas local branches. In 2015, the Presidio started its activities in Marina di Acate (Ragusa—TLS) and Noto (Siracusa—a nearby agricultural district). Its aim is twofold: to provide primary assistance to migrant farmworkers and to lobby local and national authorities. The premises of Presidio, located in the middle of the greenhouse area, are open two days a week, while once a week practitioners engage in outreach in the countryside. Its indoor services are: clothes and blanket distribution, legal aid together with lawyers and trade unionists, health support with volunteer doctors and nurses, leisure activities for children (such as school support and theatre). The Presidio assists farmworkers residing in the countryside, mostly Romanian, Romanian Romany and Albanian people. For an elaboration of data collected through its database, see Campanella (2018).

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Fig. 4.1 Live-in farmworkers’ accommodation, Vittoria (Photo credit: Presidio Project of Caritas Diocesana of Ragusa)

pesticides behind his bed; he was suffering from asthma, and so he had to sleep with an open window. This is the room, the bedside tables made with fruit boxes, the roof made with reeds and gypsum, leaks, water, uncovered shafts of light, and so on and so forth. We define these people as ‘homeless’: they have a roof over their heads, but it’s pretty much like being homeless. [Showing me more pictures ] Here are mattresses, plastic cloths to separate the room a bit, zero safety, look at this cathode tube left here. This is a garage, sheet metal roofing. This girl was sleeping on cartons on the floor to separate herself from the sand; without a toilet, she has to dig outside the shack to get her needs met. These other ones are stables for horses adapted for housing. Look at this, there is no light coming inside, aside from the door, no windows, no air. This is more or less the living situation. [Interview, Ragusa, 16 September 2019]

Romanian farmworkers who we met during fieldwork explained their decision to live in the countryside as a solution which allowed them to avoid commuting (quite expensive for those without a car) and to

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Fig. 4.2 Live-in farmworkers’ accommodation (outside), Marina di Acate (Photo credit: Presidio Project of Caritas Diocesana of Ragusa)

save much more money compared with renting an apartment in the city centre (cf. also Andrijasevic and Sacchetto 2017). Nevertheless, they often complained about the numerous shortcomings experienced while living near the greenhouses. The overlapping between spaces of production and reproduction, in fact, increased management control over working hours and time off, as highlighted by scholars studying similar cases of ‘dormitory labour regimes’ (Smith 2003; Pun and Smith 2007; Ceccagno and Sacchetto 2020) or ‘sleeping regimes’ (Ceccagno 2015) throughout Europe and Asia. Moreover, the presence of a ‘dormitory labour regime’ fostered a decrease in workers’ wage demand, since workforce reproductive costs were reduced to a minimum while savings were maximized. Consequently, this allowed live-in farmworkers to accept a lower salary than their workmates residing in the city centres. The way in which TLS’ ‘dormitory labour regime’ was organized therefore caused a fall in wages for live-in workers. Since the majority

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Fig. 4.3 Live-in farmworkers’ accommodation (inside), Marina di Acate (Photo credit: Presidio Project of Caritas Diocesana of Ragusa)

of farmworkers residing in the countryside were Romanian, Romanian labourers were thus deemed ‘employable’ for a lower wage, compared with Tunisian and Italian farmworkers within the same company.5 In the employers’ assumptions, thus, workers’ nationality was immediately associated with a particular type of accommodation and with labourers’ ‘value’, namely with the wage they were supposed to accept. Several years after the beginning of this research, in 2019, it was still possible to observe processes of adaptation between daily salaries, migrants’ nationality and their living arrangements. When questioning my informants about the main changes occurring between 2013 and 2019 in the TLS, many of them reported that Romanian farmworkers were now moving to live in the city centres, or alternatively had started to leave the 5 The few Tunisian workers living on-site usually receive the same salary as their live-in Romanian co-workers.

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region. According to them, this was mainly due to two main changes that had fostered a re-arrangement of the local ‘dormitory labour regime’. Firstly, in the last few years, there has been an increase in the attention paid towards migrants’ dwellings in the TLS countryside, due to the lobbying activities promoted by NGOs, local associations, trade unions, journalists and researchers in their joint effort to report difficult migrant living situations, which was often coupled with sexual harassment towards live-in female farmworkers (cf. Chapter 2). This increase in general concerns was coterminous with the implementation of new national legislation which made illegal intermediation a crime, and also introduced specific measures to improve farmworkers’ living conditions in the countryside (L. 199 n. 2016, in Italian Legge contro il caporalato). Under these new circumstances, employers considered it much riskier to accommodate Romanian farmworkers on their properties due to an increase in the number of prospective labour inspections. Consequently, employers started instead to seek other viable solutions to accommodate Romanian workers in Vittoria and in the nearby city centres where farmworkers generally need to pay their own rent. This increase in workers’ housing costs led to a slight rise in the conventional level of their wages, from e20–25 to e35–40 a day, catching-up with the salary level for Tunisian and Italian farmworkers. At the same time, between 2011 and 2015, the management of the humanitarian crisis through an emergency approach has given rise to an increase in the number of reception centres hosting asylum seekers and refugees mainly coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. These forced migrants (around 1500 in the area according to local informants) entered the labour market and started to be employed in greenhouses, either informally (with a salary ranging from e15–25 per day), or through other forms of job placement arranged by social workers.6 Asylum seekers and refugees were also able to accept lower informal salaries because they do not have further housing costs since they were accommodated in refugee centres. Employers thus started to consider it much cheaper and less risky to hire Sub-Saharan migrants for whom they do not need to provide any lodging in their properties. 6 Asylum seekers and refugees are often entitled to take part in projects aimed at developing their employability in the local labour market, through measures such as ‘internship’ paid directly by the government. Employers have at their disposal, in this case, a pool of workers free of charge.

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Some among my closest friends, like Lorina, Patriciu, Camila and Constantin, were still working and living in the TLS during my last visit in 2019. Since 2013, when we first met, I visited four of Lorina’s and Patriciu’s on-site homes at the companies they worked in, aside from periods they spent in Romania, Germany and in other Italian regions. During my last visit in Vittoria, we discussed the changes occurring in the area and in their private life in the last few months: Lorina and I spend the entire afternoon chatting animatedly while Patriciu is watching a Romanian TV programme. She explains that they are waiting to get their own place in the city centre, provided by the employer for e200 a month. I congratulate her on this great news, but she doesn’t seem so happy. “Yes, it’s true, we’ll have a proper house, a proper kitchen, bedrooms and toilets that we don’t need to share with other people”, she explains. “Nevertheless, it’s more convenient to stay in the countryside, since we don’t have to pay any rent and transport to the greenhouses, and we can save much more money”. I ask why the employers would not let them live on-site anymore. She replies that is because of all the rumours about ‘farmworker exploitation’ – she uses these words with something between irony and bitterness. She expresses her disappointment with all these journalists, photographers and researchers concerned about ‘worker exploitation’. She is even pissed off with a famous photojournalist who took several pictures of her and her previous place in the countryside that she considers too private to be published in newspapers and social networks. I feel genuinely sorry about this episode. While eating our smoked pork soup, we go on chatting about work and wages. In Spring, Patriciu and Lorina were paid e30 per day while living in the countryside. Their Romanian workmates living in the city centre were paid e35 per day for the same tasks and working day. Alin, the foreman, was earning e40 and according to Lorina this was fine, because he had more responsibilities. In July, Lorina and Patriciu demanded a pay rise from their boss. He agreed to increase their wage to e32.50 per day, just e2.50 more! Meanwhile, her workmates enjoyed this slight wage rise too (from e35 to e37.50). When they move in the city centre, the boss has accepted to pay Lorina and Patriciu e37.50. At the end of the dinner, I had a big stomach-ache and I’m not sure if it was caused by the heaviness of the pork soup or by the distress at Lorina’s words. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 14 September 2019]

In Lorina’s story, changes in wages—individually negotiated between either a single worker, or couple, and their employer—mirror changes

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in their living arrangements moving between the countryside and city centres. What at a first glance appeared to me as a positive novelty, namely to move to the city centre as a way of greatly improving my friends’ living conditions, was instead described by Lorina as an overall worsening of their situation, driving them to the decision to move back to Romania in December 2019. The story of Lorina epitomized the fact that, following the implementation of the L. n. 199/2016 and the NGOs’ and associations’ lobbying activities, the greenhouse labour regime has been rearranged in a way that diminished many Romanian farmworkers’ real salaries, driving them to reorganize their trajectories throughout Europe and thus often leaving the TLS. The conversation that I held with Camila during my last visit in 2019 also addressed the topic of wages and dwelling arrangements: Camila is now living with Constantin in a nice house in Vittoria city centre, where they pay e230 rent a month. They have recently come back from Romania, where they spent a couple of months. They came back to work to the same company as before, a large firm employing something between 100-120 workers, producing high-quality tomatoes and aubergines. Camila explains that picking aubergines is much worse than harvesting tomatoes, since the former are spiky and make workers’ arms itch. She explains that the boss asks the nivuri [‘negros’, sic] to do this job, paying them e25 per day, while her wage is e35 per day and Constantin’s salary as an overseer is e40. “That’s because the negros [sic] have less experience”, Camilla continues, “but also because they don’t have to pay any rent in Vittoria”. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 15 September 2019]

Since wages in the TLS are usually individually bargained for, several elements might contribute to their definition, such as workers’ skills and their familiarity with the job, their different hierarchical position within the team, their level of unionization,7 their social position and their skin colour, as Camila’s account so clearly illustrates (cf. Roediger 1991). Nonetheless, dwelling situations remain fundamental, bringing in the negotiation of informal salary considerations related to the workforce’s domesticity and reproductive sphere. 7 According to the secretary of CGIL union in Ragusa, interviewed in September 2019, the slight increase in the Romanians’ salaries was also due to the increase in their overall level of unionization, that in turn led the employers to rely on less unionized migrant workers in the area.

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As stated above, migrants’ spatial arrangements in the TLS are segmented according to nationality and racial lines, and this in turn produces racially segmented wages, while at the same time deepening the spatial divide between city centres and the countryside. Differences in wages, in fact, partially shape labourers’ future possibility of accessing rented apartments in the city centres, in turn nurturing the reproduction of an acutely racialized work-living arrangement. All in all, these forms of spatial segregation and wage segmentation are based on but also reproduce the fragmentation of relationships between different national groups within the district and the local labour market, fuelling workforce competition and facilitating its management in the workplaces as well.

4.3 Work Effort, Time and Wage Negotiation in the Greenhouses The definition of a socially-agreed and racialized wage in the area constitutes a general yardstick by which the daily bargaining in greenhouses and packinghouses is measured. As highlighted in the example at the outset of this chapter, various elements are at stake during these everyday negotiations. Although the wage is a measure of workers’ time and productivity, the amount of effort required as well as the actual ‘content’ of productivity are always undetermined in a labour relation (Smith 2006). Each labour relation, thus, entails a form of indirect bargaining over pay, since although the wage is fixed in advance, labour effort usually cannot be. However, haggling over the wage is even more important for day labourers, especially if unindentured, because it is not just labour effort but also the amount and time of payment that is kept variable and uncertain. Although from time to time negotiation can develop into a proper conflict, it more often consists of a situation in which a precarious consensus between the employer and the employee is reached through a tacit or explicit agreement. During my brief involvement as a covert farmworker, I personally experienced these forms of negotiation at SicilSerre while bargaining over my daily wage with Giovanni, my boss, keeping in mind the overall wage levels in the TLS as a yardstick. On my first day at SicilSerre, as a young Italian woman, I was hired for e30 a day, but after that my pay was progressively reduced by Giovanni (first to e25 and then to e20 a day) to match my low level of productivity.

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As soon as Giovanni asks me to work for e25, I try to haggle a bit and I say: “All right, let’s do it like this: if you pay me e25 that’s ok for me. But then you should pay Ahmed e35”. He doesn’t agree, of course, but nevertheless I give it a try. We go on working, knowing that my work should be worth e25, and Ahmed’s e30. Obviously, my livelihood does not actually depend on that wage, but even so, I cannot suppress a strong sense of anger and frustration: I put much less effort into my work, I feel more tired, I don’t want to be there, I do not want to work at all (although I know that it’s an important part of my fieldwork!). Even if Ahmed feels embarrassed, it’s clear that in that situation we have no bargaining power: the wages have been established by the uncle; we can either accept them or refuse to work, and that’s it. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 11 June 2013]

As I experienced during that working day, and as Ahmed patiently explained to me, although it was impossible for us to directly haggle over our wage, our indirect form of bargaining was to adapt to the salary reduction by consequently reducing our efforts. This practice was willingly accepted by my workmates and was somehow also expected by the employer. Moreover, as a young Italian woman, I enjoyed some privileges at work which gave me the opportunity to reduce my overall labour effort compared to my workmates. For example, I was frequently assigned to the lightest tasks, which were also the most repetitive and monotonous, but which demanded less physical exertion. Additionally, I often had the opportunity to work closer to the openings for ventilation, namely in corners from where I could breathe in some fresh air. Finally, it was possible for me to refuse overwork or to interrupt my tasks for brief pauses even if those breaks were unauthorized. It is around five o’clock, I am exhausted, I think I am about to collapse. At five past five, Ahmed, Nicola and the uncle continue to tie tomatoes, and no-one seems to have noticed that the working day is over. I try to keep going, but I start getting really nervous. I go on distributing clips for another ten minutes. I start coughing nervously, no one cares. Five-fifteen: nothing happens. I go on looking at the big red clock on the greenhouse wall; one minute lasts ages. I am growing thirstier and thirstier… ok, I give up! I go back to the cabin, wash my hands, change my clothes, and drink a bottle of fresh water. I sit under a tree to wait for the others to come, and I’m pretty scared of their reaction. What can I say to justify myself? Time passes really slowly. It’s 17.50 when they leave the greenhouse. The uncle smiles at me, he doesn’t say anything and doesn’t seem so annoyed. Ahmed

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gets ready and we leave the greenhouse, saying goodbye to Nicola. On our way home, Ahmed just says: “You are always expected to ‘complete’, I mean, to finish the section you are working on”. Nevertheless, he does not reproach me for leaving the workplace earlier than expected and I am very relieved at the fact that he is not angry at me. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 13 June 2013]

These risky and impulsive behaviours, such as stopping work before the rest of the team, reveal how far I actually was outside that labour context, and mirrors the fact that I was less worried than my workmates about losing that job. Nevertheless, my cheeky attitude also constitutes an example of the adjustments between effort and reward, and therefore it was a reaction towards the cut in my wage that I experienced the previous day. The arm-wrestling between my employer and me continued, not only during working hours but also in our lunch break, which we all spent together inside a small cabin close to the greenhouses. While the other team members were resting, I was asked to prepare the coffee, do the dishes or to ‘amuse’ Giovanni by playing cards with him. Outside the greenhouse walls, as well as inside, I was thus expected to perform typically female labour. Although these forms of reproductive and emotional labour were not mentioned in the monetary definition of the daily salary, they were nevertheless taken into consideration in everyday bargaining both by the employer and by my teammates (Hochschild 2003; Berezin 2009; Wharton 2009); for this reason, as soon as Giovanni decided to reduce my salary, Ahmed advised me to refuse to play cards with him from then on. Farmworkers’ attempts to negotiate their wages by defining the work effort often stem by the employers through quite rigid control over employees’ productivity during a certain timespan. At SicilSerre, for instance, Giovanni was able to strictly check our work, because, as he explained, each of us was expected to finish a fixed amount of work in a given time. Giovanni: Let’s consider that a single person in one day should be able to tie the tomatoes over a surface of 500 square metres, that means covering two sectors [capannoni] and half… Nicola: Just in one day? But that’s impossible! G: No, no, no, that’s possible! Till now the four of us covered five sectors and three lines [caselle] in half a day. All right? That means that

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tomorrow, no matter what, we have to cover five sectors in the morning and five in the afternoon, that means ten in total. Even if Valeria is slower and she goes at half-speed, one sector and half in the morning and one in the afternoon, tomorrow we should finish. I mean: we must finish! [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 12 June 2013]

By asking us to work according to this tight schedule and by defining in advance the level of the output, Giovanni always knew how much effort we were actually putting in. His capacity to precisely quantify our work effort was also due to the high standardization of the labour process in the technologically advanced sector of greenhouse agriculture. That is why our employer frequently reminded us that, even if he was not apparently controlling our work, at the end of the day he would know whether we were reducing our pace or not. These imperatives for workers to put in more effort became even stronger when Giovanni informed us that, starting from the following week, just one of us would continue to work at SicilSerre (and I was automatically excluded from this selection). To decide who would remain out of Ahmed and Nicola, he set up a proper “race”—as he defined it—between the two of them. Although neither of them wanted to take part in the competition, they had no option. Ahmed, for instance, expressed strong disapproval, frustration and rage at being treated “like a racehorse”, and understood clearly that the employer’s purpose was to accelerate the rhythm of work to his sole advantage. Nevertheless, since both he and Nicola were not in the position to refuse to participate, when the competition took place, they concentrated very hard on the ‘game’, and finally, they openly engaged in it. As illustrated by Michael Burawoy (1979), in a ‘game of making out’ similar to those taking place at SicilSerre, the fact of competing becomes a subjective framework which motivates the action: it provides (short-term) meaning to the work effort in the actual moment of its performance, and thus reduces the strain of the endless series of meaningless motions. Thus, the aim of a game of ‘making out’ relies on modifying the sense of conflict that occurs in workplace by partially obscuring the employers’ intentions of maximizing labour productivity. Finally, at the end of the week, Giovanni declared: Giovanni: I want to be clear once and for all. What you did [referring to Nicola], and what he did [referring to Ahmed] was less compared with the work I did. Let’s say I do three tomato rows, you [Nicola] do two and he

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[Ahmed] does two and a half, just a little bit more. [He pauses, as if to give greater solemnity to what he is about to say]. Now, let’s talk about money… [Addressing A] How much do you ask? e30? e30 is fine! [Addressing N ] What do you reckon? e25? So e25 it is! But as for the work, you have to do at least as much I do. So, I’ve done some calculations: 8 hours are not enough for you to do the work that I do. And the same goes for him. So, to do the work I do, you need to work 10 hours a day [to N ]. He needs to do 9 hours, because he’s a little bit faster [referring to A]. If that’s fine by you, then we’re sorted. If not [he makes a sign with his hand to indicate that they can leave]: friends as always. This is the deal. It’s fast work. If that’s not all right for you there’s nothing I can do about it. Nicola: Let’s try to do 10 hours… as this is my first day in the greenhouse in two years. Perhaps I can do 10 hours for a bit, then we’ll see. G: What do you mean “then we’ll see”? I don’t get you! N: If you don’t agree, I’ll leave! You can’t get mad because I can’t be like you. G: You don’t want to get mad? N: I don’t want you to get mad. For now, 10 hours is better. G: 10 hours is better? N: Because I’m not fast. It’s right. Because I still have problems. G: Right? [triumphantly] N: Right! […] G: But, wait, I want to be clear on another aspect. It’s not that because you work 10 hours, you have to go even slower and you don’t do as much as I do. Do you know what I mean? Maybe you’ll say: “Since I work 10 hours, I’ll go slower” and you don’t produce as much I do! That’s not good either! N: That’s right! G: Right? All right! [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 15 June 2013]

The outcome of the challenge/competition was thus the decision to continue to employ both workers, Ahmed and Nicola, although they were allocated different wages and working hours. This illustrates even more clearly that the competitive framework was introduced by the employer in order to intensify the pace of work and to justify the application of differentiated set of rules between the two competitors from then on. In this way, Giovanni actually implemented a form of piecework, strictly binding the workers’ wages to productivity by varying the number of working hours per worker. Although demanding that labourers keep to his own pace was an arbitrary decision, Giovanni justified himself to me by saying:

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Look, you’re Italian, so you must understand me. It’s not that I’m taking advantage of the situation. Do you understand? I do a calculation based on what I do. If I do two tomato rows, and you do one, then you’re half of what I am. If I go to work as a day labourer, as Ahmed does, and someone says to me, “How much do you want for a day?”, and let’s say I tell him: “e40”, so I have to do a job for e40, which means going fast. That’s what it’s all about: it’s mathematical! [Informal conversation, Vittoria, 15 June 2013]

In Giovanni’s words, his arbitrary decision to ask the employees to keep to his pace is framed discursively as something objective (“it’s mathematical”), which forecloses the possibility of any criticism and attempts to persuade the listener to support a definition of differentiated wages and working hours within the same workplace. Piecework is quite a common form of payment in agriculture, especially during the harvesting season, when farmworkers receive a salary corresponding to the number of baskets of produce collected (Corrado et al. 2016; Holmes 2013). This type of wage is not so common in the TLS, when rewards are usually calculated on a daily basis for of 8– 9 hours of work.8 Nevertheless, as we have seen in the case of SicilSerre, similar forms of control over workers’ productivity do exist, conflicting with farmworkers’ attempts to reduce their work effort. As the case of SicilSerre clearly illustrates, the employers’ strategies often aim to inspire competitive pressures among team members. As pointed out by Burawoy (1979), through the ‘game of making out’, as soon as workers engage in the competition set by the employers, ‘making out’ becomes a value in itself and thus motivates them to increase their labour effort. These strategies to create consensus, although precarious and always pliable,

8 Although uncommon, I have also observed cases of piecework in packinghouses. The second time I interviewed Serena, in 2014, she recounted that in her packinghouse, the employers introduced piecework: “Now each cardboard box containing ten plastic boxes of 500 g of tomato is paid 30 cents. Valeria: “How long does it take to prepare a cardboard box?” S: “If you are rapid and the tomatoes are good it takes five minutes. But if the tomato sucks it can take fifteen minutes. The average speed should be fifteen cardboard boxes per hour. But if you require people to be speedy in processing vegetables, you can’t also demand a good job! And in this place, they actually expect both!” As highlighted in this conversation, piecework in packinghouses not only forces the labourers to speed up their work rhythms, but it prevents the employers from the risks of buying lower-quality tomatoes which require much more labour to be processed, in this case reducing workers’ actual wages.

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couple with the implementation of forms of control over the workforce. Finally, as the case of SicilSerre demonstrates, the competitive framework which pushes a Tunisian and a Romanian farmworker into going head-tohead in the greenhouse contributes to exacerbating competition based on workers’ nationalities, (re)produced as in opposition towards one other.

4.4

Withholding Salaries

Struggles around reward do not pertain exclusively to the salary level, but also consist in conflicts concerning the timing of payments. One of the issues I came across during my fieldwork concerns the common practice of postponing farmworkers’ salaries until the end of the harvesting season, when produce ripens and is ready to be sold. Research on day labour often explores this practice, and the agricultural sector is no exception (Valenzuela 2003; Rogaly 2009; Perrotta 2011, 2015; Theodore 2014; Apostolidis 2019). As reported by Papadopoulos and Fratsea (2016) in their research concerning the agricultural district of Manolada in Greece, withholding wages from Bangladeshi and Albanian strawberry pickers has been a widespread practice among Greek farmers as well. Below are extensive excerpts from my fieldnotes accounting one of these cases of a long-lasting conflict inside a company. This dispute occurred between two employers—who I will call here Battaglia—and ten employees working and living in their firm. The Battaglia brothers were two aubergine and tomato producers, well known in the area for their custom of organizing bus transfers directly from Romania to Vittoria once or twice per year in order to supply the labour force for their large array of greenhouses. Due to the poor living conditions and low wages provided by the brothers (e20 or e25 a day in 2013, and e15 a day in 2015), labour turnover in the company was particularly high: according to rumours, the Battaglias would recruit anyone looking for a job and host them in precarious shacks within their property; nevertheless, many of them would quit after the first couple of months, sometimes without even collecting their pay. During our fieldwork, Lorina and Patriciu put us in contact with a group of farmworkers hired and hosted by one of the Battaglia brothers, and Giuliana and I started to spend time with them. At that moment, the group was composed of three Romanian couples, two Tunisian men, and two couples made up of a Tunisian man and a Romanian woman. All of them were working without a contract for

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periods of several months to up to five years and were residing in shared shacks scattered between the greenhouses. The group used to invite us for dinners and barbecues organized in the empty spots within the Battaglias’ fenced property, and in those friendly situations we talked about work, often engaging in conversations concerning the employer’s practice of postponing payments: Lorina complains constantly about the fact that Battaglia, her boss, is never on time with payments. She explains that he generally gives e100 to each couple, while he keeps the rest. What he usually does is write down the number of days workers are in the greenhouse and then calculates the sum he owes them. Problems arise when someone claims their money, because they need it to cover extra expenses or to go back to Romania. Then the boss says that he has no money and that they have to wait till he sells the aubergines. Dorina, for instance, one of her friends and workmates, asked Battaglia for her money so she could go back to Romania. She asked for “the bill” – as they call it – one month ago, and they calculate Battaglia owes her around e2000. Right now, she has stopped working and she is just waiting for her money. Last week, Battaglia gave her e500, and told her to buy whatever she needs to travel to Romania. She did so, but she is still waiting, with all her luggage and food already packed in her room. Lorina and Patriciu are also planning to go back to Romania for a couple of months, and that’s why they also asked for their money. Unlike Dorina, they are going on working in the meantime instead of just waiting and “wasting their time”. As Lorina says, they will refuse any pin money, they want the entire sum that they are waiting for. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 12 July 2013] At around four o’clock, we meet in a place in the countryside called contrada Alcerito to give a lift to some of our friends living around there to go to the nearby supermarket. Lorina comes with Aziz, her Tunisian neighbour, while Patriciu doesn’t come this time. When we ask what Patriciu is doing instead, she explains that since nine in the morning he has been waiting in front of the Battaglia’s office together with his workmates to ask for their money. […] When we come back to the countryside around six o’clock, we find the whole group still in front of the Battaglias’ office. Patriciu comes closer to us: he is extremely nervous, drinks a warm beer in one long gulp and starts sweating. Addressing me and Giuliana, he continues to repeat: “Ah, that’s Italy… and it sucks!” and Giuliana replies that she feels embarrassed about it. Patriciu tells us that during that morning someone for the Battaglia family said to him arrogantly: “Man, you are wearing such a nice shirt! You know? I have no money to buy that kind of shirt for myself”.

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Almost half an hour after our arrival, Battaglia reaches the office in his white SUV. He gets out of the car and starts shouting that he can’t do anything for these people. Giuliana and I keep a bit of a distance from the group; in any case Battaglia doesn’t seem to be bothered about our presence there. Another car arrives and the atmosphere get tenser. But the driver enters the office without even looking at the angry group of people. Dorina, extremely pissed off, says to Battaglia that if he doesn’t pay them, she’ll take a gas cylinder and burn the entire place down. Lorina, in the meanwhile, is threatening to call the police. “Of course, you can call them! Please, call them!”, says the man provocatively […]. Clearly no-one has any trust in the police, and no-one mentions trade unions either. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 20 July 2013] After one week, Lorina calls us asking to meet so we can say goodbye each other… finally, they are leaving for Romania! She is very happy because this morning Battaglia gave them almost the entire sum he owed to the couple (e1000) although he held back e200 which he says he will send to Romania later. Obviously, she considers this money as lost. I think that this is a strategy that Battaglia uses to encourage workers to come back to his company when they return from Romania. In any case, Lorina is very happy that tomorrow she can take the bus and go back home and doesn’t think too much about that money and about her return to Vittoria. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 27 July 2013]

The Battaglia brothers were not the only people we knew of who were postponing the payment for their workers. These practices were widespread in the TLS and so unsurprisingly were mentioned by several employers we interviewed. For instance, Marco, a tomato producer in his fifties, explained that employers usually keep farmworkers’ money by justifying it as a favour towards their employees, who would otherwise risk losing or wasting their wages due to their inability to save money.9 In Marco’s discourse, paternalism mingles with racism to depict a situation that usually leads to everyday conflicts in the TLS companies. Valeria: How do you usually pay your employees? Marco: According to their needs, there isn’t one single way… For example, there is someone who doesn’t want to bring money back home 9 Similarly, the employers interviewed by Castracani (2019) on farms in Quebec describe their practice of keeping farmworkers’ documents as a favour to avoid workers’ risking losing them.

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and says: “Give me just e50 for food and then look after the rest of the money for me till the end of the year”. V: Why don’t they usually want to bring money back home? M: Because maybe they live with many people and they are afraid that someone could steal from them! ‘Cos between them they steal from each other, you know? There are those who come here [in Italy] to be like on vacation, and as soon as they earn e25 they waste it… you know? Those that are undocumented… V: So does it work like a deposit for them? M: Actually, you agree with them to provide a certain sum weekly (usually around e50 per person), and then if they need more money they can come and ask. Because it’s their money, we kindly keep it on their behalf. Because, you know, they are beasts! They kill each other like dogs! [There are two type of migrants ]: there are those who ask you to keep their money and then they come once a month to collect it and send it to their loved ones back home. And then there are those for whom money is never enough, they fritter it away here in Italy, while drinking or doing similar things. [Interview, Vittoria, 11 December 2015]

In Marco’s words, the ‘good farmworkers’ are those who are saving money in order to send remittances to their loved ones back home. In this case, the employers’ practice of retaining their salary is described as a favour to those who may eventually become ‘victims’ of their fellow workers’ degenerate behaviours. On the contrary, the ‘bad farmworkers’ are those who drink in public, pilfer and fail to use their time productively. In this case, the practice of keeping the salary is deemed necessary because those ‘deviant’ workers need to be ‘educated’ to use money in a productive and correct manner. In Marco’s account, paternalism is thus coupled with blatant racism, as he openly describes migrant workers as “beasts”, “dogs”, acting from irrational impulses of hunger and rage. Finally, these behaviours are attributed mainly to the so-called deviant migrants, i.e. “those who are undocumented”. Salary deferral thus represents a widely used strategy that allows the employers to tie farmworkers to their workplaces by reducing their mobility in several ways. First of all, in order to obtain their money, farmworkers cannot quit their job without a previous agreement with their employer. Secondly, for farmworkers to be living on-site with little ability to reach city centres and meet other people (due to not having a private car or money to pay an informal taxi) means that they also have reduced chances to access information about other job offers in the

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area or abroad, decreasing in turn the likelihood of moving on to better opportunities. Thirdly, salary deferral also implies an increase in farmworkers’ dependency on intermediaries or on the employers themselves in terms of accessing the supermarket, hospitals, trade union offices and so on. This dependency strengthens a paternalistic relationship between the employers and the employees that in turn reduces workers’ ability to leave the workplace at short notice (see also Chapter 3).

4.5

Working Without a Wage

This chapter has so far addressed the salary negotiations between employers and employees in the greenhouses. In this last section, the aim is to additionally consider struggles around pay in packinghouses, using as an example the case of TomatoArtists, the company where Giuliana and I undertook a period of participant observation in Spring 2013. Before starting work at TomatoArtists, we agreed with our employer on a wage of e4 per hour. Once at work, we soon discovered that we were the only ones actually earning money at that moment, because our workmates had not received any of their salaries since September 2012. Furthermore, they had no expectation of receiving money from the firm in the future; in fact, there were rumours that the company was facing a period of crisis and would declare bankruptcy sooner or later. Again, these workers did not consider that contacting a trade union was a viable solution. Unions had already started several disputes with no success, as one of our interlocutors at the local branch of FLAI-CGIL explained to us.10 During our period of participant observation we were of course interested in investigating why our colleagues were working without any pay for almost a year: which kind of motivations were pushing them to wake up every morning and cope with these demanding routines for no reward? What else, besides the wage, could motivate their work? Puzzled by these concerns, we started asking our workmates these questions, and apparently they all had good reasons for staying there. For some of them, for instance, it was difficult to look for another job without a car: for Fathima TomatoArtists was the only plant that 10 Soon after receiving the job offer from TomatoArtists, Giuliana and I asked a trade unionist friend for more information about this employer. Our friend replied that ‘he was a slaveholder’ since he already knew about workers’ difficulties in obtaining their wages.

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she could reach in 40 minutes on foot from her place and therefore be able to respond to the packinghouse’s demands for her to work at short notice. Similarly, Megi was relying on Pavli, her husband, to get her to the workplace: the question of whether to quit or not thus implied a more complex marital decision. In a similar way, Sahara was also bound to this specific firm: she was hired in the packinghouse while her husband was working in the greenhouses owned by the same employer; moreover, the employer was subletting them a place for e300 per month in the nearby city centre, subtracting the rent directly from their salaries. Although at that moment they were both working without a wage, their labour was necessary in order to keep the house. Aside from specific situations, more general considerations were raised by almost all the team members: We discuss with Davide and Pavli about the fact that they haven’t received any wages for a long time. They explain that they both have decided to show an easy-going attitude towards the management, almost never asking to have their money back, although the amount owed is no small sum (Davide, for instance, is waiting for e8000). Pavli recounts that at the beginning this wasn’t such a big deal for them, because they both had some savings to survive: “It was like keeping money in a bank: we knew they must pay us at some point”. But now they are afraid that this money will never arrive and by leaving the workplace, they are scared of losing the entire sum straightaway. Davide explains that he decided to stay there solely because of the ingaggio [the indenture]”. Having an ingaggio in agriculture means having access to a consistent unemployment subsidy, and according to Davide, this is very important for making ends meet.11 He said that he receives e2-3000 per year, since he has one daughter. All in all, according to Davide, this is better than being totally unemployed, and it seems that Pavli agrees with him. [Fieldnotes, Santa Croce Camerina, 28 June 2013]

According to Van Der Linden (2008, 23), ‘wage workers are often less ‘free’ than the classical view suggests. Employers have often restricted their employees’ freedom to leave in situations of labour scarcity’. By examining several examples through history and worldwide, Van Der Linden highlights that the labour relation does not exclusively entail an exchange between money and labour power. There are several other economic and non-economic bonds tying employers and employees, such as accommodation, debts, indentured labour, physical compulsion 11 On this topic, see Chapter 3.

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and social and economic connections; among these connections, Van Der Linden also lists ‘social security provisions and other special benefits’, inviting us to consider the overall relation between the ‘subaltern worker’—as he defines them—and the employer, including outside the labour process. Several of these considerations fit the case of TomatoArtists and indeed the TLS labour market in general. As already reported in the previous chapters, for instance, in 2013 the company reduced the employees’ hourly wage (from e4.30 to e4); at the same time, to retain workers, it increased the number of social security contributions that guaranteed access to higher unemployment benefits. Moreover, working at TomatoArtists, as with many companies in the area, provided other additional advantages: for instance, workers usually brought home fresh vegetables from the packinghouses; besides that, with no opposition from the management, they usually bartered the produce surplus in exchange for dairy products with a local farmer. Davide often pointed out that holding down this employment was convenient for him in terms of networking and exchanging ‘favours’ with people asking him for fresh food. Furthermore, workers were also taking part in petty theft: Today we have worked just for two-and-a-half hours. Then we stop and clean our desks. While we are completing the last boxes, Fathima suggests me that I take home some fresh beans… I am ashamed both of accepting her proposal and refusing it. Thus, I ask: “Do you usually take some of them too?”. Fathima nods. So we take Giuliana’s rucksack and fill it with beans, trying clumsily to avoid Davide’s gaze. Then Fathima puts the fresh beans in her bag too, grabbing them rapidly. I ask her if taking some vegetables would be problem for Davide. “If he says something… fuck him!”, declares Fathima, railing against Davide, who is passing by in that very moment. A few minutes later, Davide himself takes an entire box of beans on his shoulder, and demonstrates to us: “Can you see, girls? This amount, at least, is what you have to carry home”. [Fieldnotes, Santa Croce Camerina, 21 June 2013]

These small thefts, which boost workers’ scanty and uneven salaries, represent not only a way to respond to an immediate and material need. They can also be conceived as a ‘practice of everyday resistance’, entailing the reappropriation of produce for labourers’ own consumption, and for the purpose of distributing it to maintain networks within the local community (Cohen and Hjalmarson 2018, 12; Redini 2017).

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As a way to respond to the employers’ practice of withholding farmworkers’ money, these covert acts of resistance can even turn into more open forms of conflict. At TomatoArtists, for instance, where the atmosphere was fraught with tension, these frictions were commonplace. Darjana recounted a quarrel she had with Armando, the job consultant. She went to his offices and started shouting that she needs her money. Armando laughed at her, advising her to look for a good lawyer. As soon as Darjana reported this story to her husband, the man drove to the packinghouse and entered Armando’s office brandishing a knife and shouting: “Watch out, because in Albania we don’t have any lawyers… but we have butchers and we are all pretty good at using knives”. […] Pavli reported a similar story: Elena, a former worker, entered Armando’s office with half a bottle of gasoline to threaten him. Armando started teasing her by saying: “Haven’t you got enough money to fill the bottle?” The girl replied that half a bottle was more than enough for her purpose of burning the entire administration office. [Fieldnotes, Santa Croce Camerina, 24 June 2013]

These examples illustrate how labour can be tied to workplaces in ways other than just the wage. Additional considerations—such as the presence of a public subsidy or the existence of several side-advantages—can be at stake when deciding to quit a job that provides a wage, albeit a low and unpredictable one. Nevertheless, workers organize individually and collectively in order to adapt to, contest or modify these constraints. To sum up, this chapter has centred on struggles concerning the wages in day labour relations. Firstly, it has shown how conventional salaries are usually shaped around a variety of factors, but especially depend on farmworkers’ living arrangements and on the configuration of a local ‘dormitory labour regime’ (Smith 2003). Since migrants’ dwelling situation in the TLS differs according to national groups, this racialized spatial arrangement in turn also entails salary segmentation along racial lines. In this way, nationality becomes a proxy frequently used by the employers to establish a conventional ‘fair’ wage. Consequently, the ongoing changes in the local ‘dormitory labour regime’ and in migrants’ mobility strategies also imply changes in the level of wages through times. Secondly, the chapter has dealt with everyday negotiations concerning work effort and expected level of productivity. Hinging on my experience as a farmworker, I illustrated several strategies enacted by the employees to slow down work pace and reduce the overall work effort. On the other

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hand, I discussed employers’ strategies to tie day labourers to their workplaces. Among these strategies, it is possible to include piecework and salary withholding, as well as the provision of side benefits, such as social security contributions or free food. All in all, this chapter has showed how the final ‘price’ of labour is conventionally established and negotiated every day between employers and employees according to several considerations that transcend the workplace and the working hours to also encompass the space and time of workers’ social reproduction.

References Andrijasevic, Rutvica, and Sacchetto, Devi. 2017. “‘Disappearing Workers’: Foxconn in Europe and the Changing Role of Temporary Work Agencies.” Work, Employment and Society 31 (1): 54–70. Apostolidis, Paul. 2019. The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berezin, Mabel. 2009. “Exploring Emotions and the Economy: New Contributions from Sociological Theory.” Theory and Society 38: 335–46. Burawoy, Michael. 1979 Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campanella, Piera, ed. 2018. Vite Sottocosto. Secondo Rapporto Presidio. Roma: Aracne. Castracani, Lucio. 2019. Ils Viennent pour Travailler: Enquête Ethnographique parmi les Ouvriers Agricoles Migrants au Québec. Montréal: PUQ. Ceccagno, Antonella. 2015. “The Mobile Emplacement: Chinese Migrants in Italian Industrial Districts.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41 (7): 1111–30. Ceccagno, Antonella, and Devi Sacchetto. 2020. “The Mobility of Workers Living at Work in Europe.” Current Sociology 68 (3): 299–315. Cohen, Amy, and Elise Hjalmarson. 2018. “Quiet Struggles: Migrant Farmworkers, Informal Labor, and Everyday Resistance in Canada.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology (December). https://doi.org/10.1177/002 0715218815543. Cortese, Anna Maria, and Rita Palidda. 2018 “Concorrenza Imperfetta: Strategie Competitive di Migranti Tunisini e Rumeni nell’Agricoltura del Ragusano.” Mondi Migranti 1: 49–66. Corrado, Alessandra, Carlos De Castro and Domenico Perrotta. 2016. Migrations and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean area. London: Routledge.

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Hellio, Emmanuelle. 2016. “‘They Know That You’ll Leave, Like a Dog Moving onto the Next Bin’: Undocumented Male and Seasonal Contracted Female Workers in the Agricultural Labour Market of Huelva, Spain.” In Corrado, De Castro, and Perrotta 2016, 198–216. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003. The Managed Hart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California. Holmes, Seth. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kilkey, Majella, and Domenica Urzì. 2017. “Social Reproduction in Sicily’s Agricultural Sector: Migration Status and Context of Reception.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (15): 2573–90. Papadopoulos, Apostolos G., and Loukia-Maria Fratsea. 2016. “Migrant Labour and Intensive Agricultural Production in Greece: The Case of Manolada Strawberry Industry.” In Corrado, De Castro, and Perrotta 2016, 128–44. Perrotta, Domenico. 2011. Vite in Cantiere. Migrazione e Lavoro dei Rumeni in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Perrotta, Domenico. 2015. “Agricultural Day Laborers in Southern Italy: Forms of Mobility and Resistance.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 114 (1): 195–203. Preibisch, Kerry, and Leigh Binford. 2007. “Interrogating Racialized Global Labour Supply: An Exploration of the Racial/National Replacement of Foreign Agricultural Workers in Canada.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 44 (1): 5–34. Pugliese, Enrico. 1985. “Quale Lavoro per gli Stranieri in Italia?” Politica ed Economia 9: 69–70. Pun, Ngai, and Chris Smith. 2007. “Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place: The Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China.” Work, Employment and Society 21 (1): 27. Redini, Veronica. 2017. “All’Ombra delle Merci.” In Le Reti del Valore, edited by Sandro Chignola and Devi Sacchetto, 141–60. Roma: Derive & Approdi. Roediger, David. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso. Rogaly, Ben. 2009. “Spaces of Work and Everyday Life: Labour Geographies and the Agency of Unorganised Temporary Migrant Workers.” Geography Compass 3 (6): 1975–87. Smith, Chris. 2003. “Living at Work: Management Control and the Dormitory Labour System in China.” Asia Pacific Journal of Management 20 (3): 333– 58. Smith, Chris. 2006. “The Double Indeterminacy of Labour Power: Labour Effort and Labour Mobility.” Work, Employment and Society 20 (2): 389–402. Smith, Chris. 2015. “Rediscovery of the Labour Process.” Working Paper Series SoMWP-1501, The School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham Hill.

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Theodore, Nik. 2014. “Generative Work: Day Labourers’ Freirean Praxis.” Urban Studies 52 (11): 2035–50. Urzì, Domenica, and Colin Williams. 2016. “Beyond Post-National Citizenship: An Evaluation of the Experiences of Tunisian and Romanian Migrants Working in the Agricultural Sector in Sicily.” Citizenship Studies 21 (1): 136–50. Valenzuela, Abel, Jr. 2003. “Day Labor Work.” Annual Review of Sociology 29: 307–33. Van Der Linden, Marcel. 2008. Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History. Leiden: Brill. Wharton, Amy S. 2009. “The Sociology of Emotional Labor.” Annual Review of Sociology 35: 147–65.

CHAPTER 5

The Body at Work

Abstract The chapter sheds light on the struggles concerning farmworkers’ bodies. It discusses how day labourers’ bodies are shaped by employers’ recruitment strategies and at the same time how they are able to push back against workplace requirements. Firstly, the chapter shows how farmworkers resort, alternatively, to a sense of beauty or pride in order to reproduce forms of hyper-femininity and hegemonic masculinity preventing the degradation of the self that a ‘dirty’ job in agriculture can entail. Secondly, it exemplifies how day labourers appropriate their everyday routines to eschew risks of exhaustion, i.e. by collective work pacing. Finally, it discusses how farmworkers strategically use their bodies to show or conceal pain as a way to convey different sets of meanings to an interlocutor. Keywords The body · Recruitment strategies · Workers’ postures · Farmworkers’ health conditions · Collective work-pacing · ‘Dirty’ work

5.1

The Body/Work Nexus

While working in greenhouses, I was constantly struggling with a runny nose. Nothing serious, as I explained to my workmates, just chronic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Piro, Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7_5

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rhinitis likely exacerbated by my spending many hours in a humid environment full of pesticide fumes. While taking short breaks between the tomato rows, hiding behind the plants to avoid our employer’s gaze, Wera and I often discussed these sorts of ailments and other breathing problems that she was also experiencing. “The worst”, she explained, “is that I can’t smell my daughters anymore when they’re with me”. Every experience is an embodied one, and day labour is no exception (Ghigi and Sassatelli 2018). The body is deeply constrained, worn out, ‘manufactured’ every day by this kind of labour. At the same time, labour process is shaped around the human body, which is marked by gender, ethnicity, hidden and visible disabilities and so on. The body/work nexus is thus crucial both in the analysis of the labour process and in studies focussed on the socially constructed nature of bodies. Nevertheless, following Wolkowitz (2006), this nexus has been neglected for long time by labour scholars and sociologists of the body. Although Marx explicitly recognizes the ‘mutually constitutive relationship between body and work [since] bodies are both the source of labour and themselves its product’ (18), aside from dealing with work-related illness and injury, further labour process analyses have underestimated the relevance of the bodies. Braverman’s (1974) work, for instance, which conceptualizes the embeddedness of a mind-body dualism within the assembly line, separating the conception and execution of work, did not contribute substantially to the understanding of the embodied nature of labour, since bodies, conceived of as machines, constitute a less interesting aspect of the human existence (Wolkowitz and Warhurst 2010, 225). More recently, by recognizing the relevant contribution of, among others, Bourdieu and Foucault, and by recalling Thompson’s lesson on the modern factory, several labour scholars have engaged in a fruitful discussion with sociologists of the body, thanks also to the stimulus provided by intersectional approaches (Crenshaw 1989; Browne and Misra 2003; Anthias 2012; Collins 2015).1 Examining bodies at work, as this chapter aims to do, enriches analysis of the labour process by showing how workers are selected according to gender, ethnicity, age and other bodily characteristics, such as height and weight, demonstrating how a suitable farmworker’s body is deeply socially constructed and how certain skills, often deemed to be natural, 1 For a review of this topic see, among others, Wolkowitz and Warhurst (2010). See also Smith and Winders (2008), Harvey (1998) and Bahnisch (2000).

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actually require a long-life apprenticeship and demand certain processes of incorporation (see Sect. 5.2). Moreover, the chapter will examine the everyday workplace struggles concerning bodies that employers try to control and constrain by prescribing postures and routines, and that the employees strive to preserve through their ‘mindful’ bodily reactions (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987; see Sect. 5.3). Finally, in order to consider the body/work nexus, this chapter draws attention to the uses that farmworkers variously make of their injured or ill bodies, concealing or showing their physical pains to express distress or compliance towards an interlocutor (see Sect. 5.4). In cases of contingent day labour, the very nature of the casualized work deeply affects workers’ bodies. In a different way from long-term manual labour, the swing between peaks of work and bouts of unemployment, although allowing the possibility of rest, also produces nevertrained-enough bodies and high levels of stress and mental suffering. Moreover, in order to secure work every day, casual day labourers need to show off their maximum stamina and strength, and so they are partially stripped of the capacity to adapt to the work rhythm in order to preserve their bodies from exhaustion. Furthermore, when labourers perceive employment in agriculture as a temporary experience in their life, as is often the case for migrant farmworkers, knowledges about the body, for example preventing bad posture or distributing physical effort over a longer period of time are less likely to be transmitted. By considering these peculiarities of day labour in agriculture, the following sections deal with the embodied nature of labour and with processes of farmworkers body construction both within and outside the workplace.

5.2 ‘The Greenhouse Is Not a Place for Italian Women’: Embodied Labour and Employers’ Recruitment Strategies It is widely recognized that employers’ recruitment strategies hinge on bodily characteristics and on expectations that certain skills are to be found ‘naturally’ in prospective employees according their gender and nationality, used to make assumptions about physical strength, stamina, manual dexterity, patience, caring attitudes and so on (see, among others, Preibisch and Encalada Grez 2010; Maldonado 2009; Browne and Misra 2003; Shih 2002; Moss and Tilly 2001). The workplaces and, within

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them, the single tasks are thus highly gendered and racialized, and usually demand specific bodily characteristics. As accounted for in a famous article by Elson and Pearson (1981), in manufacturing factories worldwide, recruitment strategies are largely based on a ‘widespread belief that there is a ‘natural’ differentiation between the innate capacity and personality traits of women and men’ (92), distinguishing between women’s ‘nimble fingers’, and men’s physical strength. Similarly, it is common that certain abilities at work are attributed to specific migrant groups. Preibisch and Binford (2007, 17), among others, explain that in the agricultural industry in Ontario (Canada) ‘Mexican workers are considered [by the employers] to be shorter in stature and are preferred for work that involves stooping close to the ground, while Caribbean workers are considered more suited to fruit tree-picking’. Although the employers are in search of ‘the most docile, reliable and, therefore, exploitable labor force – regardless of their country of origin’ (32), they rely extensively on racial stereotypes and their recruitment strategies represent a set of ‘blatant racist beliefs’ which connect migrants’ alleged biological and bodily characteristics to their work-related capacities. Moreover, as noted by Ambrosini (2013), migrant workers are often conscious of these stereotyping processes and tacitly or openly mobilize them in order to protect racialized (and gendered) labour market niches. As our workmate at Gurrieri told Giuliana and me at the end of our first working day, in the TLS, greenhouses are not considered suitable workplaces for young Italian women. In the greenhouse, male farmworkers’ bodies are constructed as the main protagonists, depicted as strong, heroic, resistant to warm and humid environments, able to deal with dirty work. By contrast the female workers are constructed as marginal and helping bodies,2 supporting men but never in charge of key tasks or responsibilities (such as overseeing the team or managing the plants’ chemical treatment). Overall, ‘the masculine is valued over what is considered feminine, and as a consequence farm women’s bodies and abilities are inferiorized and devalued’ (Brandth 2006, 20). Even though female farmworkers, especially since the 2000s, have constituted a significant

2 Actually, this construction of femininity that stresses weakness and passivity refers mainly to Italian and Tunisian women’s bodies. Instead, the experience of gender and ethnicity for Romanian farmworkers is quite different. As with the experiences of Black working-class women their bodies in the greenhouses are constructed as capable of toiling under strain, showing stamina and a strong commitment to work.

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share of the local workforce (around 30%, according data collected by National Social Security Institute), women’s labour in greenhouses has been for long time totally obscured or fundamentally underestimated and conceived of as ‘gig work’. As a consequence, Italian and Tunisian women have often worked in greenhouses, but they have rarely been employed; this implies that their labour has been frequently unpaid or poorly paid, and when a payment has been made it has been often considered as a form of ‘pin money’ instead of a proper salary (Zelizer 1989). During a Monday morning shift at the packinghouse, Fathima and Alexandra are discussing their weekends. I can hear their conversation from my desk. Fathima is extremely tired because she had to collect tomatoes the whole weekend in her husband’s greenhouses. As far as I understood, her husband is a sharecropper and works the land on his own without employing anyone, but he frequently asks Fathima to join him when she is not on shift at the packinghouse. Alexandra forcibly argues that Fathima has to demand her money: “I’ll tell you once for all: At least e10, e20, come on, he owes you that! If not, he must rely on someone else to work, that’s not your business”. [Fieldnotes, Santa Croce Camerina, 27 June 2013]

As is widely argued by feminist scholars, women across time, space and generations have played major roles in agriculture (cf. Sachs and Alston 2010). The studies focussing on women and agriculture, however, for long time have exclusively dealt with the gendered division of labour within households in family farming or small-scale production, highlighting women’s invisibility and their difficulties in accessing capital and land. Nevertheless, with the restructuring of the agri-food market and export-oriented agriculture, women have assumed a different role as migrant farmworkers entering male-dominated occupations (Lara Flores 1995; Barndt 2002; Mannon et al. 2012). Although their number worldwide is still limited, they have represented an important target for employers in order to segment labour and to hierarchize workforces according to gender and racial lines. Aside from taking up the worst jobs (both socially and economically), female farmworkers have also to contend with stigma from both the migrant community and the hosting countries who depict them as questionable mothers and sexually available women (cf. Preibisch and Encalada Grez 2010, 299; Moreno Niento 2014, 208; Hellio 2016, 211). The situation in the TLS is no exception. For example, Romanian farmworkers are depicted as ‘sexually available’,

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mainly when contrasted with Tunisian and Italian women. Accordingly, this exposes greenhouse farmworkers to a higher risk of harassment and abuse (cf. Chapter 2 on this topic). Antonella—a young psychologist enrolled in the 2000s by the Municipality of Vittoria to conduct exploratory research aimed at detecting migrant women’s needs in the local community—largely concurs with the existence of these prejudices, as she recounted in her interview: [During our inquiry] we become acquainted with the employers’ frequent impression that the sexual elements, I mean, the elements referring to sex in the labour relationship were more emphasized in cases in which the women taking up the job were originally from Romania. I mean, I sensed that Romanian women are more sexually available. The impression was that there wasn’t any type of coercion [from the employer], but a real sexual desire from these women. Some of them were using this opportunity to gain advantages, such as to reduce work, or to assume a higher role in the company, maybe overseeing. [It was possible for us to detect these] behaviours inviting sexual approaches because, when we visited these women, they were usually wearing skimpy clothing, which clearly invites men to go beyond the working relationship. [Interview, Vittoria, 7 June 2013]

Antonella clearly outlines a widespread myth concerning Romanian women’s sexual availability, which couples with the idea of female farmworkers as victims of labour and sexual exploitation. Both these contrasting myths, a locally adapted version of the well-known images of women as femmes fatales or femmes fragiles, contribute to placing Romanian female farmworkers in a more vulnerable position compared with other women and with migrant and Italian men. In contrast to greenhouses, packinghouses are highly femininized workplaces. According to the employers, they prefer to hire women in the processing lines because they are deemed to be ‘naturally’ endowed with qualities such as manual dexterity, precision and patience in packing vegetables, while making them look attractive, ready for supermarket shelves. Since these qualities are ‘naturally’ ascribed to women, they remain unrecognized as labour skills but conceived of as innate aptitudes (Elson and Pearson 1981; Lara Flores 1995). As highlighted by Juana Moreno Nieto (2014, 204), among others, when describing employers’ strategies in recruiting female strawberry pickers in the Loukkos plain in Morocco, the recognition of these qualities refers at the same time to a

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bodily disposition and to a moral attitude: ‘Patience was mentioned on multiple occasions as being a feminine attribute and refers to a twofold meaning: physical endurance on the one hand, allowing repetitive and tiresome tasks to be carried out; and moral endurance on the other, making it possible to accept poor working conditions (such as low wages) or disrespectful treatment from the foremen (such as insults), which, as opposed to men, women would endure’. Vittorio, a middle-aged Sicilian man whose father first imported the greenhouse technology into the TLS, reported these considerations by framing the gendered recruitment procedures in the packinghouses of the TLS as an historically rooted phenomenon. Valeria: Who was processing vegetables in the packinghouses [back in the 1970s]? Vittorio: Waged workers, mainly women, and today it’s still the same! If you go into the packinghouses, 99% of the employees are women, as it used to be once upon a time! Women had to process vegetables, while men used to be employed for… I mean, they had to carry heavy loads, because in that situation some brute strength is required, that we, as men, we have! You have other qualities, instead! [Interview, Vittoria, 12 May 2013]

Although men’s tasks in the packinghouses are limited, nevertheless they are described as essential to ‘powering up’ the entire labour process. Like Vittorio, Sandra, a 36-year-old packinghouse manager, depicts the recruitment procedures in her company as highly gendered, but also concerned with physical aspect. She explains that work in the packinghouse is more appropriate to female bodies and attitudes, because it requires nimble fingers and an aesthetic sense. At the same time, she explains that she ‘needs to keep men’ on the lines since they are essential for lifting heavy loads and accomplishing tasks requiring strength, such as changing the bobbins of the cellophane packing machine that wraps vegetables. Additionally, when asked more about the recruitment procedures, she replies: Valeria: Generally, how old are the (female) workers? Sandra: Their age could vary; but in terms of height, they are as tall as me [she is quite short ]. V: [puzzled expression]

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S: Well, I never hire beautiful or tall girls, they are troublesome, you know? I select according to aesthetic criteria, because nice girls come here to look for something else, not for work. And then they slow down the work, because guys lose their time looking at them [imitating a dumbfounded expression]. [Interview, Vittoria, 29 May 2013].

By stigmatizing beauty and by using bodily characteristics as proxies of ‘moral’ behaviour to select prospective employees—also considering postures, dress code, hairstyle, etc.—Sandra is explicitly prescribing to her female employees the set of rules that need to be followed in order to adapt to the workplace (cf. Warhurst and Nickson 2009). The female workers’ beauty is typically described as a ‘treat’ by the employers in greenhouses and packinghouses,3 and this consideration is even more frequent in relation to Romanian farmworkers. While employers aim to manage embodied labour by prescribing bodily characteristics in workplaces, workers react through adaptation but also by deliberately embracing creative forms of self-expression in contrast to employers’ expectations. What is at stake here is labourers’ autonomy in shaping their own bodies sometimes by making them good-looking and appealing in contrast with the workplace requirements. Serena, for instance, explains that, even if she and her colleagues in the packinghouse are constantly reproached by their supervisor and risk jeopardizing their fifteen-minute break, from time to time they attempt to leave a lock of hair sticking out of their hairnets, with the purpose of personalizing their bodies which are constrained by the uniforms. Similarly, while visiting Romanian greenhouse workers such as Lorina, Camilla and Niculina, I was often surprised by the effort they put into taking care of their bodies: after ten hours of work, even spending their time off in the same greenhouse area, they used to wear nice necklaces and earrings, and would have a little make-up on and be well-dressed. These practices of selfcare, at odds to what employers prescribe to them, can be conceived as a form of body work in response to the companies’ requirements and a reaction towards the ‘dirty’ nature of the agricultural labour. As highlighted in Martina Cvajner’s ethnography (2011, 2012), the East European domestic workers interviewed by the author also tend to adopt a dress code deemed to be flashy and sometimes even tacky. According 3 On the practice of stigmatizing beauty, common especially among female employers, see also Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) on domestic work.

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to Cvajner, this form of ‘hyper-femininity’ conveys an attempt to resist a type of labour that commonly makes women’s everyday experience deeply inconspicuous and ugly by jeopardizing their intimate sphere which is caused by the overlap between their workplace and their living spaces. To ‘spruce up’ a sense of beauty and self-care thus provides a means of surviving the degradation of self that ‘dirty’ labour in agriculture otherwise entails, and represents a way to subvert the stigma imposed to them (as ‘sexually available women’) by claiming personal dignity and social worth. Throughout this section, I have argued that stereotyping based on gender, ethnicity and bodily characteristics strongly influence employers’ recruitment strategies. In other words, I maintain that farmworkers’ bodies are deeply shaped by these workplace prescriptions, even as they strive to counteract the employers’ expectations. The following section continues to draw attention towards workplace struggles around bodies, this time focussing mainly on the employers’ demands that workers assume specific bodily postures and routines, and on the employees’ efforts to mitigate exhaustion and to appropriate repetitive and alienating tasks.

5.3 Learning Bodily Postures and Enduring Monotonous Routines As stated by Leder (1990), in our everyday life we often forget about our body and take it for granted, although it is essential to fulfilling our aims. Nevertheless, we realize that we have (and we are) a body when it suddenly begins to hurt, or it feels awkward, overly visible or out of place in a particular situation (cf. Ghigi and Sassatelli 2018). For Giuliana and me, being hired in greenhouses and packinghouses represented one of these exceptional cases. While working at the university, we were not used to physical strains, nor of conceiving our bodies as an important ‘working tool’ that needs be trained and preserved from exhaustion. Because committing our bodies to work constituted for us such a novelty, from the very beginning we paid close attention to the embodied aspects of day labour. Listening to the recordings of our conversations a few months after our fieldwork, I thus realized that we spent quite a lot of time discussing our bodies: we shared with each other the way we felt, complaining about bodily pains and suffering; but we also

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discussed the postures we were required to assume while working, questioning the type of workplace movement which is usually incorporated and taken for granted by an experienced worker. Giuliana: I definitely hate when we have to spampinare [squatting down to cut the lower leaves of the tomato plants ]. We have to hold the same position for too long and it’s uncomfortable, unnatural, the whole body has to hold itself up in this position: the arms have to lean forward to cut the leaves, while the legs have to remain bent, never touching the ground, to move quickly from one plant to the other. How do they call it? The “rabbit posture”, right? Well, now my quads and back are hurting so much! Valeria: Actually today at one point I saw you working sitting on the ground and Antonio was teasing you a lot. What was he saying? G: Yes, I sat down, it was much more comfortable! But Antonio was laughing at me saying that to be quick you have to be uncomfortable! [Vittoria, 11 April 2013]

The squatting “rabbit posture” (see Figs. 5.1 and 5.2) was indeed required by the employers to allow workers to keep a quick and constant speed without ever resting their centre of gravity directly on the ground. Thus, workers’ bodies need to be fit and accustomed to holding this position and keeping the pace without the risk of sitting down on the ground, as Giuliana had to do (cf. Sanò 2018, 201–3). Prescribing postures to increase worker efficiency, often regardless of their effects on workers’ bodies, is common in workplaces, even in jobs which at first sight do not appear to require physically demanding work. For instance, Jamie Woodcock (2017, 73) in his ethnographic account of work experience in a call centre explains that he was required to maintain an ‘upright posture’ all the time, ‘keeping the head lifted to project the voice’ or ‘standing and gesticulating to add the ephemeral “good” quality to calls’, so that his body, as well as his voice, was never at rest while speaking at the phone. Working in the greenhouses, not all the tasks demand the assumption of such uncomfortable postures as the “rabbit”. More commonly, it is the very repetitiveness of the motions that makes each posture hard to maintain for the whole day. In my fieldnotes, I often jotted down several considerations concerning the organization of labour in the greenhouse, noticing that, while tasks were numerous, they were segmented and arranged in such a way that they become repetitive and tiring for farmworkers. In the period of employment at SicilSerre, for instance, we

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Fig. 5.1 The “rabbit posture” (Photo credit: Giuliana Sanò)

were required by the boss to ‘tie the tomato plants’, which means tying the bottom of a seedling through a clip, fastening it with a nylon string and then tying the string up around a metal stick. This quite simple task was actually segmented into two or three micro-tasks assigned to each of us, all of them requiring movements that for the first couple of hours did not seem to demand too much effort. In my case, for instance, I was asked to ‘simply’ distribute the small black rings near to each tomato seedling. Soon after, Ahmed and Nicola had to squat, to take the clips and use them to tie the stalk of the tomato plants to the string; then, stretching up, they had to fix the string to a pillar above. Although at first glance my task seemed much easier compared to that of my teammates, after the first two hours, my muscles were definitely hurting under the pressure of reproducing the same simple movement so many times. Moreover, the repetitiveness of the task was making me increase the pace of work, in order to finish it and be assigned to something else. Unfortunately, that day I had to continue with the same activity for all five hours

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Fig. 5.2 At work (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

of the morning shift, with no break and no possibility of talking to any of my teammates, who at that time were working in the other corner of the greenhouse. I’m going to audio-record some fieldnotes about the last few days in SicilSerre, ‘cos I don’t have any residual physical energy to write it down. I’m worn out, exhausted! I feel a lingering pain in all my muscles, in my back and in my knees, an overall malaise. But this not just my problem, because Ahmed also has the same pains! Since he works as a casualized day labourer, it’s impossible for him to get totally used to the physical strains that this work entails. […] And, moreover, the repetitiveness of this job is freaking me out! I mean, greenhouses are big enough to eventually allow the employers to vary the assignments, so that workers can alternate moments in which they need to assume uncomfortable positions with situations in which their body can rest a bit. Instead, the employers’ obsession with having ‘to complete’ tasks is driving me totally crazy: “You must complete a line!”, “You must complete a sector!” You must complete… every task in the whole greenhouse area before shifting to the next one. Because of this obsession, today we worked the whole day in a squatting

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position, with our bottoms almost on the ground, in order to brocculiare [crop the branch of the tomato plant growing at the bifurcation between the leaf and the stem]. At this time plants are really small, so we had to stay bent down, working very close to the ground the whole time. That’s unbearable! Now I can’t walk… and for Ahmed it’s the same! [Fieldnote, Vittoria, 13 June 2013]

If labourers are hired by the day, like Ahmed, their aim is to impress the employer in order to secure work for the following period. This means that contingent day labourers are usually forced to maintain a very high pace, pushing their bodies to their maximum speed and stamina. In contrast to casual workers, long-term labourers usually develop the ability to protect their bodies from becoming totally exhausted. Newcomers like me and Giuliana need to learn first and foremost how to regulate the energy during both the working day and the week, keeping a constant pace, resting behind the plants when no-one (including colleagues) can see, getting some fresh air or smoking a cigarette outside of the greenhouse’s plastic wall. At Gurrieri, workers often cautioned us to work “slowly slowly” and to take breaks even if unauthorized. Aside from preventing excessive effort, the practice of collectively slowing down the work pace is often used also as a method to counter the employers’ demand to work faster. Since it has the advantage of being very difficult to detect, in fact, it can be carried on as a covert form of resistance towards oppressive employers (see Cohen and Hjalmarson 2018; Perrotta 2011). To be enacted, however, it requires implicit solidarities and trust ties among team members. By quoting Newby’s historical contributions on agricultural labour relations in England, for instance, Ben Rogaly (2009, 1979) explains that: It was the working together on the land with regular rest breaks in the fields that created the capacity for workers to take some action, however subjective, in their own interests. “Farm workers… worked together in groups… While ploughing the field it was customary to break for short ‘breathers’ every hour or so, during which gossip and chat would be freely exchanged… the kind of workplace camaraderie which supported informal work values and norms easily developed under such conditions…. In particular it was possible to maintain some degree of usually covert antagonism to the injustices of employers…”. (Newby 1977, 34 in Rogaly 2009, 1979)

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Notwithstanding the fact that practices of slowing down the work rhythms and pretending to work are commonly enacted within the workplaces, sometimes farmworkers are at risk of being reported by their colleagues to the employer, as it happens at the Guerrieri due to the presence of Gigi, the Tunisian man suspected to be a boss’ informer. This emphasizes that, from time to time, the divisions among the workforce along race, gender, age and position within the team can hamper the emergence of forms of solidarity among team members. [We are working at Kemiri farm.] Ahmed complains more than once about his back pain. I invite him to have a short break, but he seems to suggest that we can’t do it. In reality, nobody is in charge of controlling us, since Hassan is running errands in the city centre, but taking a break still seems too risky. Chadi is the only one in the team who is doing almost nothing while pretending to work. He wastes time in quite useless tasks, such as moving empty plastic boxes from one side to another. From time to time, he takes puffs on a cigarette, bending outside the greenhouse’s plastic walls. Moreover, he pretends to be busy in overseeing us. At one point, for instance, he stops in front of our tomato row and speaks to Ahmed in Arabic. I ask Ahmed to translate the instructions, which are to give more attention to harvesting only the red, ripe tomatoes. From his position outside the row, however, it’s impossible for Chadi to see the contents of our boxes and to know which kind of tomatoes we are actually picking. I have the feeling that his purpose is just to show his bossy attitude towards us, to pretend to oversee our work instead of doing the harvesting himself. Although I understand his strategies, nonetheless this behaviour irritates me. [Fieldnote, Vittoria, 13 March 2013]

In the arm-wrestling between employers and employees, control over bodies in order to guarantee labour productivity is always part of what is at stake. Although body postures and bodily routines are usually incorporated and thus taken for granted and rarely challenged, they constitute a form of embodied knowledge that needs to be learnt, transmitted within the work team and then individually shaped through single workers’ body. These learning processes in the workplace rely on ties of mutual trust between team members; moreover, embodied knowledges need time to be transmitted and incorporated. Sometimes more experienced farmworkers have no time to teach newcomers because of rapid turnover, but other times they have no desire to do so because they fear being replaced. In this sense, the casualization entailed by day labour represents a form

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Fig. 5.3 Danger zone (Photo credit: Giovanni Battaglia)

of expropriation of workers’ knowledges about their bodies, jeopardizing their embodied capacity to resist physical strain that worsen their overall wellbeing. The following section will examine farmworkers’ health conditions more closely, focussing specifically on the uses that day labourers make of their painful and injured bodies both in and outside workplaces (Fig. 5.3).

5.4 The Strategic Uses of Farmworkers’ Bodies: Concealing or Manifesting Illness and Pain 5.4.1

Hiding Vulnerabilities

Work in the agricultural industry is widely considered an exhausting and physically damaging form of labour. Although the number of work-related

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illnesses and injuries in agriculture is higher than in other sectors,4 farmworkers rarely report ailments and injuries, and the real figure is likely very much higher than recorded. As outlined by Frédéric Décosse (2008, 103), ‘labour in intensive agriculture combines the physical demands of the traditional agricultural tasks with the typical risks of industrial production’. As in other assembly line jobs which require repetitive wrist motions, carpal tunnel syndrome is one of the most common ailments for packinghouse workers. On the other hand, greenhouse workers are exposed to other kinds of risks: they frequently suffer from breathing problems and lung infections caused by exposure to pesticides combined with the humidity of the work environment. They often report skin diseases caused by contact with chemically-treated plants, which are usually handled without any appropriate specialist clothing (i.e. long-sleeved tops) and without gloves (the use of which is discouraged by the employers since they are deemed to reduce workers’ dexterity). Furthermore, farmworkers suffer from musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), due to the postures assumed while working without necessary rotation and with few breaks, and from hernias caused by incorrect or repetitive lifting of heavy loads. Moreover, the intensity of labour, as well the employers’ and overseers’ forms of control over productivity, increases work-related stress. Finally, the precarity of living environments and their distance from hospitals and clinics cause an overall worsening in workers’ health conditions: for those living in the countryside, it is difficult and expensive to arrange a car lift and to take time off from work, and therefore they tend to wait until they are very sick or injured before visiting a physician, do not use preventive services and often miss scheduled appointments (cf. Holmes 2013, 130). All in all, farmworkers’ health conditions mirror the insalubrity of their working and living environments, are fuelled by the lack of employer concerns over work organization, timing and dress, and reflect the high level of job and life insecurity experienced by day labourers, entailing physical but

4 Data concerning work-related injuries and illness reported in the Italian agricultural industry can be found at https://bancadaticsa.inail.it/bancadaticsa/bancastatistica. asp?cod=2 (Accessed July 19, 2020). According to INAIL data, agriculture is the second industry with the highest number of work-related injuries, while the first one is the construction sector.

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also mental suffering.5 As the spokesperson for the local branch of Caritas Italiana puts it: In our project we have also arranged a health helpdesk. We usually visit around 400 people a year, and we distribute medical treatment for free. Actually, the majority of cases we detect are simple health problems connected with living and working conditions, such as lots of bronchitis, injuries, stomach aches, gastritis. Obviously, there is also… how do I say it… something like hypochondria or an emotional need, I mean, the need to be reassured. So, the availability of a doctor is also the opportunity to solve this kind of problem, to give them a pat on the back, and for them to be listened to. [Interview, Ragusa, 14 September 2019]

Nevertheless, the vulnerability of farmworkers’ bodies can rarely be manifest within workplaces. In cases of unindentured labour in particular, in order to secure work every day, employees need to conceal from their employers, and from time to time also from their teammates, their bodily needs and ailments as well as any work-related injuries. Lorina and Patriciu, for instance, both nearly fifty, were suffering from several long-term health problems. At the time of the fieldwork, Patriciu was constantly using painkillers to alleviate his aching back and knees. Lorina was suffering from a hernia, which gave her severe pain in her leg, and she was monitoring it and waiting for surgery. Every time they needed to visit a physician they relied on Alberto, an informal Sicilian driver, who specialized in supporting migrant farmworkers facing health issues. Aside from driving them from the countryside to the hospitals or clinics, Alberto also provided other services for a little extra money: collecting information about local health services, booking people in for examinations, buying and delivering medical treatment, and also keeping a sort of medical record for his clients. Alberto’s help was fundamental in order to limit the farmworkers’ need to leave the countryside. It was important that Lorina and Patriciu pay attention to minimize their employer’s suspicions, which arose from the fact that they were older than other workers and therefore expected to be weaker. When a visit to a physician was needed, the couple would ask for a day off, not mentioning to their boss the motivation for this request. When they speak openly

5 Cf. also Redini et al. (2020) for an empirical research concerning migrant female workers’ health conditions in the domestic sector.

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to employers about their physical pains, farmworkers are often suspected of malingering or are blamed for being the cause of their own suffering (e.g. being accused of assuming the wrong postures while working, cf. Décosse 2008). Moreover, in these cases they face the tremendous risk of being fired straightaway, as happened to Ahmed when he was working at SicilSerre. It is around ten o’clock in the evening and Ahmed joins us at our place. He seems nervous and tired. He says that he can’t work the next day, because he is exhausted, and his foot is hurting too much. A few years ago, he had a car accident that seriously compromised his left foot, which now hurts from time to time when it comes under strain. He asks to sleep at our place because he is too tired to go back home and his place is too far away. During the night, his moaning wakes me up several times. In fact, I stay awake most of the night: he never stops moaning. At five o’clock I overhear a phone call between him and Giovanni. Ahmed informs the boss that he cannot go to work because of the deep pain in his foot, then he hangs up the phone. A few minutes after, Giovanni calls him back saying that ‘he has understood his game’: he isn’t in pain, he just wants to rest, he is too lazy for this job. Ahmed says “no”, and begs Giovanni to believe him, says that he just needs one day off and then he can come back to work. But Giovanni replies firmly that there will be no more work for him in the following days. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 18 June 2013]

Ahmed physical limits collide with Giovanni idea of migrant body as always ‘productive, existing only to work. It is never sick, late or interrupted by life’s demands. Ideally, this body work to the human endurance because tomorrow, there may be no work at all. This body is, thus, anything but “fleshy” and “messy”, fashioned instead after a cyborg designed solely for work’ (Smith and Winders 2008, 64). The anxiety of being fired and replaced drives many day labourers to conceal their health problems or unexpected pregnancy from the employers and from other farmworkers as well, mainly because of the fear of being reported to their boss. Since workers’ bodies, especially male ones, are usually constructed as strong enough to endure demanding workloads, concealing pain also represents a way to reproduce a hegemonic form of masculinity, entailing the celebration of virility epitomized by male power and stamina (Connell 1995). By concealing physical suffering in this way male workers develop

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forms of camaraderie which allow them to collectively manifest a sense of pride and self-esteem in being farmworkers. At around seven o’clock Giuliana and I met Ahmed, Karim and three other Tunisian guys in a bar close to Piazza Manin. Ahmed and Karim introduced us to the guys, explaining that we met while working together in the greenhouses. The guys start to laugh wildly at us. “That’s a joke!”, They say, “these two girls are barely able to lift a bucket of tomatoes”. They continue by showing off how hard they work every day, competing amongst them to establish who is the best at filling the greatest number of tomato boxes a day. We ask whether they think picking is a tiring job, but they say that it’s not, that you just need to have muscles and to know how to use them and that’s it. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 7 May 2013]

On the one hand, the construction of a hegemonic masculinity based on physical power is pivotal for day labourers in order to develop forms of camaraderie and to produce an individual and collective masculine identity while protecting themselves from the risk of degradation entailed in performing a kind of labour widely considered as menial. Similar forms of class and gender-based solidarity are commonplace among manual labourers in male-dominated sectors such as construction, mining or shipping (see, among others, Walter et al. 2004; Cohen 2006). On the other hand, this ‘cocky’ attitude often prevents farmworkers from openly discussing their health problems as something related to collective working and living conditions, relegating these issues to the individual and private sphere, and thus downplaying the overall effects of day labour on their bodies. 5.4.2

Listening to Farmworkers’ Bodies

Concealing weakness, pains and illness from employers and sometimes other workers too can thus be a strategy used by day labourers in order to prevent dismissal as well as to construct a male farmworker’s body as being powerful and in rude health. This construction also fuels a collective sense of solidarity and pride. In front of different interlocutors and in different contexts, however, farmworkers can ‘mindfully’ use their bodies to convey other types of meaning, in this case with the purpose of denouncing their working and living conditions. For example, in an everyday relationship with two young female researchers, Giuliana and me, workers frequently used a bodily language

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to communicate their labour conditions. During interviews and in casual conversations where we explained the purpose of our research, people often complained about their painful bodies as a way to explain to us, using physical ‘evidence’, the harmful effects of day labour. While we were working at Kemiri farm, Karim often behaved in this way. The first time we met and before we had started to work together, Karim asked more than once if we were journalists, because he was pretty sure that he had seen us on TV. Notwithstanding our attempt to reassure him that we had never taken part in any TV programmes, from then on he was convinced that our purpose was to collect information in order to publicly denounce labour conditions in workplaces in the TLS. This conviction drove him to be quite open in discussing both his work and his private life by underlining the most suffocating and oppressive aspects of his existence. In situations when he could not speak freely, however, i.e. when we were in the workplace, he used his body to convey a similar set of meanings. One day, for instance, while working beside Giuliana, he indicated that he had a strong pain in his heart by pushing his hands into his breast as if contain the ache. Drawing on Byron Good’s (1977) seminal work on heart problems emerging in oppressive working and living contexts in Iran, Giuliana Sanò (2018, 98) reflects on the social relational nature of this type of sickness: ‘The most interesting aspect of sickness is the intentionality of the narrator, namely the narrator’s desire that speaking about sickness would create an opportunity to change his condition, by raising in the interlocutor worry, empathy, attention and recognition of the problem. This perspective aims to highlight the relational nature of sickness, which needs to have someone available to listen it in order to be recognized as such’.6 Karim’s intentional signalling of his heart pains represents a way to resort to a common bodily language to describe a situation perceived by himself (and by us, as researchers) as deeply oppressive. It is our very presence as privileged interlocutors, indeed, that provides a sense-making frame, pushing Karim to narrate and strategically use his (sick) body to exemplify the deep sense of social oppression he was experiencing. In contrast, this understanding of sickness is often ‘turned off’ when farmworkers refer themselves to local health services in charge of dealing

6 Author’s own translation.

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with this type of ailment. In these situations, workers’ claims for attention and the demonstration of anger and discontent conveyed through their bodies remain largely unheard. Healthcare workers, in fact, tend to treat these symptoms of malaise as a medical disease, or alternatively accuse farmworkers of malingering, in this way downplaying labourers’ intentions of using their body as a means to communicate their overall suffering. Several examples of the relationship between workers and healthcare services are contained in my fieldnotes, since Giuliana and I conducted numerous hours of observation within a migrant clinic located near to the greenhouse area. Our access to the clinic was granted by one of the physicians working in the health service, who enthusiastically welcomed our presence during her daily visits to migrants, the large majority of whom were Romanians and Tunisians who were either employed as farmworkers or looking for a job. After agreeing the days and hours of our presence, she also asked us to wear a white coat when spending time in the clinic. With every patient, the physician explained that Giuliana and I were carrying on a research project for the university and she asked each person if they would consent to our presence at the consultation. The white coats turned us immediately into trustworthy doctors, and consequently no one expressed any reservation in terms of our presence as part of the visits.7 The needs expressed by the clinic patients varied a lot, although the majority of them related to poor working and living conditions and to difficulties in accessing preventative medicine. Moreover, a large proportion of them were suffering from anxiety, causing symptoms such as gastritis or frequent headaches. Today Abdallaj is at the clinic again. The doctor shrugs her shoulders: “He likes to spend time in the waiting room”, she says ironically. I chat a to him in the corridor for a while before entering the doctor’s room. He says that when he moved to Sicily, almost ten years ago, he dreamed about enrolling at university and working as an engineer. At the very beginning he tried to set aside some money to pay for taxes and rent. “After a while”, he says, “I discovered that here for me there was just agriculture”. At the moment, he works now and then in the greenhouses and

7 On the ambiguity and challenges of informed consent, see Morrison and Sacchetto (2018); Marzano (2012).

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he bought a contract to legalize his migration status. He has no further dreams, no hope of seeing his situation improving. He comes here to the clinic almost once every two weeks, complaining of strong and persistent headaches, although he has his own diagnosis: “It’s because I’m thinking too much, my head is always spinning round”. The doctor also seems to share the same diagnosis, explaining to us that Abdallaj’s actual problem is that he needs to find a good job and to meet someone to talk to. Nevertheless, she decides to perform her role as a physician and thus prescribes painkillers, without giving much attention to Abdallaj’s stories, being much more worried about the queue in the waiting room which is getting longer and longer. [Fieldnotes, Vittoria, 15 May 2013]

Day labourers, especially those who are compelled to look for a job every day, often use the Italian expression la testa gira (literally meaning ‘my head is spinning round’), which can be understood in two senses. The head, used as a metonymy of the entire body, is moving from one hiring spot to another to look for a job: in this case ‘spinning round’ exemplifies the hectic lifestyle of a day labourer. At the same time, this expression assumes the meaning of feeling dizzy and weak, namely it represents an embodied manifestation of a general malaise. By displaying these symptoms to the doctors and using his ‘mindful body’,8 Abdallaj is mainly conveying his daily sense of frustration and disappointment. His ‘restless and ready body’, as Smith and Winders (2008, 63) vividly define migrants’ labouring bodies, is manifesting its limits. However, the reaction of the doctor to Abdallaj’s ‘socially produced headaches’ (Holmes 2013, 135), namely the immediate prescription of painkillers, shows that within the clinic the expressions of discontent are treated as strictly physical maladies, downsizing their social determinants. As highlighted in Sayad’s classic studies (1999) concerning the relationship between migrant labourers and health institutions since the 1970s, as well as in current scholarship (cf., among others, Horton 2016; Décosse 2008; 8 In their famous 1987 article, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock discuss a ‘mindful body’ (which is an individual, social and political construction), in order to emphasize that ‘mind and body are inseparable in the experience of sickness, suffering and healing’ (30). The authors conclude that (31): ‘Sickness is not just an isolated event, nor an unfortunate brush with nature. It is a form of communication – the language of the organs – through which nature, society, and culture speak simultaneously. The individual body should be seen as the most immediate, the proximate terrain where social truths and social contradictions are played out, as well as a locus of personal and social resistance, creativity, and struggle’.

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Scheper-Hughes 1994; Fassin 2000; Redini, Vianello and Zaccagnini), in the case of migrant workers ‘biomedicine effectively depoliticizes suffering, blaming sickness not on political, economic and social structures but rather on individual behaviours, assumed cultural practices, and perceived ethnic body differences’ (Holmes 2013, 152–53). By focussing on the body/work nexus, this last chapter has shed some light on the struggles around farmworkers’ bodies both within and outside the workplace. As stated above, day labourers’ bodies are shaped by specific requirements conveyed through the employers’ recruitment strategies; moreover, they need to adapt to uneven everyday rhythms and to a specific organization of the labour process, entailing a high level of physical and mental stress. Nevertheless, farmworkers use their ‘mindful’ bodies to resist workplaces’ aesthetic and ‘moral’ requirements, as well as the tiring bodily postures and repetitive routines which harness them. This chapter has shown how they are, alternatively, able to resort to a sense of beauty or pride in order to reproduce forms of hyper-femininity and hegemonic masculinity that prevent the degradation of the self that a ‘dirty’ job in agriculture often entails. Moreover, farmworkers collectively learn how to domesticate their everyday routines in order to eschew high physical risks and to preserve themselves from exhaustion. Finally, labourers strategically use their bodies to show or conceal pain and suffering as a way to convey different set of meanings to an external interlocutor. All in all, the tensions around bodies, although incorporated and for this reason often taken for granted and thus neglected, constitute a large proportion of the everyday conflicts and negotiations between employers and employees and between labourers themselves, extending out from the workplace to society as a whole.

References Ambrosini, Maurizio. 2013. Irregular Migration and Invisible Welfare. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Anthias, Floya. 2012. “Transnational Mobilities, Migration Research and Intersectionality.” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 2 (2): 102–10. Bahnisch, Mark. 2000. “Embodied Work, Divided Labour: Subjectivity and Scientific Management of the Body in F.W. Taylor’s 1967 ‘Lecture on Management’.” Body & Society 6 (1): 51–68.

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Barbara, Ehrenreich, and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds.). 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holton. Barndt, Deborah. 2002. Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Brandth, Berit. 2006.“Agricultural Body-Building: Incorporations of Gender, Body and Work.” Journal of Rural Studies 22 (1): 17–27. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labour and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Browne, Irene and Joya Misra. 2003. “The Intersection of Gender and Race in the Labor Market.” Annual Review of Sociology 29: 487–513. Cohen, Amy and Elise Hjalmarson. 2018. “Quiet Struggles: Migrant Farmworkers, Informal Labor, and Everyday Resistance in Canada.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology (December). Online first https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0020715218815543. Cohen, Deborah. 2006. “From Peasant to Worker: Migration, Masculinity, and the Making of Mexican Workers in the US.” International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (1): 81–103. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. Connell, Raewyn W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine.” Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics 1: 139–67. University of Chicago Legal Forum. Cvajner, Martina. 2011. “Hyper-femininity as Decency: Beauty, Womanhood and Respect in Emigration.” Ethnography 12 (3): 356–74. Cvajner, Martina. 2012. “The Presentation of Self in Emigration: Eastern European Women in Italy.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 642 (1): 186–99. Décosse, Frédéric. 2008. “La Santé des Travailleurs Agricoles Migrants: Un Objet Politiques?” Études Rurales 182 (2): 103–20. Elson, Diane and Ruth Pearson. 1981. “‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers’: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing.” Feminist Review 7 (1): 87–107. Fassin, Didier. 2000. “Repenser les Enjeux de Santé Autour de l’immigration.” Hommes et Migration 1225: 5–12. Ghigi, Rossella, and Roberta Sassatelli. 2018. Corpo, Genere e Società. Bologna: Il Mulino. Good, Byron. 1977. “The Hearth of What’s the Matter: The Semantic of Illness in Iran.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1 (1): 25–58. Harvey, David. 1998. “The Body as an Accumulation Strategy.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16: 401–21. Hellio, Emmanuelle. 2016. “‘They Know That You’ll Leave, like a Dog Moving onto the Next Bin’: Undocumented Male and Seasonal Contracted Female

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Workers in the Agricultural Labour Market of Huelva, Spain.” In Migrations and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area, edited by Alessandra Corrado, Carlos De Castro and Domenico Perrotta, 198–216. London: Routledge. Holmes, Seth. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horton, Sarah Bronwen. 2016. They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury and Illegality, Among U.S. Farmworkers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lara Flores, Sara María. 1995. Jornaleras, Temporeras y Boías-Frias: El Rostro Femenino del Mercado de Trabajo rural en America Latina. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maldonado, Marta Maria. 2009. “‘It Is Their Nature to Do Menial Labour’: The Racialization of ‘Latino/a Workers’ by Agricultural Employers.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32 (6): 1017–36. Mannon, Susan E., Peggy Petrzelka, Christy M. Glass and Claudia Radel. 2012. “Keeping Them in Their Place: Migrant Women Workers in Spain’s Strawberry Industry.” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19 (1): 83–101. Marzano, Marco. 2012. “Informed Consent.” In The Sage Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft, edited by Jaber F. Gubrium, James A. Holstein, Amir B. Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney, 443–57. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Moreno Nieto, Juana. 2014. “Labour and Gender Relations in Moroccan Strawberry Culture.” In Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture: The Social Costs of Eating Fresh, edited by Jörge Gertel and Sarah Ruth Sippel, 199–210. New York: Routledge. Morrison, Claudio and Devi Sacchetto. 2018. “Research Ethics in an Unethical World: The Politics and Morality of Engaged Research.” Work, Employment and Society 32 (6): 1118–29. Moss, Philip, and Chris Tilly. 2001. Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Perrotta, Domenico. 2011. Vite in Cantiere. Migrazione e Lavoro dei Rumeni in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Preibisch, Kerry and Leigh Binford. 2007. “Interrogating Racialized Global Labour Supply: An Exploration of the Racial/National Replacement of Foreign Agricultural Workers in Canada.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 44 (1): 5–34. Preibisch, Kerry and Evelyn Encalada Grez. 2010. “The Other Side of el Otro Lado: Mexican Migrant Women and Labor Flexibility in Canadian Agriculture.” Signs 35 (2): 289–316.

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Redini, Veronica. 2020. “I Sentimenti al Lavoro. Politiche di Welfare e Affettività.” In Redini, Vianello and Zaccagnini 2020, 56–76. Redini, Veronica, Vianello, Francesca Alice and Zaccagnini, Federica. 2020. Il Lavoro che Usura. Migrazioni Femminili e Salute Occupazionale. Milano: Franco Angeli. Rogaly, Ben. 2009. “Spaces of Work and Everyday Life: Labour Geographies and the Agency of Unorganised Temporary Migrant Workers.” Geography Compass 3 (6): 1975–87. Sachs, Carolyn and Margaret Alston. 2010. “Global Shifts, Sedimentations, and Imaginaries: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Women and Agriculture.” Signs 35 (2): 277–87. Sanò, Giuliana. 2018. Fabbriche di Plastica: Il Lavoro nell’Agricoltura Industriale. Verona: Ombre Corte. Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1999. La Double Absence: Des Illusions de l’Émigré aux Souffrances de l’Immigre. Paris: Le Seuil. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1994. “Embodied Knowledge: Thinking with the Body in Critical Medical Anthropology.” In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky, 229–241. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Margaret Lock. 1987. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1): 6–41. Shih, Johanna. 2002. “‘… Yeah, I Could Hire This One, But I Know It’s Gonna Be A Problem’: How Race, Nativity and Gender Affect Employers’ Perceptions of the Manageability of Job Seekers.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25 (1): 99–119. Smith, Barbara E. and Jamie Winders. 2008. “‘We’re Here to Stay’: Economic Restructuring, Latino Migration and Place-making in the US South.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (1): 60–72. Walter, Nicholas, Philippe Bourgois and H. Margarita Loinaz. 2004. “Masculinity and Undocumented Labor Migration: Injured Latino Day Laborers in San Francisco.” Social Science & Medicine 59: 1159–68. Warhurst, Chris and Dennis Nickson. 2009. “‘Who’s Got the Look?’ Emotional, Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services.” Gender, Work & Organization 16 (3): 385–404. Wolkowitz, Carol. 2006. Bodies at Work. London: Sage. Wolkowitz, Carol and Chris Warhurst. 2010. “Embodying Labour.” In Working Life: Renewing Labour Process Analysis, edited by Paul Thompson and Chris Smith, 223–43. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodcock, Jamie. 2017. Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres. London: Pluto Press. Zelizer, Vivian A. 1989. “The Social Meaning of Money: ‘Special Monies’.” The American Journal of Sociology 95: 342–77.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions

Abstract By examining the unsettled nature of workplace relations through the analysis of everyday struggles, and by taking seriously migrants’ agency, this chapter aims to move further than current scholarship in agriculture and migration studies which consider migrant labour as merely a factor which guarantees the restructuring of food value chains. This chapter invites us to recognize the pivotal role of migrant labour not only as a factor, but also as an actor shaping the global processes of food production, by undertaking migratory projects that significantly defy pre-arranged mobility patterns, by negotiating labour effort within workplaces and eventually quitting them, by transforming the rural contexts they live in and, ultimately, by taking part in processes of redrawing food supply chains from below. Keywords Agriculture · Labour mobility · Food supply chains · Migrant agency · Unorganized migrant farmworkers

By taking the reader into the ‘plastic factories’ of an enclave of industrial agriculture in the South of Italy, this book intended to shed some light on the struggles—around the contract, the wage and the body—which take place between employers and employees in these workplaces every day. Agriculture, the sector used as a case study to illustrate these types © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Piro, Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7_6

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of conflict, is notorious for having some of the harshest and most unsafe working conditions across an array of labour market sectors. Moreover, in an increasingly competitive global market, fresh food producers in North America, Europe, North Africa and in several other contexts have largely relied on internal and transnational migrants in order to fill their growing demand for casualized, flexible and poorly-remunerated labour. The debate over agri-food business has so far demonstrated the pivotal role assumed by migrant labour in the process of the restructuring of global supply chains (Berlan 1986; Rogaly 2008; Gertel and Sippel ; Corrado, De Castro, and Perrotta 2016). Within a ‘corporateenvironmental food regime’ (Friedmann 2005) such as the one which currently characterizes food production, large retailers and multinational corporations have progressively become the key players, engendering a reduction in the number of small and medium-sized farms. In order to adapt to an increasingly competitive global scenario, the latter has opted to cut labour costs, often through relying on cheap and flexible migrant labour. The recruitment and management of migrant workers in agriculture have frequently been arranged through state-led temporary programmes like those examined in Chapter 1. The majority of the scholarship dealing with these seasonal schemes has described recruited migrant labour as ‘unfree’ (Strauss 2012; Strauss and McGrath 2016; Yea 2017; Décosse 2016; Castracani 2019) or ‘captive’ (Basok 2002; Hellio 2016), specifically as a resource managed by the firms in order to be ‘transplanted’ from one point to another (Xiang 2012). In countries where temporary programmes are less pervasive, such as Italy, employers usually rely on a workforce that immigration policies have ‘fashioned’ as casual and flexible (Anderson 2010; Genova and Peutz 2010). However, within this set of studies, migrant initiatives and agency have remained largely overlooked. Although some scholars have discussed exceptional cases of trade unionism, uprisings and strikes organized by migrant labourers in agriculture (Papadopoulos and Fratsea 2016; Caruso 2015; Olivieri 2015; Perrotta and Sacchetto 2013), very few of them have so far explored the everyday forms of agency expressed by unorganized farmworkers, aside from noteworthy exceptions that have largely informed the analysis carried out in this book (see, in particular, Rogaly 2009). By trying to fill this gap, the present study has taken great care to avoid any abstract celebration of labourers’ agency. As several life stories

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recounted throughout these pages have shown, many migrant farmworkers are trapped in the lower end of a demanding and ‘dirty’ sector, with limited possibilities for negotiating better working conditions and improving their lives. Nonetheless, using Ben Rogaly’s words (2009, 1984), here ‘the point rather is recognizing that unorganised migrant workers as subjects may still play a role in seeking, and obtaining, incremental and sometimes highly significant changes in microspaces of work and living, albeit it in a world dominated by capital’. By looking at these microspaces, i.e. the greenhouses and packinghouses of the TLS, I have tried to show the disruptive effects of unpredictable forms of day labourer agency within a work relation which is conceived of as always unsettled. This understanding of the work relation as fluid and open-ended relies on Smith (2006) theorizing of ‘the double indeterminacy of labour power’. According to Smith, the conception of labour power needs to be expanded in order to encompass both ‘effort power’ and ‘mobility power’, notwithstanding the fact that the latter has been so far overlooked in the academic debate. Since in a work relation both effort and mobility power are uncertain, capital and labour can strategize around them by regulating their uses and by managing the movement of labour power into and out of any particular labour process (Smith 2010, 283). Due to this double indeterminacy, the work relationship can be conceived of as being structured around several types of struggles, the empirical analysis of which has constituted the main object of this book. To provide an account of these practices of informal bargaining, I opted to observe them within workplaces, experiencing first-hand negotiations including those concerning contracts, wages, work pace, workload and body postures. While acknowledging the deep differences in terms of gender, ethnicity and class between myself and most of the farmworkers I met in the field, I definitely enjoyed the opportunity to spend several months at their side, transplanting, harvesting and packing vegetables while discussing their life stories and future projects. This fine-grained ethnography, coupled with the Labour Process Theory perspective, allowed me to identify some struggles that, while making no claim to be exhaustive, nevertheless assume a great importance in the day labour relation, namely the conflicts centred around the employment contract, the fair wage and the specific uses of farmworkers’ bodies.

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After an introduction to the historical dynamics shaping agriculture and migration in the Sicilian district of the Transformed Littoral Strip, Chapter 2 took the reader into the small- and medium-sized greenhouse and packinghouse companies in which this research was conducted. Chapter 3 then dealt with struggles around employment contracts in order to show how, especially in a context characterized by high level of informal labour, the possibility to provide (or not) a contract represents for the employers an important means to ensure discipline, shaping a ‘good farmworker’ according to their needs (MacKenzie and Ford 2009). In fact, contracts are issued on the basis of a trust relationship, namely an agreement between employers and employees that conventional rules concerning labour effort and mobility will be followed by both sides. They thus represent a pivotal means for the employers to tie employees to the workplace, and this is undoubtedly true in the case of migrant workers, for whom, according to Italian migration law, legal status depends on an indentured working relation. Nevertheless, I found that migrant workers were able to strategize around these legal requirements: bound by the migration law to hold a job contract which is usually not provided by the actual employer, they could opt to purchase it; through this ‘illegal’ act, they autonomously gain a ‘legal’ migration status that, coupled with money coming annually from agricultural unemployment benefits, allows them to increase their mobility through sectors, within Italy or also throughout Europe. Chapter 4 dealt with the everyday forms of struggle concerning the wage. In this chapter, I argued that the socially-agreed level of wages in the area, far lower than those established by the employment contracts, largely depends on day labourers’ living arrangements. In fact, the worker’s dwelling situation is always a major factor considered by the employers and employees when agreeing on payment. Living arrangements in the TLS habitually differ according to national groups, with Tunisians usually residing in the city centres, Romanians often lodged in the countryside, and sub-Saharan asylum seekers and refugees hosted in reception centres. In this way, the spatial location of the workforce affects wages which consequently become segmented and racialized, in turn fuelling competition among different migrant groups and reproducing ethnic and national divides. Although it varies according to the level of wages conventionally established in the area (ranging from e15 to e40 per day), the actual daily pay is individually renegotiated in each specific workplace. As illustrated

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through examples of everyday work in greenhouses and packinghouses, employers attempt to contain wages directly and indirectly by extending working hours, increasing the intensity of labour or introducing forms of piecework; meanwhile, workers strive to reduce the work pace and from time to time decide to quit their job. In order to limit the disruptive effects of unpredictable labour turnover, the employers usually carry out practices which aim to tie workers to their job site, such as withholding payments or giving out side benefits (i.e. free food, social security benefits, houses, transport and so on) that make it harder or less appealing for farmworkers to quit. Finally, Chapter 5 centred on the body/work nexus and discussed struggles over the embodied aspects of day labour. Firstly, it showed how employers rely heavily on assumptions based on sex, skin colour and other aesthetic criteria, such as height and weight, to recruit workers. Although farmworkers’ physical appearance and ‘attractiveness’ are highly stereotyped by the employers, especially when dealing with migrant female bodies (which are often deemed to be ‘sexually available’), I argued that workers strive to preserve their good looks in order to eschew the degradation of the self entailed by a ‘dirty’ and demanding job in agriculture. Secondly, the chapter discussed the postures that labourers are required to assume while working, which, coupled with the repetitiveness of the movements, engenders painful effects on their bodies. Nevertheless, the employers’ attempts to prescribe rigid positions and monotonous routines were counterbalanced by workers’ ability to regulated work effort in order to prevent exhaustion. Since this ability is not inborn but needs to be acquired, mutual trust among team members is fundamental to collectively reproduce and transmit knowledges concerning the body. Nevertheless, I also showed that the casualized nature of day labour and the segmentation of the workforce according to gender, race and age often jeopardize these learning and socialization processes. Finally, Chapter 5 addressed farmworkers’ health conditions, as this workforce is historically characterized by high exposure to risks of injury and exhaustion. Here, I maintained that workers are able to strategically use their bodies by deciding when and with whom it is worth concealing or displaying their vulnerabilities. As brilliantly summarized by Smith and Winders (2008, 63–64), migrant bodies are fashioned as always available to work anywhere, reliable, disposable, productive, affordable and implicitly youthful and male. Nonetheless, these bodies have their limits—limits

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which farmworkers strive to hide in front of the employers to adapt to their expectations and to avoid being fired. At the same time, concealing pain and suffering constitute a strategy in order to develop forms of camaraderie based on a hegemonic masculinity, with the purpose of eschewing the risk of degradation entailed by a kind of labour considered as menial. Contrariwise, in interactions with young researchers or doctors, day labourers’ ‘mindful’ bodies are used strategically to ‘communicate’, through physical evidence, the unjust labour conditions they experience (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). All in all, the three types of conflict investigated throughout this book exemplify the employers’ everyday problems in recruiting, training and retaining workers, and the employees’ daily concerns in terms of securing work, collecting wages, preventing their bodies from degradation and exhaustion, and finally claiming ‘dignity at work’ (Hodson 2001). Looking at these workplace conflicts paves the way for us to analyse the employers’ and employees’ involvement as subjects acting every day within the power structures of the food supply chains. Consequently, throughout this study, employers are not depicted exclusively as passive ‘victims’ of the global forces driving value chains that marginalize them and squeeze their profits in food production, as several other scholars have approached them (cf., among others, Holmes 2013). Rather, throughout this research, employers become flesh and blood actors that recruit workers, prefer to hire labourers of different nationality and pay them differently in order to fuel competition and increase work pace, sometimes lodge workers within their fenced properties in the countryside, and frequently require them to overwork, within a local context that largely naturalizes and takes for granted these labour conditions. This does not mean that I neglect structural dynamics determining producers’ weak position within a retailer-driven value chain, but rather that I recognize the employers’ active role in the daily fashioning of a segmented labour market, by relying on groups of workers hierarchized according to gender, nationality and age in order to satisfy production needs (Anderson 2010; MacKenzie and Ford 2009). On the other hand, by adopting the lens of workplace conflicts, day labourers in agriculture are also depicted as actors able to make certain choices over mobility and move decisively within the set of constraints determining their working lives. Here, the point is not just to agree with Gertel and Sippel (2014, 247) when they recognize that ‘workers are not

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“unskilled” but equipped with prior experiences, motivations and expectations that are embedded in concepts of identity and family awareness’. There is much more to it than this. In this book, I show how, although sometimes stuck in poorly-paid and demanding jobs, day labourers are able to strategically use their mobility power and to take advantage of the temporariness of their employment in order to gain new skills, acquire information, nurture their family and communitarian networks, engage in new migration projects and finally improve their living and working conditions. Of course, this strategic use of mobility is highly differentiated according to gender, race, legal status, age, class and educational background; but nevertheless, it remains an important resource on which migrant workers collectively and individually rely on their working lives (cf. Alberti 2014; Ceccagno and Sacchetto 2020). The analysis of the forms of agency enacted in this book can be particularly beneficial as compared to other research conducted on migrant labour, because it contributes to undermining the conception of migrants in agriculture as ‘slaves’, that too often underpins researchers’ endeavours and journalistic accounts, drives the initiatives of coalitions acting in solidarity with migrants (encompassing trade unions, NGOs, consumer networks and other civil society actors) and informs policymakers’ measures. Contrariwise, the unpredictability and turbulence of workplace relationships analysed so far leave some room for the possibility that a new set of arrangements between employers and employees will emerge in the near future, justifying the need for further empirical research concerning migrants’ forms of covert or open resistance. Organized forms of collective action, for instance, currently minoritarian and largely ineffective, could potentially take place and be strengthened in conjunction with more subtle forms of day labourer agency. The recognition of such dynamisms in work relations thus paves the way for us to conceive of the current situation in the labour market not only as a point of arrival but also as a point of departure for future scenarios, as notably suggested by Michael Burawoy (2013). Further research in this field and in the light of the changing composition of migrant labour and migration regulation is needed to illuminate the subtle dynamics and interrelations between the individual and collective forms of struggles. The linkages between the two (individual acts of defiance and collective forms of organizations), too often conceived as conflicting, represent an interesting terrain on which to develop further research, addressing when

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and under what conditions the two forms of struggle can be mutually strengthening instead than being mutually exclusive. To sum up, by analysing the unsettled nature of workplace relations through examples of everyday struggles, and by taking seriously migrants’ agency, this study has moved a step further than current scholarship which considers migrant labour as merely a factor which guarantees the restructuring of the food value chain (Gertel and Sippel ; Corrado, De Castro, and Perrotta 2016). These latter analyses, in fact, pinpoint the role of large retailers, agri-business corporations and small- and medium-sized companies as the main protagonists in reshaping and sometimes driving global supply chains. Accordingly, migrant labour has been conceived of primarily as a resource used by these players to strengthen their position in a competitive global market. Expanding on this field of consideration, in this book I maintain that day labourers participate in this global scenario as well, by undertaking migratory projects that significantly defy pre-arranged mobility patterns, by negotiating labour effort within workplaces and eventually quitting them when situations become unbearable, by transforming the rural contexts they live in through their place-making routines and, ultimately, by taking part in processes of redrawing food supply chains from below. This book thus aims to contribute to the current debates as well as to a much broader understanding of the dynamics innervating food production worldwide by recognizing the pivotal role of migrant labour not only as a factor managed by the firms and by the states, but also as an actor autonomously shaping the global processes of food production through its own unpredictable choices.

References Alberti, Gabriella. 2014. “Mobility Strategies, ‘Mobility Differentials’ and ‘Transnational Exit’: The Experiences of Precarious Migrants in London’s Hospitality Jobs.” Work, Employment and Society 28 (6): 865–881. Anderson, Bridget. 2010. “Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Workers.” Work, Employment and Society 24 (2): 300–317. Basok, Tanya. 2002. Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Berlan, Jean-Pierre. 1986. “Agriculture et Migrations.” Revue Européenne Des Migrations Internationales 2 (3): 9–31. Burawoy, Michael. 2013. “Ethnographic Fallacies: Reflection on Labour Studies in the Era of Market Fundamentalism.” Work, Employment and Society 27 (3): 526–536.

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Index

A asylum seekers and refugees, 93, 142

B body beautiful, 120 strong and powerful, 131 struggle around the, 143 workers’ body position, 39, 115 Burawoy, Michael, 12, 99, 101, 145

C Corrado, Alessandra, 2, 3, 5, 11, 23, 25, 26, 59, 101, 140, 146

D day labour, 13, 33, 35, 43, 45, 50, 54, 58–61, 64, 70, 73, 75–81, 86, 87, 96, 102, 109, 110, 114, 115, 121, 124, 126, 130–132, 134, 135, 141–143, 145 dormitory labour regime, 91, 93, 109

E employment contract, struggle around, 13, 54, 141, 142 F food supply chain, restructuring of, 3, 146 H health condition, farmworkers’, 127, 128, 143 Holmes, Seth, 6, 33, 101, 128, 134, 144 I Intermediation Illegal, 93 Law n. 199/2016, 95 L Labour Process Theory (LPT), 8, 9, 141

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Piro, Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7

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150

INDEX

living conditions, migrants’ dwelling situation and, 87, 95, 109, 142 ghetto, 7 live-in farmworkers, 27, 91 living arrangements, 14, 27, 87, 92, 109, 142 on-site farmworkers, 92 spatial segregation, 96. See also dormitory labour regime M migrant clinic, 133 mobility power, 9, 13, 73, 78, 80, 81, 141, 145 P paternalistic relationships, 67, 68 piecework, 87, 100, 110, 143. See also salary;wage R race/racialization, 10, 88, 99, 100, 126, 143, 145 recruitment programmes, 4 Rogaly, Ben, 3, 5, 8, 59, 80, 102, 125, 140 Romanian female farmworkers, sexual harassment, 28, 118 S Salary Low, 75, 76, 79, 102, 119 struggle around, 13, 54, 141 Theft, 108 Uneven, 108 Withholding, 87, 102, 109, 143 working without, 106, 107 Segmentation

labour market, 27, 109, 143 racial, 87, 96, 109, 117, 142 salaries, 27 workforce, 7 Smith, Chris, 8, 80, 86, 91, 96, 109, 141

T trade unions CGIL, 95 FLAI-CGIL, 75, 106 grassroots, 2, 13 U.S.B, 29

U unemployment benefit National Social Security Institute (INPS), 26, 60, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76 social security contribution, 13, 61, 70, 73, 74, 87, 108, 110 unfree labour, 4

W wage low, 9, 47, 48, 69, 75, 79, 92, 93, 102 struggle around, 8, 9, 13, 87, 109, 139, 142 Theft, 79, 87, 108 Uneven, 59 withholding, 87, 102, 110 working without, 106, 107. See also salary work effort, 14, 96, 98, 99, 101, 109, 143 work pace, collective work pacing, 47, 68, 87, 89, 109, 125, 141, 143, 144