INTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses on labour conditions and discrimination of migrant workers in Italy, with a particular focus on the agricultural sector in two Southern Italian areas.
This topic is here addressed from two main points of view. On the one hand, we will trace a short history of immigration to Italy, as well as of the relevant legislation on migration and racial discrimination in the domain of labour; then, we will describe migrant labour in the agricultural sector, focusing on the main reasons for migrant agricultural labourers’ vulnerability, especially in the South. Moreover, we will describe some recent transformations in the agricultural labour market, for example, due to the massive arrival of migrants labelled as asylum seekers on Italian southern shores.
On the other hand, with the aim of offering an in-depth analysis of labour discrimination of migrant workers’ in the agricultural sector, we will focus on two case studies: the area of production of processing tomatoes in the regions of Puglia and Basilicata and the area of production of table olives and olive oil in Western Sicily. In these regions, almost all seasonal harvesters are of African and Eastern European origin, while Italian agricultural workers are mostly employed in other – and less demanding – tasks and with permanent contracts. With the aim of analysing the complex intertwinement of structural and symbolic violence and the differences between the two areas, we will take into consideration three aspects of the working experiences of migrant workers, especially those of sub-Saharan origin, in which the situation of discrimination and exploitation is particularly evident: (1) the piecework salaries, which represent the most common way of payment for seasonal harvesters, while workers employed in other tasks in the same areas are mainly paid by hour; (2) the necessity to live in ghettos and shantytowns during the harvest seasons, in a situation of racial segregation and separateness from local population; and (3) the illegal organization of labour intermediation called caporalato, which often represents the unique way to find an employment for these labourers.
Drawing on the Bourdieusian concept of ‘symbolic violence’, we will ask if and to what extent African seasonal labourers ‘accept’ and perceive their situation of discrimination in Southern Italian rural areas as ‘natural’ and legitimate. With this aim, we will focus on the ambiguous figure of the farm labour brokers called caporali: for many workers, especially in Western Sicily, these brokers represent the unique source of ‘legitimate’ authority, within the representation of a ‘community’ of African workers. Differently, the State and local administrations seem to contribute to the situation of structural violence (Farmer, 1996), without any form of recognition and legitimation by migrant labourers.
In both the areas considered for this chapter, we have conducted sociological studies based on qualitative and ethnographic methodologies. In Western Sicily, Martina Lo Cascio has conducted 50 interviews with farm labourers, farmers, owners of processing plants and a one-week participant observation as an olive harvester. In Puglia and Basilicata, Domenico Perrotta has realized about 60 interviews with farm labourers, caporali, farmers, owners and workers of processing plants, and local administrators. Moreover, both the authors have extensively observed the ‘ghettos’ in which seasonal labourers live and have participated in projects of mutualistic agricultural production with migrant workers.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF MIGRATION TO ITALY
As is well known, Italy became a migration-receiving country slowly during the 1970s–1980s. At least until the mid-2000s, migration towards Italy has been a case of what Pugliese (1993) and King, Lazaridis, and Tsardanidis (2000) called ‘Mediterranean’, ‘South European’ or ‘post-industrial’ model of migration, contrasted to the models of other European countries traditionally receiving migrants in 1950s–1970s, such as France, Great Britain and Germany. The key features of such Mediterranean model included: the heterogeneity of migrants’ national origins; marked gender asymmetry in the different migratory systems; and the fact that receiving countries’ labour markets mainly demanded a non-unionized workforce, for non-Fordist, flexible, informal and seasonal employment. Moreover, migration to Italy – and to other South-European countries – was characterized by a high element of ‘illegality’ or, better, of ‘illegalisation’, due to the increasing attempts on the part of both the EU and member states to control immigration (King et al., 2000). As King et al. (2000, p. 10) argued, their ‘illegality’ was one of the reasons that obliged migrants to accept jobs in the informal labour market.
Over the 1990s and 2000s, the Italian legislation on migration has held some stable features, which can be summarized as follows. First, since the Law 39/1990 (known as Legge Martelli), such legislation has emphasized the distinction between ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ (in the media, defined as clandestine) migrants; importantly, since the Law 40/1998, the ‘regularity’ of migrants’ presence has been strictly linked to the possess of a regular work contract; in 2009, the clandestinity has been defined as a criminal offence. Second, the governments’ programs of recruitment of foreign workers – through the annual decreti flussi (flows decrees) issued since the early 2000s, and the quota system – have been largely insufficient and inefficient (A. Colombo, 2012). Third, recurrent amnesties have been launched, with the aim of regularizing ‘irregular’ migrants: the largest amnesty has been connected to the Law 189/2002 (known as ‘Bossi-Fini Law’), through which more than 650,000 former-irregular migrants obtained a permit of stay in Italy (Colombo, Sciortino, & Craveri, 2003; Finotelli & Sciortino, 2009). Fourth, insufficient attention has been paid to the ‘integration’ of migrants, even if this issue has been formally present in all the Laws concerning migration (Calavita, 2005). Finally, the ius sanguinis model has rendered very difficult the access to Italian citizenship for both first-generation (who can apply for the citizenship after 10 years of continuous residence in the country) and second-generation migrants.
For many scholars and observers, such legislation, together with the features of the Italian economy, has resulted in a compression of migrants’ rights in Italy, due to a form of ‘institutional racism’ (or ‘democratic racism’, Palidda, 2009): for a potential migrant, it was (and still is) almost impossible to enter Italy regularly to search a job, due to the inefficiency of the ‘flows decrees’; thus, the most part of economic migrants have spent a period of clandestinity in Italy, in a condition of ‘deportability’ (De Genova, 2002), before obtaining a permit of stay, usually through one of the periodic amnesties. Moreover, foreign citizens needed (and need) to own a work contract to renew their permit of stay, and this rendered the dismissal a dangerous contingency, thus becoming a de facto reason of discrimination in the labour market. A huge number of migrant workers were (and are) obliged to accept worse work conditions and lower salaries, than their native colleagues, usually in the so-called 3-D jobs (dirty, dangerous and demanding – see Ambrosini, 2018; Fullin & Reyneri, 2011). Such a situation of partial access to rights and vulnerability on the labour market has been described through the concept of ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013).
Since the late 2000s, this ‘Mediterranean model’ of migration has been changing, due to a number of social, economic and geo-political processes. The first of such processes has been the enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007: since then, migrants of Romanian, Bulgarian and Polish origin – which represent an important share of migrants in Italy (Table 1) – have become EU citizens, and they are no more subject to the legislation for non-EU migrants. Second, since 2008, the financial and economic crisis has hit the Italian economy, and especially some of the economic sectors that had been attracting migrant workforce, such as small manufacturing firms and construction. As noted by Sacchetto and Vianello (2013), migrants have been among the first workers fired because of the crisis. Consequently, the number of migrants entering Italy has been constantly decreasing (Table 2), and the number of workers formally recruited through the annual flows decrees has decisively dropped (Table 3). We should not forget that, over the last years, the number of Italian emigrants has increased, and for many observers, it has exceeded the number of immigrants, thus marking a new turning point in the history of Italian migration.
Table 1. Number of Foreign Citizens in Italy and Main Nationalities – Selected Years.1
Year | Total of Residence Permits to Foreign Citizens in Italy | First Three Nationalities |
1992 | 648,935 | Morocco – Tunisia – USA |
1997 | 986,020 | Morocco – Albania – Philippine |
2002 | 1,448,392 | Morocco – Albania – Romania |
2007 | 3,432,651 | Albania – Romania – Morocco |
2011 | 4,052,081 | Romania – Albania – Morocco |
2016 | 5,047,028 | Romania – Albania – Morocco |
Source: Italian Institute of Statistics (demo.istat.it).
Table 2. Number of New Residence Permits by Year and Reason of the Permit, Years 2010–2016.
Table 3. Number of Foreign Workers to be Recruited through the Annual ‘Flows Decrees’ (decreti flussi), Issued by the Italian Government Yearly.
Year | Number of Workers |
2001 | 89,400 |
2002 | 79,500 |
2003 | 79,500 |
2004 | 115,500 |
2005 | 179,000 |
2006 | 550,000 |
2007 | 250,000 |
2008 | 230,000 |
2009 | 80,000 |
2010–2011 | 98,080 |
2012 | 52,850 |
2013 | 47,850 |
2014 | 32,850 |
2015 | 30,850 |
2016 | 30,850 |
2017 | 30,850 |
2018 | 30,850 |
Source: Website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, authors’ elaboration.
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