pic7 ebook oliveri rev

7/30/2019 PIC7 eBook Oliveri REV

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Enacting Rights from Below.

Migrant Farmworkers struggles in Nard, Southern Italy

Federico Oliveri

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the struggles undertaken in 2010 and 2011 by migrant

farmworkers in the countryside of Nard, Apulia, Southern Italy. First, I will show

the key features of the mobilisation and clarify my theoretical background. Then, I

will analyse the situation of migrant farmworkers and their struggle against illicit

work and over-exploitation. Finally, I will reconstruct the genealogy of the

mobilisation, trying to understand its general political meaning and assess its

results and perspectives.

Key Words: acts of citizenship, migrant workers, labour rights, social rights,

social movement, immigration laws, labour laws, Italy.

*****

1. Migrant struggles in Nard as acts of citizenship

Since July 2010, for two consecutive summers, the countryside surrounding the

town of Nard became the scene of an unprecedented protest. Hundreds ofmigrants, all men between 20 and 40 years, mostly from Tunisia, Burkina Faso,

Sudan, and other African countries, started to contest illegal gangmasters

(caporali) that control the harvest of watermelons and tomatoes. In 2010 a

campaign against illicit work affecting migrants was launched by two NGOs,Finis

Terrae and Brigate di Solidariet Attiva. They were in charge of the Masseria

Boncuri, an old farmhouse owned by the municipality equipped with tents and

other basic services, in order to offer decent accommodation for seasonal workers.

In 2011, migrants decided to support their claims for labour and social rights

against the gang-mastering system (caporalato) with a two-weeks self-organisedstrike.

Both the campaign and the strike raised new awareness on working and living

conditions in rural Southern Italy. As a first result, local and national authorities

have been recalled to their responsibility to protect the rights of migrants and of all

farmworkers, passing stronger regulations against gangmasters and illicit work. As

a matter of fact, the struggle of Nard has its roots in the food production model

imposed by neoliberal globalisation, which encourages extreme forms of

exploitation and accordingly provides low-cost and disposable workers through a

highly selective governance of migrations.


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The explosion of the protest can be explained in the frame of the new cycle of

migrant struggles started in Italy in 2010 a cycle quite different from the previous

ones. The first difference is the changed context, characterized by the economic

crisis and its effects, in terms of growing unemployment and of a new

governmental war against irregular migration. The second difference is the

political nature of those struggles, characterised by the production of specific acts

which I define, following Engin F. Isin, acts of citizenship. 1These acts produce

new actors as claimants of rights and responsibilities, under unprecedented

conditions and within a short period of time. Through such acts, the actors become

answerable to justice against injustice, often breaking and innovating the given

legal framework.

Acting as citizens, migrants become part of a broader global movement that

opposes the neoliberal model of citizenship. Against such a racialised,

exclusionary, competitive and post-democratic idea of being political, they try toproduce a new global citizenship from below. In particular, the struggle undertaken

in Nard for the enforcement of legal labour and social rights is the expression of

what I define, with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a subaltern cosmopolitan

legality2 alternative to the elite-oriented one.

2. Migrants struggles against Illegal Gangmasters and Over-exploitation

Migrants have been employed as farmworkers in Southern Italy for more than

twenty years, gradually substituting the local workforce. In the beginning they

were mostly from Maghreb, then from Western and Central Africa, lastly fromEastern Europe. They currently enjoy different legal statuses: seasonal workers,

temporary residents, refugees, people under humanitarian protection, rejected

asylum seekers, over-stayers, irregulars. Even long-stayers and migrants with

documents continue to seek out precarious job in order to renew their permit to

stay and send money to their family, ending caught up in a spiral of poverty,

exclusion and exploitation. The living conditions of seasonal workers in Southern

Italy are particularly harsh: according to a 2009/2010 report by the European

Network Against Racism, 65% live in poor housing with no access to water, 62%

have no access to toilets and 76% have chronic illness, mostly linked with workingconditions.3

Many migrant farmworkers move from a region to another, following the

different seasonal harvests, having few or no contact with public services and local

populations. From July to August about 600 migrants usually work in Nard as

watermelon and tomato pickers. Before 2010, no more than 30 of them were

legally hired: as a matter of fact, illicit work is still the main strategy local farmers

use to make profits while keeping labour costs down. None of these farmers would

admit to recur to African gangmasters (capi neri). Such illegal intermediaries

directly recruit and manage daily farmworkers (braccianti). They provide the


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correct number of people for each field; they control the harvest, deciding the

speed of work and the length of the working day; they pay the wages deducing

money for workers food and transport.

Migrants are paid on a piece-rate system (cottimo): in Nard, for instance,

gangmasters pay 3,50 Euros per crate of 100 kilos tomatoes. Each worker

recollects about 7 crates in a day. As a result, after working between ten and twelve

hours, they are not going to earn more than 20 Euros per day. According to the

current market prices, it is possible to estimate that farmers pay the gangmasters an

average of 10 Euros per crate. There is therefore a massive gap between these

working conditions and the legal provisions set by the local farmworkers contract,

which imposes a 6 hour and half maximum working day and a 5,92 Euros

minimum wage per hour. Without legal contracts, migrants cannot even access

justice in order to redress this over-exploitation. Moreover, they work with no free

access to clean water, no social insurance, no unemployment benefits, and nosecurity provisions.

In 2010 the campaign Hire me (officially) against illicit work systematically

informed migrant workers about their fundamental rights violated by the gang-

mastering system. With the help of police and the local labour inspection office, an

unusual pressure was put on the caporali of Nard mainly from Tunisia and

Sudan and the enterprises using them: as a result, about 200 migrant farmworkers

were legally hired.

In 2011 the campaign had already started, when a group of 40 workers refused

to continue harvesting tomatoes as usual, starting the first self-organised strike ofmigrant farmworkers in Italy.4In the early dawn of the 30th of July, they argued

with the capo nero, refused to perform an additional task separating the green

tomatoes from the red ones for the same price and returned to the Masseria

Boncuri. During a first general assembly, they convinced the other workers to

strike until their claims were satisfied: be paid 6 Euros instead of 3,50 for each

crate of tomatoes; receive regular employment contracts; be recruited by the local

job centre or directly by the farmers instead of by the caporali; receive labour

inspections; enjoy better living conditions.

As their first act, at 3 in the morning the strikers built street blockades withpiled-up stones around the camp in order to prevent gangmasters trucks from

coming and going. At least during the first days, almost all the 350 migrants hosted

at Masseria took part in the mobilisation. After the first days, the caporali started

to undermine the protest from within, both directly and indirectly: they threatened

by death the leaders of the strike; they used some of their men inside the tent city

in order to divide the front by stressing the differences of nationality and status;

they hired strike-breakers from other villages; they put a lot of pressure on their

fellow citizens amongst the strikers to return to work and to move to the abandoned

farms in the area, in order to circumvent the street blockades around the Masseria.


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They even stipulated legal contracts with some workers and increased the wage per

crate. Also for simple economic reasons, after two weeks the majority of migrants

returned to work or left Nard for other places.

After ten days of strike, negotiation talks started at the Prefecture in the

provincial capital of Lecce and at Regional Government in Bari. They included the

strikers, the two NGOs of the Masseria Boncuri, the representatives of the

municipality of Nard, the province of Lecce and the Apulia Region, the local

delegates of the CGIL trade union, one employers association. Migrants claims

were only very partially recognised: employment lists for daily farmworkers would

be established in the job centre of Nard, encouraging employers to hire from that

list; the municipality had to guarantee free transport to the fields for the hired

workers. Nearly all migrants hosted at the Masseria put their name on the list, but

only 20 were regularly employed.

As a matter of fact, the institutional negotiations and the building of a group ofmigrant spoke-persons weakened the strike on the fields. In the meanwhile the

tomato harvest was about to end: the tent city was closed on the 6th of September.

Nevertheless, on the 14th of September the Italian Parliament adopted a new law

transforming gang-mastering from an administrative violation to a crime, punished

with a 8 to 12 years incarceration and with a 1,000 to 2,000 euros fine per each

worker hired illegally. One of the main flaw of the new national legislation the

fact that enterprises recurring to gangmasters were not touched by sanctions was

partially redressed by the Regional Government of Apulia on the 15th of

November. The 2006 regional law against illicit work was strengthen introducingso-called indexes of congruity in order to verify the correspondence between the

extension of the cultivated fields and the workforce hired by farmers. In case of

incongruence, companies were excluded from public funds.

3. Migrant struggles in a Time of Economic Global Crisis

The roots of the struggles in Nard can be traced back in the neoliberal

governance of migrations, experimented in Italy since the end of the 1990s in order

to support with low cost workers the economic system in the global competition.

The current mechanisms of controls, selection and stratification of the migrantpopulation deserve the label of neoliberal because migrants rights are linked to the

right to entry and stay in the country, and thus depend entirely on their usefulness

according to market rules and political opportunism. For instance, Italian law

requires would-be immigrants to have jobs waiting for them in order to receive

residence permits. It requires also migrants to leave the country if unemployed for

six months, giving enormous power to employers.

Irregular migration is thus produced by the legal system of controls, according

to the needs of the economic and political system. Migrants are required to go

through a period of illegality during which they are tested: only those who accept


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to live with no or few rights in precarious conditions, such as in the underground

economy, are admitted to the rank of regulars. This is also why the government

decides for periodical mass regularisations. Even as regulars, migrants are kept on

the razors edge of short-term permits.

The demand for disposable workers is particularly high in agriculture. Italian

farmers, especially in the South, suffer the race to the bottom of prices and labour

standards imposed by emerging countries like China and by few large trade and

food companies. As investments for technical innovation are very small, farmers

make profits by lowering the wages of the pickers and by increasing their work

schedule, in violation of the national and international labour laws. Not

surprisingly, the mentioned 2009 report by the European Network Against Racism

found that 90% of migrant workers do not have a regular contract and 16% have

been victims of violence.5

The global crisis started in 2008 produced a further shrinking of wages andexasperated the repressive feature of the neoliberal governance of migrations. The

norms passed by the Italian Parliament in 2009 classified the irregular entry and

stay in the country as a criminal offence, rather than as a simple administrative

irregularity. Undocumented migrants were liable to pay a fine of 10,000 Euros and

to be detained up to six months. People who willingly housed them risked up to

three years in prison. The initial proposition to deny access to public services

such as medical care and education to undocumented migrants was taken back

after heavy protests.

This tense context produced a new cycle of struggles, whose first episode wasthe tumult of Rosarno, in the Southern region of Calabria. On the January 7 th 2010

hundreds of migrants working as orange-pickers revolted against the latest racist

violences, but also against over-exploitation and Mafia oppression. Without that

revolt, it would be difficult to explain the acceleration in the organisation of the

first migrant general strike, which took place on the 1st of March 2010. And,

subsequently, without that strike it would be difficult to explain the blockade of the

roundabouts in Castelvolturno, Campania, enacted by migrant farmworkers in

October 2010, the occupation of a construction crane in Brescia, Lombardy, in

November 2010 and finally the strike in Nard.The revolution against President Ben Alis regime played a role, too, in the

mobilisation: many Tunisians hosted at the Masseria considered those events as an

example that change is possible, if one is ready to fight back. Last but not least, as

an effect of the crisis some migrants fired in Northern factories went in the

Southern countryside in order to get a job and maintain their right to stay. Many of

those migrants had already participated to strikes and to collective bargaining, now

using theirworking-class knowledge in Nard.

4. Migrant struggles as a Rupture of the Established Political Pattern


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The 2010 campaign against illicit work and the 2011 strike for labour and

social rights produced an unexpected rupture of the established political pattern.

This is why migrant struggles in Nard should be qualified as acts of citizenship.

First, migrants produced themselves as claimants of rights and responsibilities

trough acts of self-organisation and self-representation. The campaign granted

visibility and voice to an otherwise silenced and subaltern category of workers

those engaged in rural areas, submitted to the gang-mastering system. The strike

was decided and carried out autonomously by migrants, with the not invasive

support of the two NGOs Finis Terrae and Brigate di Solidariet Attiva. The

strikers tried to break with the paternalistic approach of trade unions, generally

considering migrants unable of acting autonomously: during the institutional

negotiations CGILs trade-unionist were invited to support migrants claims, and

their efforts to control the mobilisation were criticized.

Second, migrants creatively used the Masseria Boncuri as a public space forsocialisation and communication, which allowed them to stop isolation, racial

segregation and ethnic competition. The 2011 strike would be impossible without

the everyday self-organised assemblies. They allowed to articulate the claims

against gangmasters and companies and to understand them as shared by all

migrant workers, going beyond national cleavages. They created a new political

discourse producing several important shifts: from a short-term to a long-term

perspective, from an individual dimension to a collective one, from a particular to

an universal struggle against work exploitation as a global system.

Third, both the campaign and the strike produced a subjective transformation ofthe migrants involved and their relationship to other actors. Acting as citizens and

as self-conscious workers, migrants showed to themselves that change is possible.

Standing up for their rights and for workers rights in general, migrants stimulated

the solidarity of other workers and social groups and the concern of gangmasters

and farmers.

Notes


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1 Engin F. Isin, Theorizing Acts of Citizenship, inActs of Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (London and

New York: Zed Books, 2008), 15.2 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation (London:LexisNexis Butterworths, 2002), 469.3 Laura Di Pasquale,Racism and Discrimination in Italy. ENAR Shadow Report 2009/2010 (Bruxelles: European Network

Against Racism, 2010), 15.4 For a detailed reconstruction of the migrant strike of Nard in Summer 2011, see Brigate di solidariet attiva, et al., Sulla

pelle viva. Nard: la lotta autorganizzata dei braccianti immigrati (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2012).5 Pasquale,Racism and Discrimination, 15.

Bibliography

Brigate di solidariet attiva, Gianluca Nigro, Mimmo Perrotta, Devi Sacchetto, and Yvan Sagnet. Sulla pelle viva.

Nard: la lotta autorganizzata dei braccianti immigrati. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2012.

Di Pasquale, Laura. Racism and Discrimination in Italy. ENAR Shadow Report 2009/2010. Bruxelles: EuropeanNetwork Against Racism, 2010.

Isin, Engin F. Theorizing Acts of Citizenship. In Acts of Citizenship, edited by Engin F. Isin and Greg M.

Nielsen, 15-43. London and New York: Zed Books, 2008.

Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Toward a New Legal common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation . London:LexisNexis Butterworths, 2002.

Federico Oliveri received his PhD in legal and political philosophy from Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy,

in partnership with Paris West University Nanterre La Dfense. His main research interests are citizenship, social

movements, human rights and migration studies. He worked for many years as a research advisor at the Council of Europe,

within the Social Cohesion Development Division, and taught graduate courses on governance and active citizenship at

University of Pisa. He is research associate at the Sciences for Peace Interdisciplinary Centre, University of Pisa, where he

coordinates the editorial board of the journalScienzaePace.
http://scienzaepace.unipi.it/http://scienzaepace.unipi.it/http://scienzaepace.unipi.it/

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