This book provides a fine-grained ethnographic examination of the everyday negotiations and conflicts taking place in greenhouses and packinghouses in an agricultural district in south-eastern Italy (Sicily). In a highly competitive global scenario, driven by multinational corporations and large retailers, small and medium-sized farms largely rely on migrant labour to fill their demand for casualized, flexible and low-paid jobs. By taking the reader into the ‘plastic factories’ where the author was hired as a farmworker, this book sheds light on the struggles – around the employment contract, the wage and the body – which take place every day between employers and employees.
The book contributes to broadening the understanding of the dynamics innervating food production worldwide by recognizing the pivotal role of migrant labour not only as a factor in the restructuring of global supply chains, but also as an actor shaping these processes through its own unpredictable strategies.
Author(s): Valeria Piro
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 162
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
1 The Agri-Food Business and Labour Mobility
References
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
2.3.1 Kamari
2.3.2 Gurrieri
2.3.3 SicilSerre
2.3.4 JustTomatoes
2.3.5 TomatoArtists
2.4 From the Workplace to the Home
References
3 Bargaining Over Contracts in a ‘Day Labour’ Market
3.1 Unpacking Day Labour
3.2 Paternalistic Labour Relations: Shaping a ‘Good Farmworker’
3.2.1 ‘Good’ Farmworkers’ Permanent Availability
3.2.2 Paternalism at Work
3.3 Everyday Uses of Employment Contracts
3.4 Mobility Power and Farmworkers’ Coping Strategies
3.4.1 The Purchase of Employment Contracts
3.4.2 Working ‘Under the Table’
3.4.3 Mobility Practices
References
4 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
4.5 Working Without a Wage
References
5 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
5.4.1 Hiding Vulnerabilities
5.4.2 Listening to Farmworkers’ Bodies
References
6 Conclusions
References
Index
