The
enslavement of immigrant workers in the Italian south has been an
open secret for years. The agricultural workers’ union, FLAI-CGIL,
suggested that “about 100,000 (mostly foreign) workers are forced
to suffer workplace blackmail and dilapidated living conditions”. A
system of certification for Italian and international supermarkets to
say that their produce is not the fruit of slavery has also failed to
eradicate the practice. On the contrary: for decades, organised crime
and discount supermarkets have forced down the price of raw products,
reducing payment along the food supply chain and creating a system
that inevitably punishes the most vulnerable.
There
is no question that the migrant workers are vulnerable to
exploitation, but Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroonian anti-slavery activist
who once worked picking tomatoes in Puglia, explains that the
vulnerability is mental as much as physical. “When you have been
enslaved,” Sagnet says, “it’s such a strong thing that your
head begins to reason differently. It’s not the slavery of hundreds
of years ago, when you were deprived of your liberty. Slavery in the
21st century doesn’t need chains, because they exploit a continual
sense of intimidation that the most vulnerable people, like
immigrants, feel.” Pay, already low, is even lower for
“clandestines”. Many of the labourers we spoke to say gangmasters
regularly withhold their identity documents and pay. Even if, in
theory, they are free to leave, circumstances force them to stay put.
“If you have worked for a week or for two weeks and they haven’t
paid you,” says Sagnet, “and they have your documents, of course
you don’t leave.”
Discrimination
and violence against African workers gets worse in Italy with every
passing day. Most of those picking crops in the Italian fields come
from Africa, mainly – at the moment – from Gambia, Ghana,
Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia. Agriculture requires a constant supply of
labour. That supply is organised by gangmasters: agents who recruit
seasonal workers and who are tasked with squeezing extra work out of
them at the lowest possible cost. In the
Italian south, the lives of foreign agricultural labourers are so
cheap that many NGOs have described their conditions as a modern form
of slavery. They live in isolated rural ruins or shanty towns. Some
have Italian residency permits, but many don’t. A few have work
contracts, although union organisers often find they are fake.
Desperate for work, these labourers will accept any job in the fields
even if the wages are far below, and the hours far above, union
standards. Italy’s
agricultural sector is booming, with food products making up 8.7% of
Italy’s flagging GDP. The tomato industry alone is worth £2.8bn.
Mass immigration is chaotic and uncontrolled, but the exploitation of
immigrant workers is systematic. Migrants usually arrive in Italy
with nothing but debts, after borrowing money from relatives back
home to finance their journey to Europe. They usually know nobody
when they reach their destination, and have no one to appeal to when
in difficulty. Few even reveal to relatives back home the desperate
situation in which they find themselves.
There
are a few factors on which modern slavery thrives,” says Jakub
Sobik,
of the British NGO Anti-Slavery International: “Vulnerability,
discrimination and a lack of the rule of law.”
In
Italian agriculture, all of these conditions are present. Labourers
without papers are considered outside the law, so they can expect no
protection.
“You
know that what you’re suffering isn’t right,” says Sagnet, “but
you can’t denounce it because they’ll report you as an illegal
immigrant.”
In
2018, Global Slavery Index, an organisation providing a
country-by-country ranking of the number of people currently
enslaved, estimated there are 50,000 enslaved agricultural workers in
Italy (the Index claims a
total of 145,000 people
are enslaved in the country as a whole, forced into prostitution and
domestic services). The UN’s special rapporteur on slavery said
last autumn
that 400,000 agricultural workers in Italy are at risk of being
exploited and almost 100,000 are forced to live in inhumane
conditions.
“There’s
a form of exploitation which, in some ways, exceeds what happened in
the past, when slave-owners at least cared about the health of their
slaves because they needed them,” said an Italian-Ivorian
trade-unionist and campaigner, Aboubakar Soumahoro. “Today, there’s
not even that care.”
Italy's
interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly said
immigrants are the “new slaves”. The observation isn’t
sympathetic but strategic: publicising their destitution is a
calculated attempt to dissuade more from coming to Italy. It serves
his political purpose to perpetuate their ghettoisation, and also
shores up the far-right narrative that immigrants can never
integrate.
Salvini
and his allies have turned logic on its head. For them, the victims
aren’t the people who have been enslaved, but the Italian people.
In their view, the criminals aren’t gangmasters who exploit the
workers, but immigrants (“every day in Italy”, Salvini has
tweeted, “immigrants commit 700 crimes”). One of his most
familiar slogans is “la
pacchia è finita”
(“the free ride is over”) – echoing the popular myth that
refugees and pro-immigration leftists have somehow got rich at the
expense of ordinary Italians. Central to his message is the branding
of modern slaves as criminals – saying nothing about slavery
itself.
Supermarkets
and their suppliers cite their use of certifications that are
intended to reassure consumers that the goods we buy are produced
under legal labour practices. But as these stories demonstrate, such
figleaves are totally unreliable.
An
immigrant worker called Njobo explains: “The Africans that are
living here, most of them are living a fake life. They look for
beautiful pictures and put them on Instagram. None of us would take a
picture from this place and send it back.” He gestured around his
makeshift home, revealing the dilapidation of his surroundings, the
room dotted with shredded plastic rags and broken glass. Immigrants
don’t only have debts to relatives, they are also desperate to
obtain residency permits. The so-called Bossi-Fini law of 2002 (named
after the two party leaders who drafted it) grants a residency permit
only to those who have work contracts, meaning immigrants will put up
with exploitation in order to obtain one. Those without residency
permits are even more vulnerable. Many migrants have reported being
beaten by employers, who also make sexual demands. Violence,
especially against women, is alarmingly common. In 2017, 58% of
asylum requests were turned down. The appeals process, too, was
abolished. Those so-called diniegati
– men
and women denied asylum – invariably preferred to disappear into
the nearby agricultural slums than risk deportation.
The
migrants continue to be exploited for profit, through a system called
caporalato.
This is the practice through which the recruitment and payment of
day-labourers is subcontracted to a gangmaster, the caporale.
An ancient and sinister figure in Italian history, the caporale
was – throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries – a
proto-mafioso, the enforcer of the landlord’s will. The difference
now is that the mafioso himself is likely to be a landowner, and it’s
his orders that are being enforced by a usually non-Italian caporale.
The
practice of caporalato
has been illegal since a 2016 law banned intermediaries from
exploiting vulnerable agricultural labourers (thanks, largely, to the
courageous campaigning of Yvan Sagnet), and yet it is still
ubiquitous. At 4am, you see hundreds of labourers cycling on main
roads, without lights, to reach the pick-up points for transport to
the fields. There, at crossroads and in lay-bys, the black labourers
wait for a caporale
and his minibus. No one knows if there will be work. “Work yes,
work no,” says one phlegmatic man, moving his hands as if he were
juggling invisible balls. The only certainty is that anyone who has
agitated for fair pay or better conditions will be automatically
excluded.
Costs
vary, but in general the labourers have to pay around €3 for
transportation to and from the fields. The vehicles usually carry
double the legal limit of passengers, with men and women sitting on
top of each other. The fields are so remote that, once there, the
workers are obliged to buy sandwiches and water for €3-4. It costs
50 cents to charge a phone or, if anyone falls ill or has an
accident, €20 to be taken to hospital.
Although
piecework in agriculture is illegal, that is how all labourers are
paid: the going rate is €3.50 to fill a chest with 300kg of
tomatoes, or €5.50 if they are cherry tomatoes; workers receive €1
for a huge case of tangerines or 50 cents for one of oranges. The
going rate for 100kg of grapes is €13. Even if you work at top
speed, it is hard to make much more than €30 a day, and that’s
before all those deductions. Contracts are essentially worthless:
local unionists try to intervene, checking online to see if the
correct social security payments have been made on behalf of workers.
They very rarely have. Union representative Rocco Borgese shakes his
head glumly: “We have lost our humanity,” he says. In
terms of the local economy, the more helpless and homeless immigrants
are, the cheaper it is to employ them.
Because
the Bossi-Fini law ties residency to the possession of a work
contract, many purchase a contract for hundreds of euros. Other
times, the contract is issued in the name, not of the immigrant, but
of a local man or woman who doesn’t work and has probably never
been to the fields. This guarantees the local person agricultural
unemployment benefit if, on paper, it looks as if they have worked
for more than 53 days in the year. In 2015, 3,000 of these “false
labourers” were discovered in Calabria. For the labourers dropped
off at dawn in the fields, the work is relentless. In
an article in the British Medical Journal in March, doctors
representing the Italian medical charity, Doctors With Africa, wrote:
“Over the past six years the number of agricultural workers who
have died as a result of their work is more than 1,500.”
The
sociologist and author Leonardo Palmisano, who investigates
agricultural slavery and organised crime, says: “The mafia in the
south controls the reception of immigrants. Centres for
asylum-seekers have processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants,
and the mafia is often part of the management.”
The
Italian state pays €35 per immigrant per day (and €45 for minors)
to reception centres that house them. During the mass migrations of
recent years, the government contracted out the housing and feeding
of migrants, which became a billion-euro industry. The largest
reception centres in Italy are called Caras (centri
di accoglienza per richiedenti asilo,
or “welcome centres for asylum-seekers”), each in command of
multi-million euro contracts for providing food and other services.
One investigation in 2017 into the Cara Sant’Anna (based in an
abandoned military airport in Isola di Capo Rizzuto in Calabria)
estimated that, over 10 years, the Arena mafia clan had embezzled
a third
of the €100m state funding. Tiny portions of out-of-date food were
served. The number of residents was exaggerated to increase cashflow.
The asylum centre had become, in the words of the investigating
magistrate, “a cashpoint for the mafia”. The running of Cara
Sant’Anna has now been taken over by the Red Cross. Similar
is happening all over the country. The Roman mafioso, Salvatore
Buzzi, whose consortium repeatedly won contracts to arrange housing
for migrants, was heard in a 2014 police wiretap boasting:
“Have you got any idea how much I earn through immigrants? I make
more from immigrants than I do from drugs.” His consortium enjoyed
annual revenues of €55m.
Calabrian
farmers were extremely vulnerable to international competition when
Brazil and other countries began undercutting the Calabrian juicers.
As the mafia cut corners, always looking for maximum returns, the
laborious tasks that the EU subsidies were intended to finance –
protecting or improving production through pruning, replanting,
fencing, scientific research and infrastructure – simply hadn’t
been carried out.
Throughout
the 1980s and 90s, the Italian mafia bought land. Cash-rich from drug
trafficking, and from embezzling public funds for construction, the
mafia saw the land grab as an easy way to launder profits. When
garbage-disposal contracts were privatised, land offered an
opportunity to dump refuse, including toxic waste. But the mafia’s
purchase of agricultural land received a new impetus when, in 2008,
the EU’s subsidy system was changed: there was now a fixed sum of
€1,500 per year per hectare, regardless of production. It was a
further incentive to buy land, with the result that many of the
orange groves of Calabria are now controlled by some of most powerful
families in the Italian underworld: the Pesce, Piromalli and Mancuso
clans.
“The
mafia now governs the agro-industry,” Leonardo Palmisano, the
anti-mafia author, told us. “You only need to look at the
properties confiscated from the mafia. In recent years, they are
almost all in the agricultural sector. And organised crime doesn’t
just control agricultural production, but also transport,
commercialisation and the fruit markets.”
Italy’s
“Agromafia Observatory”, an organisation that analyses criminal
incursions into the food chain, estimates that the value of
food-related business to organised crime has risen 12.4% in the last
year, making it now worth €24.5bn. The Observatory suggests that
agriculture now makes up 15% of the mafias’ total income.
“You
have to understand”, says Don Pino De Masi, the anti-mafia priest,
“that in Calabria, the black economy is bigger than the real one.
There are no workers’ rights. You take on who you can pay the least
and the gangmaster oils this ‘race to the bottom’ mechanism.
Above the immigrant gangmaster is the Calabrian one, the expression
of the will of those who command here.”
Many
activists believe this modern form of slavery is not a perversion of
21st-century capitalism, but the logical result of putting profit
before every other consideration. “Unless you counter the huge
power of the multinationals,” Yvan Sagnet told us, “it will be
difficult to resolve the problem of working conditions. Because
caporalato
and modern slavery are the effect of a system, not the cause of it:
the effect of ultraliberalism applied to agriculture.”
“This
isn’t a comfortable message for supermarkets”, says Rachel
Wilshaw, ethical trade manager at Oxfam, “but in squeezing their
suppliers so hard commercially that they can only make a profit by
exploiting workers, supermarkets themselves are driving the
conditions that can result in modern slavery in their supply chain.”
Every
year, before the harvest is in, certain supermarkets invite a supply
price for their fresh produce. Because the order, for the winning
bidder, will be very large, producers compete to outdo each other
with the lowest price. This is the supermarkets’ “double-down”
auction, infamous for reducing prices on all produce. After opening
offers are called in, the lowest bid from that first round is then
used as the starting point for this second round, hence “double
down”.
A
manufacturer of tomato products called Francesco Franzese explained,
“To
produce a tin of tomatoes certain expenses are out of your control:
the price of tin, energy and water costs and so on. The only place
you can squeeze savings are in labour costs. The only place. In
accepting these industrial prices,” he said, “we’re actually
selling the skin of the farm-workers.”
The
result is that tomatoes, oranges and other agricultural produce are
now sold with no relation to how much they cost from the ground up,
but solely how little the super-powerful supermarkets are prepared to
pay from the top down. Prices paid to tomato-processing companies,
which turn the raw fruit into tins of tomatoes, concentrates, sauces
and ketchups, are constantly forced down. Those processors, in turn,
readjust the prices they pay to farmers, in order to maintain their
profit margin. The price pressure is even more acute on tomatoes than
on other products, because they are often used by supermarkets as a
“loss leader”. Tomatoes are so fundamental to Italian cuisine
that shops sell them at a loss knowing the customer will purchase
other products while shopping and make up the difference. But the
downward squeeze on prices is only part of the story of the supply
chain, because it’s also apparent that someone, somewhere, is
making huge profits. Although farmers were paid 7.5 cents per kg for
their tomatoes last year, the consumer was charged, roughly, €2 per
kg for them. That represents a price increase of 2,567%.
In
that context, it is hardly surprising if corners are cut. Farmers use
gangmasters to provide the cheapest, most vulnerable labour, and
don’t ask questions about the workers’ conditions. “The farmers
make up for diminishing margins”, Sagnet and Palmisano wrote,
“through the gangmasters … everyone makes money on the ones
below, except for the very last in the chain, the labourers.”
Discount
supermarkets – the main perpetrators – now account for almost 20%
of the Italian market, and in Germany (a major consumer of Italian
produce) the figure is at 40%. Between 2014 and 2017, while the
Italian economy has
been stagnant, the major discount supermarkets have grown. The power
of supermarkets is exacerbated in Italy by the producers’ relative
weakness. In the Italian south, the average size of a farm is seven
hectares. There is often little consolidation or cooperation between
them, and they remain powerless compared to the national supermarket
chains. There is also an almost total absence of employment agencies
for the agricultural sector in Calabria and Puglia, to act as
alternatives to gangmasters.
Activist
Fabio Ciconte and journalist Stefano Liberti have been campaigning
for a decade for a fairer food industry, and recently published a
book: Big Trolley: Who Decides What We Eat? “The supermarkets,”
they wrote, “have created a war between the poor: on the one side
the farmers, who are struggling to survive, and on the other
consumers, who want to spend less and less. If you need labourers
quickly, there’s no efficient way to find them. That’s the
intermediary role that caporali
[gangmasters]
provide.”
The
continued use of slave labour in Italian agriculture has been made
possible by a combination of factors: a migrant crisis in which
hundreds of thousands of people with minimal rights have arrived in
areas dominated by organised crime just as the country’s economy is
flatlining and discount supermarkets are using all means possible to
push down prices.
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