It serves his political purpose to perpetuate their ghettoisation, and also shores up the far-right narrative that immigrants can never integrate. The observation isn’t sympathetic but strategic: publicising their destitution is a calculated attempt to dissuade more from coming to Italy. Rather than denying the situation, the country’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly said immigrants are the “new slaves”. “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. 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. 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). Workplace inspectors are “very few and very corrupt”, according to Rocco Borgese, secretary of the FLAI-CGIL union (which represents agricultural workers) in Gioia Tauro, Calabria. ![]() In the Italian deep south, where the mafia runs a parallel system of local rule with its own violent enforcement, the law holds little sway. “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.” Labourers without papers are considered outside the law, so they can expect no protection. The problem is so severe that the Italian intelligence agency warned earlier this year about the rise in far-right groups and “a real risk of an increase in episodes of intolerance towards foreigners”.īut it’s the absence of the rule of law – Sobik’s third prerequisite for modern slavery – that is most evident in Italian agriculture. A few weeks before, in July, a Moroccan man was beaten to death there. A Cameroonian was shot in the city of Aprilia, an hour’s drive from Rome. In 2018, there were 126 racially motivated attacks recorded in the country, some fatal: in May last year a neo-fascist shot and wounded six black people in Macerata, near the central city of Ancona. 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.”ĭiscrimination and violence against African workers gets worse in Italy with every passing day. It’s not the slavery of hundreds of years ago, when you were deprived of your liberty. “When you have been enslaved,” Sagnet says, “it’s such a strong thing that your head begins to reason differently. 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. “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. 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. The largest migrant reception centres are almost all in the south – in Sicily and Calabria – where mafia organisations exert greatest control and where agriculture requires a constant supply of labour. The number of arrivals has been growing exponentially in recent years: the number of boat people landing in Italy peaked at 181,436 in 2016. ![]() The produce they pick regularly ends up on the shelves of Italian, and international, supermarkets, bought by consumers who have no idea of the suffering involved.Īlthough some of the workers are eastern Europeans, most of those picking crops in the Italian fields come from Africa, mainly – at the moment – from Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia. 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. A few have work contracts, although union organisers often find they are fake. Some have Italian residency permits, but many don’t. They live in isolated rural ruins or shanty towns. 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.
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