In the last decades, Italian state responses to eradicate labour exploitation in the agro-industrial sector have mostly adopted a criminal justice approach, which criminalises informal labour intermediation (caporalato) and the alleged conditions for its reproduction (the concentration of farmworkers in makeshift slums or ghettoes), thus leaving the structural elements at the basis of exploitation (such as big-retail power) intact. Besides labour intermediation, nevertheless, caporali provide a range of other services—including (substandard) housing—to racially subaltern farmworkers usually discriminated against in the regular housing market. By ethnographically focusing on a rural area in southern Italy, fictionally called “La Grande Piana” to protect the identity of research participants, this chapter focuses on the emergence of new actors, infrastructures, and forms of value extraction—and the persistence of old ones—in the intermediation for housing access, including actors from the humanitarian sector, local residents, and old caporali.

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“Non-profit” Intermediation? Housing Access for Migrant Farmworkers in Italy Amidst the Criminalisation of Caporalato

  • Cecilia Vergnano

摘要

In the last decades, Italian state responses to eradicate labour exploitation in the agro-industrial sector have mostly adopted a criminal justice approach, which criminalises informal labour intermediation (caporalato) and the alleged conditions for its reproduction (the concentration of farmworkers in makeshift slums or ghettoes), thus leaving the structural elements at the basis of exploitation (such as big-retail power) intact. Besides labour intermediation, nevertheless, caporali provide a range of other services—including (substandard) housing—to racially subaltern farmworkers usually discriminated against in the regular housing market. By ethnographically focusing on a rural area in southern Italy, fictionally called “La Grande Piana” to protect the identity of research participants, this chapter focuses on the emergence of new actors, infrastructures, and forms of value extraction—and the persistence of old ones—in the intermediation for housing access, including actors from the humanitarian sector, local residents, and old caporali.