Migrant Farmworkers in 'Plastic Factories'

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.

Uses a rich set of ethnographic data collected through an extended fieldwork in Sicily Addresses the emerging area of research on migrant farmworkers in the southern Mediterranean, which is still underrepresented in the Anglophone literature on labor migration Highlights the everyday labour conditions to which farmworkers adapt and around which they shape their needs and desires.

Autorentext
Valeria Piro is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in labour sociology at the University of Padova and a teaching fellow in Sociology of Migration at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Inhalt
Chapter 1. Entering the workplaces.- Chapter 2. What does it mean to work by the day? Trust relationships, job contracts, formal and informal regulations.- Chapter 3. The body at work: Performativity, Weakness, Beauty.- Chapter 4. Struggling for a fair wage: negotiations and conflicts around the salary.- Conclusion.