Migrant farm workers and stratification

Blog post by Giuliana Sanò, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

My Identities article, ‘Producing labour stratification: how migration policies affect the working, living and housing conditions of migrant farmworkers’, examines the  relationship between migration and labour stratification in the city of Vittoria, located in south-eastern Sicily. This agricultural district provides a valuable case study of the evolving patterns of (e)migration in Italy.

Historically marked by emigration, Vittoria underwent a significant transformation in the 1960s, rapidly becoming a destination for workers from Tunisia. At that time, Italy had not yet developed a comprehensive immigration policy, as its primary focus was to curb domestic emigration, particularly from the south. Consequently, Tunisian male workers who arrived in the late 1960s provided predominantly family-run local businesses with a crucial labour force, replacing local workers.

The exponential growth in profits within the local agricultural sector, described as the ‘miracle of the green gold’ by local economic figures, was largely attributed to the expansion of greenhouse farming. Unlike other agricultural districts in Italy, Vittoria's cultivation of vegetables under plastic and polyethylene covers enabled year-round production, mitigating seasonal risks. However, the crucial role of migrant labour in this sector's success is often overlooked in economic narratives.

As King et al. (2000) have argued, the Mediterranean migration model is characterized by low labour costs, high levels of informality, and increasingly restrictive migration policies. Vittoria's district exemplifies these dynamics, faithfully replicating their underlying mechanisms.
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The early 2000s witnessed the arrival of both male and female workers from Romania. Following Romania’s accession to the European Union in 2007, the impact on the agricultural sector and the relationships among migrant workers became immediately apparent. The ability to employ EU workers partially reshaped the composition of the labour force in vegetable harvesting, reinvigorating existing stratification processes and generating new ones.

Although Romanian workers, in theory, enjoyed greater freedom of movement compared to their Tunisian counterparts, their actual working and living conditions did not significantly improve. The influence of multinational corporations, international market transactions and large-scale retail distribution (GDO) put pressure on the agricultural sector. To offset rising distribution costs, employers shifted the burden onto production, primarily through wage suppression. Consequently, migrant farmworkers bear the brunt of this downward spiral, becoming trapped within a migration model that – regardless of nationality – fosters stratification and intensifies competition among workers.

In this context, employers establish daily wages based on arbitrary criteria, including gender, age, nationality, work-speed, ‘cleanliness’ of movements and harvesting, and documentation. This engenders a hierarchy rooted in informality, vulnerability and exploitation. Asylum seekers and refugees (the most recent arrivals in southern Italy) occupy the lowest stratum of this hierarchy, facing even more precarious economic and working conditions. The tightening of migration policies (King et al. 2000) accelerates economic and labour segregation, further exacerbating their plight.

In the agricultural district of Vittoria, this stratification is manifested in wage disparities and divergent working conditions. Women are paid less than men, based on the assumption of their perceived physical weakness and slower pace. Romanian workers earn less than their Tunisian counterparts, predicated on the assumption that they prefer to reside in rural areas, in employer-provided warehouses and shacks, rather than incur rental costs in the city. Asylum seekers receive the lowest wages, under the presumption that their basic needs are met by reception centres.

A closer examination of economic discourses and local agricultural producers' narratives reveals that the ‘miracle of the green gold’ and the justifications used for wage discrepancies is fundamentally a product of labour stratification. Sustained by increasingly restrictive and criminalizing migration policies, coupled with weakened labour regulations that drive workers into marginalization and economic vulnerability, the agricultural system continues to perpetuate a deeply stratified model of migration.

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Image credit: Giovanni Battaglia, Vittoria 2013.

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Read the Identities article:
Sanò, G. (2024). Producing labour stratification: how migration policies affect the working, living and housing conditions of migrant farmworkers. Identities:  Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2373618

Read further in Identities:

Migratory stratifications: a new analytical tool for investigating social change

Utility workers: religion and the migratory stratification of foreign nurses across generations

Displaced memories in the Trieste border area: a neverending historical entanglement