How The Pandemic Helped Gangmasters Exploit The Invisible Agricultural Workers Of Italy

The Italian countryside is often the backdrop of where we daydream of an idyllic setting for a walk through a hilltop town and taste the succulent produce of the local laborers. The place to learn about rich gastronomic history, discover whether the wine is biodynamic and what products to best pair it with. But what sometimes isn’t being included in the culinary conversation, are the people at the bottom of this delicious supply chain, and how they are being treated.

They are the estimated 180,000 agricultural workers in Italy that are being exploited for farm work. Often, they are migrant workers, their vulnerable position making them subject to gross exploitation, sexual abuse, and violence according to a report on how Agro-mafia and gangmasters are exploiting workers produced by Placido Rizzoto and FLAI-CGIL, one of Italy’s largest labor unions.

Italy’s agricultural laborers are known as ‘invisible workers’, Valeria from Francavilla, Calabria tells Forbes. She has been in the fields for the past 20 years after she immigrated from Eastern Europe. Exploitation in the agricultural fields is not a new phenomenon, but conditions have become worse for these invisible workers due to decreased checks happening during the pandemic.

Jean-René Bilongo, Migrant Affairs and Inclusiveness Officer of the labor union FLAI-CGIL explains, “Things got worse with the coronavirus outbreak, people were forced to remain at home with the national lockdowns, and, if you are not on the field or checking the land, you cannot see what is going on or arrest the exploiters, the caporalato, or gangmasters, know this and things got worse for workers in agriculture because of it.” 

The gangmasters act as middlemen for farmers who need to find quick, cheap, readily available workers to pick their produce. The gangmasters have made it their business in taking a share of the workers’ pay, usually charging them for transfer to the fields, and squalid living quarters in makeshift shantytown ghettos. Often, the shacks are in the depths of the countryside, close to the farm and far from the eyes of tourists. This shared work and living space add to the already complicated employee-employer dynamic in this sector. FLAI-CGIL estimates Italy to have between 60-80 of these ghettos across the country where 100,000 people live.

Valeria has been picking oranges, peaches, and strawberries for most of her life, a skill she learned back in her native country, Ukraine. Over the years, she has seen women be exploited, abused and even had colleagues die. “Even if we have the union, many people are still not paid and will never get properly hired. I don’t even know how to combat this. People are so scared to talk because they get threatened and risk never working in the area again.” She explains the network of farmers and gangmasters are so interconnected, that workers who speak out about the conditions can become blacklisted among more than one farm. Being an agricultural worker is seasonal, precarious, both physically and mentally exhausting and sometimes, life-threatening.

For agricultural laborers, not showing up means not getting paid, and despite the pandemic, workers had to show up, often working in environments that were not compliant to Covid-19 regulations, “This year, just like any other, we had to go to work to survive, but then we arrive in situations that were even more inhumane, with trucks crowded full of 10-15 people, people working without any distance, no hygiene, no protective gear, and you are forced to work in these conditions”, says Valeria. 

“This is a job where you are severely underpaid, about 25 Euro per day. But who is treated worst of all are the first to arrive, the undocumented migrants who go to the gangmasters because they don’t know where else to go. And during this period of the pandemic, they are being exploited worse than beasts.” says Valeria. 

“Often, these gangmasters are very violent, we hear of murders, women are victim to violence and sexual harassment,” says Bilongo.

Female migrant agricultural workers are considered to be at most risk to find themselves in a situation of isolation, segregation, and dependency on an employer. Like in the case of female Romanian farm workers in Vittoria, Sicily, “In such a context, anything can remain hidden, labor exploitation is often accompanied by sexual blackmail towards female migrant workers by their employers. These cases often involve women who live on the farms with their children, who are used as a means of blackmailing,” writes Letizia Palumbo for the EU Institute for the Trafficking and Labour Exploitation in Domestic Work in the Agricultural Sector in Italy. 

A significant point of data that shows the phenomena of sexual abuse and a culture of silence is in Vittoria. There, the rate of abortions among migrant women is very high in comparison to the entire population of the province. “We are talking about a very small city – where many Romanian women live. That small community has more abortions than anywhere else in the province and many work in agriculture there. When the issue first exploded, we had some members of parliament that boarded a flight rushing to Sicily saying they would help and then they got on another flight back to Rome and forgot about it.” says Bilongo.

According to the EU Institute for the Trafficking and Labour Exploitation in Domestic Work in the Agricultural Sector in Italy, official data shows that in 2014, 20.7% of the total abortions in the province of Ragusa were carried out on Romanian women, 2.87% on Tunisian and Albanian women, 2% on Polish women, and 1% Moroccan women. “Although certainly not all cases of abortion can be attributed to cases of sexual abuse, the high number of abortions among Romanian women is an important fact that needs to be considered to address the harsh working and living conditions faced by most female farmworkers in Ragusa,” writes Palumbo.

But despite the visible atrocities, the fear of speaking out against the abuse and possibly losing work outweighs the need to seek justice.“If I speak out to say I am unhappy with the working conditions, if I talk about it, I risk getting fired. Our silence keeps our job security. So everyone takes this filth and bears the weight of it on their shoulders, to survive, but you can’t live normally in these conditions all day with this stress. It’s physically exhausting work but also psychologically impossible.” says Valeria.

Daniela Rondinelli, EU Parliamentarian and committee member of the Agricultural and Rural Development spearheaded a newly approved amendment of the Common Agricultural Policy that aims to help combat the phenomena of exploitation of agricultural workers.

The EU budget allocates the largest share of funds to Agriculture, about 35%. Huge sums of money have attracted the underbelly of organized crime, informally known as the agro mafia. Rondinelli pushed this amendment to penalize those who commit these crimes of abuse and exploitation.

“The people that will have access to the funds of the Common Agricultural Policy are only those who respect the laws and their workers. If they don’t, they don’t get access to funds. The situation in Italy, but also in other European countries is very serious. The agro mafia exploits 180 thousand people in Italy and they are profiting with billions of euros – this situation cannot continue,” says Rondinelli “we need to break the mechanism between farms that use the gangmasters”.

The amendment also aims to bridge the gender equality gap which is more pronounced in rural areas. On average, in rural work, women spend 22 hours a week in unpaid work activities while men spend less than 10. 

“Agricultural workers are just a number – not people. We are considered numbers that just produce and work, they don’t call you by your name, they call you whore or animal. I have seen the gangmasters treat African and Romanian women like human merchandise. These events have made me very aggressive, you can’t let people close, this comes as a consequence when you see these things,” says Valeria.

But the message that Valeria says she and her colleagues want to be understood is that they want to be seen, they want to count. “We workers feed the country – lawyers, congressmen, professors everyone. Fruit and vegetables are not grown in a supermarket. We pick these things and we just want to be treated like humans. Who works in agriculture is not a beast, we are people who do so much, and without us nothing works. Without us, restaurants, supermarkets, cafes don’t work. Poor people sweat to make this happen, we deserve rights.”