To Jerry Masslo, Mohamed Ben Ali, Adnan Siddique, Saidou Toure and all the other
invisible workers whose voices have been silenced.
You continue to be heard.
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM
Università di Bologna
SCHOOL OF ARTS, HUMANITIES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
Laurea Magistrale in
International Cooperation on Human Rights and Intercultural Heritage
FROM INVISIBLE WORKERS TO CITIZENS: HOW MIGRANT
WORKERS IN ITALY HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO REVIVE THE
CITIZENSHIP-WORK NEXUS
Dissertation in: Political Power Beyond State Boundaries: Migration,
Development and Human Rights
Presented by: Isabella Basso
Supervising Professor: Annalisa Furia
Co-Supervising Professor: Karine Bates
Academic Year: 2020-2021
Introduction
“[…] All’improvviso, un’automobile grigia di grossa cilindrata si fermò accanto a me e un distinto signore abbassò il finestrino, mi squadrò e mi disse: “Tu sarai sempre a piedi”1.(Soumahoro, 2020)
July 5, 2020. Just few days after the Stati Generali dell’Economia (Valerio, 2020), an institutional event organized by the (now former) Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte, aimed at imagining the economic and social fate of the country in the context of the post-first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a timid crowd is gathering in San Giovanni square, Rome. A man is standing on the main stage. He screams: “[…] when we arrived here [in the square] they told us to stay one meter apart one from the other. In the countryside there is not a step of distance between us, there is not. There are no masks either” (Sofia, 2020)2. This stinging sentence of denunciation is perfectly able to capture the spirit and the purpose of the event that is taking place, the Popular States of the Invisibles. The event has been initiated and curated by an emblematic figure, the former Italo-Ivorian trade unionist Aboubakar Soumahoro. The demonstration is bringing together a great variety of people, all of whom feel like they are ‘the forgotten’ of Italian society. Among them, a specific category stands out, that of migrant workers: agricultural workforce or braccianti, care workers, supermarket cashiers, call centre workers, food riders (Valerio, 2020). The contribution of these people, especially during the lockdown, proved necessary for Italian society; yet today, more than ever, these individuals remain on the margins, part of a population that always seems to be left invisible. The Popular States hence transform in a mandatory moment of reflection. If the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has surely brought the whole human population to its knees, it also served to remove a veil that had been covering already existing urgent socio-economic issues. Among these surely figures the situation of these migrant/non-citizens-workers.
They are the indispensable-invisibles: if on the one hand society could not do without their contribution to the general wellbeing, on the other they are not formally citizens. Somehow then, their presence goes to break one of the cornerstones of European societies, and in this case, of the Italian one: the strong mutual relationship between citizenship and work. If, quoting Sieyes “Le travail général est […] le fondement de la société” (Sieyes as cited by Furia 2008, p. 74) and if, as Tronto (2005) states, “Citizenship shapes, and is shaped by, our most deeply held values about justice and fairness in determining what good citizens in our society do” (Tronto 2005, p. 139), the fact that these working people are not citizens clearly embodies a stark contradiction. The scope of this dissertation is to delve deeper into this question. More specifically, I intend to explore the conceptual relation between citizenship and work, to which I also refer using the term citizenship-work nexus, understand the unusual role of the migrant worker within it and then envision how this subjectivity can, by embodying a new notion of citizen, revive this binomial. My main claim is that it is possible to research and renew citizenship taking those who are normally considered objects rather than subjects of politics, in this case the working migrants, as a starting point (Adrijasevic 2012, p. 62). My reflection is to be inscribed in a Western-European capitalist framework; it is indeed in this environment that the very same concepts of citizenship and work, and therefore their conceptual relation, was born and can be conceived. This is why I start this study with a historical overview of the nexus between citizenship and work. In order to understand how those two notions have shaped each other in various moments of European history, and consequently how the idea of the working citizen was born, chapter 3 tackles the reflections of some influential European scholars relative to the matter. Specifically, the ones I present are: the notion of active/working citizenship, product of the contributions by Aristotle and Sieyes (3.1), the birth of the nationstate and the inclusion of the citizenship-work binomial within it, as well as the conception of work as a solidarity force according to Fourier et Bourgeois (3.2), and finally, (working) citizenship linked to rights as an institute able to progressively enlarge its scope and meaning, view first presented by T.H. Marshall (3.3). This overview does not aim to be historically exhaustive: indeed, not only the authors taken into consideration belong to distant historical eras, but also the choice of selection is linked to my personal vision and is, therefore, certainly contestable. Its objective is rather to focus on the aspects of the citizenship-work binomial that I deem to be more pertinent for this analysis. If the last section of chapter 3 questions the current relevance of the framework outlined (3.4), chapter 4 is an attempt to answer this matter by delving deep into the question of working migrants in Italy. In order to provide an answer to the two questions ‘how does the working migrant fit into the nexus between belonging and work that clearly emerged from the framework outlined in chapter three?’ and ‘how can the nature of the nexus itself change if the reality of working migrants is acknowledged?’, first of all, a general presentation of the phenomenon from the official (4.1.1) and unofficial (4.1.2) point of view is provided; in fact, a first necessary step in the process of deconstructing some realities is understanding them. Then, narrowing down the field, I will refer to a case study, the Italian one. I will specify how nine Italian laws on migration and their provisions on labour migration make the migrant worker exist in a framework of otherness and invisibility in respect to the citizen (4.2.2), which favours structural exploitation of these individuals in the Italian work market (4.2.3). This gives the answer to the first research question, displaying how the working migrant in the Italian context ends up being something diametrically opposed to the working-citizen. Chapter 5 tries to answer the question relating to the possible change in the nature of the nexus. First of all, it proposes the reappropriation of the migrant’s subjectivity, and subsequently it suggests to re-imagine the citizenship-work nexus precisely through the figure of the migrant worker. In order to show how this revolution of thought can happen, the framework outlined in chapter 3 is revisited: it is demonstrated how the migrant-worker can be an active/working citizen (5.3.1), a caring citizen (5.3.2), and a citizen who, from his/her position of excluded can manage to widen the scope and meaning of citizenship itself (5.3.3). Lastly, the shortcomings of citizenship are acknowledged, but the study concludes by stressing how a reconceptualization of citizenship and work, and the consequent contamination between the two personas of citizen and working migrant, can be a necessary first step towards the overcoming of old dichotomies and more inclusive and human societies.