Caporalato (Italy)

Caporalato 🇮🇹
Location: Italy
Definition: Labour intermediation in which the recruiter profits by enrolling workers on short-term jobs
Keywords: Italy – Europe – EU – Informal economy – Informal employment – Intermediation – Migration – Mutual help – Modern slavery
Clusters: Intermediation – Domination
Author: Francesco Bagnardi
Affiliation: PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy

By Francesco Bagnardi, PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy

Caporalato - etymologically from the Latin word head, leader - refers to an illegal form of labour intermediation in which the recruiter, a gangmaster called caporale, profits by enrolling and mobilizing workers according to the short-term demand of employers. This practice is spread mostly in the agricultural sector in specific areas of Italy. The workers at risk of being under the control of gangmasters today in Italy are estimated to be between 160,000 and 200,000 (Carchedi, 2020).

Within the caporalato system, farmers outsource to caporali the recruitment, transport, and control of workers in the field. Caporali enrol the workers for their daily gig, bring them to the field, and in some cases provides them with information or access to housing in informal settlements. Caporali bargain the tasks and payment with farmers and get paid for the whole team. They are responsible for the output of the team and monitor work intensity and quality. Payment and working time are negotiated informally, remuneration is often piece-rate and consistently below the minimum wage, and collective provincial contracts and working time regulations are largely not complied with (Perrotta, 2014). Caporali take a fee for daily transport and accommodation, and might recruit and retain workers with violence, coercion, or simply with the threat of not calling them back to work in the future. In some cases, especially for Eastern European seasonal workers, caporali might organize the transport from the home country to the Italian fields (Corrado et al., 2018; Perrotta, 2015).

The caporalato system in Italy has been existing for more than a century. It persisted despite historical struggles of farmworkers’ unions (Mottura & Pugliese, 1976; Scotto, 2016) and remains crucial to provide cheap and flexible labour to a changing agricultural sector (Perrotta, 2014; Piselli, 1990) in which asymmetrical agri-food global value chains and the market power of retailers force farmers to stay flexible and minimize labour costs. Today, caporalato functions as a ‘criminal system without an effective legal alternative’ (Poppi & Travaglino, 2019, p. 92): it develops informally and often illegally, but it also ensures labour intermediation and mobility in ways that formal systems fail to (Corrado et al., 2018).

On the one hand, the caporalato system might even develop under the control of criminal organizations that directly monitor caporali, infiltrate farms, manage informal settlements where migrants live, oversees the relationship between farmers and retailers, and even deals with the logistics and transport of produces (Fanizza & Omizzolo, 2019; Sagnet & Palmisano, 2015). On the other hand, caporali can be social brokers (Perrotta, 2019) and gatekeepers (Perrotta & Sacchetto, 2014) that mediate between agri-businessmen’ need for flexible workers and farmworkers’ need for income and accommodation.

Starting from the late 1980s, Italian harvesting activities have been increasingly taken up by migrant workers. Caporali and day labourers are today mainly migrants (Avallone, 2017). The supply of labour for unskilled farm work exceeds the demand and this favours precarious employment arrangements. The deportability (cf. De Genova, 2002) of migrant workers due to European Union and Italian migration regulations contributes to make them vulnerable and more inclined to accept sub-standard employment conditions. Migrant workers in Italian fields, indeed, are increasingly asylum seekers or refugees with a temporary visa (Dines & Rigo, 2015), they often find accommodation in secluded informal settlements and this socio-spatial segregation impairs job mobility and increases dependency on intermediaries (Perrotta & Sacchetto, 2014).

Nonetheless, migrant workers maintain agency vis-à-vis their caporali and their relationship is not always based on mere coercion. Farmworkers might frame their caporali as entrepreneurial actors and look up to them (Poppi & Travaglino, 2019) or might be linked to them by kinship ties (Perrotta, 2019). Workers can escape a coercive relationship with one caporale by reaching out to fairer intermediaries or directly to farmers. Forms of misbehaviours and small-scale conflicts to renegotiate the labour process persist too despite the control of caporali, and open forms of collective actions like work stoppages and strikes have emerged (Perrotta & Sacchetto, 2014; Peano, 2017).

The spread of the caporalato goes beyond specific or marginal Southern Italian areas and sectors. Caporalato and other similar exploitative forms of labour contracting are crucial in agriculture in other regions of Italy (Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto, 2020), in other Mediterranean countries (Corrado et al., 2016, 2018) and beyond (Barrientos, 2013; Palumbo & Corrado, 2020). Moreover, exploitative intermediation practices involves not only migrants but also natives (Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto, 2020), persist in other traditional industries like construction (Fellini et al., 2007), and are on the rise in technologically advanced sectors such as platform work in the gig economy (Inversi, 2021; Merlo, 2020).

Policy responses against caporalato have abounded in the last few years. In Italy caporalato became a criminal offence in 2011, and since 2016, farmers relying on caporali can be punished with incarceration (de Martino et al., 2016; Santoro & Stoppioni, 2019). Policymakers have also introduced measures to provide formalized and regular alternatives to organize agricultural labour markets. These measures, however, achieved only limited results (Bagnardi et al., 2022; Santoro & Stoppioni, 2019).

References

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