Piro, Valeria: Migrant Farmworkers in 'Plastic Factories' (E-Book)

<p>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.&nbsp;</p><p>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<i>factor</i> in the restructuring of global supply chains, but also as an<i>actor</i>shaping these processes through its own unpredictable strategies.</p><br><p></p>

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.