Overview
- Uses a rich set of ethnographic data collected through an extended fieldwork in Sicily
- Addresses the emerging area of research on migrant farmworkers in the southern Mediterranean, which is still underrepresented in the Anglophone literature on labor migration
- Highlights the everyday labour conditions to which farmworkers adapt and around which they shape their needs and desires.
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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.
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 factor in the restructuring of global supply chains, but also as an actor shaping these processes through its own unpredictable strategies.
Reviews
“This little book by Valeria Piro tells us about the daily grind of diverse nationality farm workers in south-east Italy (in Sicily to be precise) in rich ethnographic detail. The insights are subtle, insightful and meaningful for our understanding of work-life struggles far beyond the specific case. … People could enjoy this book if they are interested in migration and nation/race, contemporary ethnography, in team work … . This longitudinal ethnographic study is multi-dimensional, inclusive, complex, vivid and powerful.” (Karen O’Reilly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, October 17, 2022)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Migrant Farmworkers in 'Plastic Factories’
Book Subtitle: Investigating Work-Life Struggles
Authors: Valeria Piro
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74509-7
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-74508-0Published: 29 June 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-74511-0Published: 30 June 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-74509-7Published: 28 June 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 151
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 12 illustrations in colour
Topics: Organizational Studies, Economic Sociology, Migration, Agricultural Economics, Ethics, Ethnography