Moving Ground

A once florid stone extraction industry in the Italian Alps became one of the larger and longer-lasting industries of the area until the 2008 recession. From the 1930s on, this productive dynamism generated a continuous need for workers throughout various conjunctures that caused a stratification of new inhabitants and labour composition. After the Great Recession, the unprofitability of most of the quarries in the area opened a period of industrial collapse with the silent expulsion of workers from the sector. The consequent re-emigration of previous immigrant workers that lost access to wages was paralleled with a degrading of working conditions for the residual labour recruitment. Both long-term continuities and changes in property relations in the area regarding especially the institutional developments of the corporate community will help a reflection on the specific way of insertion of a locality - characterized by one of the simplest forms of extraction of a publicly owned commons - into the world system. Contestation and co-option of old and new inhabitants occurred, engendering the contemporary situation of industrial stagnation in which the appropriation of a commons by a minority of inhabitants generated different effects of the crisis on different strata of the population.