The exploitation of migrant workers in the Italian agricultural sector: a case study from a Ghanaian community of day-labourers in Northern Apulia

The notion of slavery traditionally entails extreme exploitation, property rights and individual ownership. These concepts have been reflected in various legal instruments as well as in the popular understanding of slavery for centuries. Although the existence of legal definitions, the question of identifying what sort of practices can be classified as forms of slavery has never been an easy task, ranging between literally and rhetoric interpretations. Even in the contemporary debate, the attempts to define and analyze slavery still rise a lot of questions: what counts as a slave in the contemporary world? When forms of contemporary extreme exploitation fall under the category of slavery? These questions open up a debate that seems to fit particularly well in the analysis of the working and living conditions of west-African migrant day-labourers in the southern Italian agricultural sector. In the last decade, the recruitment system headed by caporali (i.e. go-between the landowner and the daily workers that exercise physical and psychological violence on the latter), and the exploitative working conditions of these migrants have sparked the debate whether they can be defined as “new slaves”. Through an ethnographic analysis of life histories and work biographies collected during my field research in Apulia, a region renowned as the biggest Italian tomato district, within a group of Ghanaian seasonal workers, I’ll try to reconstruct the paths of the "things" - the tomatoes - and that of these workers, and to answer the question: are they slaves?