Tuesday, June 25, 2013
4.04 (PC Hoofthuis)
How does institutional racism impact on the way in which unions react to changes in the labour force and the growth of a migrant workforce with a different legal status from the indigenous? Drawing from the Italian experience of the last ten years, the paper will suggest that racism, far from being a pure cultural and social product, has been a fundamental tool in the dynamics of labour precarization. Particularly, the paper will discuss the migrants’ strike of 2010 and 2011, when, for the first time a national strike has been called by autonomous groups and union locals, against the negative effects of the Italian immigration Law (‘Bossi-Fini’) and to spotlight the highly exploitative working conditions experienced by migrants in the Italian economy. The call resulted in an unprecedented mobilization of workers around the issue of migrants’ conditions, rising tensions among the very unions that have been, in the past, more active in promoting migrants rights. The paper argues that the bureaucratic organization of Italian unions, and the specific role dedicated to immigration issues in this organization, favoured the growth of institutional racism as a factor of division, leading to the racialization of the workforce. From this angle, the author will employ the framework of ‘differential inclusion’, as developed in the critical scholarship on the European citizenship and border regime. The paper will then discuss the relation between the different administrative conditions of migrants and what the author calls the ‘wages of regularity’ attached to these different conditions. The paper argues that addressing the relation between migrants’ conditions, immigration law and labour dynamics is essential to challenge social precarity and racism, and represents both a challenge and a strategic goal for contemporary labour movements.
