A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #23-26 - Milan: Gangmastering, Expulsion, and Financialization (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The case of the massive exploitation of foreign labor, predominantly 
Indian, at the construction site of the former National Shooting Range 
in Piazzale Accursio in Milan is emblematic of the Milanese model of 
urban development. Emerging a few months after another investigation 
based on accusations of gangmastering, involving one of the giants of 
platform capitalism, Glovo, and in light of the veritable black hole 
represented by the future US Consulate, it highlights and confirms, 15 
years after similar investigations during the pre-Expo 2015 season, a 
distinctive feature of the city's permanent construction site: 
unregulated labor, with no top-down rules, and the resulting total 
arbitrariness of small-time bosses and foremen.

According to the prosecutor's indictment, Caddell Construction (a US 
company based in Alabama, responsible for the project) exploited more 
than 300 Indian workers, out of over 500 migrant workers employed on the 
construction site, forcing them to work 12-hour shifts at wages ranging 
from 2 to 4 euros per hour, and forcing them to repay half their wages 
for room and board. In addition to the company's legal representative, 
Ulkas Demir, 52-year-old Aji Appukuttan, born in India, was also 
arrested. Officially responsible for personnel management on the 
construction site, several witnesses reported him as having pressured 
and abused workers, demanding they remain silent about working 
conditions. The "multinational's watchdog," as reported in the reports, 
acted as the "operational foreman" and intermediary in the system of 
exploitation on the New Delhi-Milan route discovered at the construction 
site (the extent of which extends to other construction sites is yet to 
be determined).

The project planned for the former National Shooting Range is the final 
step in the overall transformation of Portello, one of Milan's most 
important industrial districts in the 20th century (Alfa Romeo, above 
all, with its history of partisan resistance and labor conflict until 
its closure in the late 1980s). Today, included in Local Identity Nuclei 
(NIL) 71 ("Villapizzone, Cagnola, Boldinasco") and 67 ("Portello"), 
after the divestments of the 1980s and 1990s, it became one of the first 
areas, along with Bicocca, to reconvert its manufacturing identity from 
blue-collar to tertiary. This, of course, also occurred through the 
privatization of the public city: the construction in 1997 of the Fiera, 
owned by Fieramilanocity, a key player in Expo 2015; Portello Park, also 
known as "Parco Vittoria" after the owner of the area, Vittoria 
Assicurazioni, has seen the construction of a new business center and an 
extensive shopping area, replacing a portion of green space; the elusive 
Alpha District, which was to be a new "Design District," announced 
during the Fuorisalone and now abandoned. The transformation of Portello 
is inevitably linked to ongoing or planned transformations in the 
surrounding neighborhoods, from San Siro to the adjacent Cascina 
Merlata, with direct impacts on the adjacent public housing 
developments: the working-class quadrilateral around Piazzale Segesta 
and Quarto Oggiaro, respectively. The change in social composition has 
been less smooth: historically a mixed context, Portello's new 
residential vocation has not led to a seamless transition from 
working-class residents to the new upper-middle class. Furthermore, the 
self-managed Cascina Torchiera Senz'Acqua, which, while not within the 
Portello area, is nevertheless surrounded by multiple pressures for 
displacement from the surrounding development lines, is also resisting 
full privatization.

Returning to the US Consulate situation, we can see how several factors 
intersect within it: the need to accelerate shifts and construction 
work, dictated by urban planning obsession; the increase in gray and 
opaque areas, to the point of veritable legal black holes, permitted by 
the liberal regulations on contracts and subcontracts; the framework for 
the exploitation of foreign labor permitted by the Bossi-Fini Law, 
which, like all laws on "controlling migrant flows," is actually a labor 
market law and its regulation in favor of the employer operating on 
Italian soil. Furthermore, in the specific case of the former shooting 
range, there is also the claim of "extraterritoriality," with which the 
United States has always justified its denial of entry to trade unions. 
This is in addition, of course, to the secret custody of the future 
Consulate headquarters, which, seen in its construction phase, has the 
structural characteristics of an impregnable fortress rather than a 
commercial and institutional building.

In the events surrounding the so-called "urban planning earthquake" in 
Milan, an increasingly overlooked aspect is the exploitation of labor, 
along the lines of precarious employment and gang-mastering. These are 
the living bodies of the workforce that, ultimately, after 
administrative simplifications and the absence of a unified national law 
on urban development, allow the rapid profitability required by 
financial and real estate investments to be met.

With the cases of Glovo and the US Consulate, therefore, gang-mastering 
and piecework increasingly appear to be foundational elements of the 
workforce that supports the Milan model and its lifestyle-or rather, the 
lifestyle of the new, higher-income residents who have arrived in the 
city over the last 15 years, replacing approximately a third of the 
population, and of a bourgeois middle class that has prospered on the 
privatization of public space. This is precisely what happens in the 
hotel and restaurant sectors, whose conditions were recently denounced 
precisely during the Winter Olympics, being at the center of the 
political economy of the event-city.

Off Topic Workshop

https://umanitanova.org/milano-caporalato-espulsione-e-finanziarizzazione/
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