A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, il Cantiere #23: Slavery yesterday and today - Some anarchist workers from the South (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

«Slavery ultimately means being torn from one's context and therefore 
from all those social relationships that constitute a human being. Put 
another way, a slave is in a certain sense a (social) dead man" (David 
Graeber) ---- While still a student, when I stated that slaves still 
existed in the current era, they thought I was crazy, the idea of 
progress was so rooted in the history they taught us. Yet if we consider 
Graeber's definition of the term "slavery," then perhaps my ideas were 
not so unbalanced after all. In fact, if we reflect on the conditions in 
which so many of us live in our daily work, these, unfortunately, are 
not far from the Graeberian definition.

In the south of this country the situation is even more evident, 
starting from the most obvious fact: the strong phenomenon of 
emigration. The difficulty of finding work and a purchasing power that 
is even lower than the average for each category of employed workers 
means that they are torn away from their context and therefore lose many 
of the social relationships that up until then had constituted them and 
supported as human beings innervated in a social fabric. The reality of 
foreign workers employed in the agriculture and catering sectors 
exacerbates these conditions even more, as for them the blackmail of 
legal documents (residence or work permit) is added to the already 
miserable hourly wage. , blackmail that lowers labor costs and allows 
effective working hours to be increased, up to 10 to 12 hours per day. 
It is the worker himself who is forced to choose this option, to take 
home the necessary salary to survive. Such daily time spent on work 
actually devours the aforementioned necessary social relationships to 
lead a dignified life.

For employee

Val. adj.

n small engraving. When over ten years ago Naples regained popularity as 
a high-level tourist destination, for some time the middle/lower classes 
recovered a certain balance between work and income, above all through 
the management of small B&Bs and restaurant activities. It was a brief 
period in contrast with the trend which is, however, rapidly returning. 
In fact, in recent years, the sharks of companies already established in 
the sector or operating in apparently distant contexts (1)     have 
swooped on many apartments to structure themselves into widespread 
commercial chains, bringing a condition of super-exploitation for young 
people, mostly students *, employed* in this type of activity. With the 
small initial earnings having largely disappeared, in addition to a new 
super-exploitation, the ever-increasing difficulty of families in the 
historic center remained in paying ever-increasing rents. In short, here 
too the logic of the capitalist market has prevailed: those who had more 
capital to  invest have remained in business while the few truly 
family-run businesses now survive by staying afloat, while the 
conditions of employed work, which already were what they were, they 
fell into poverty. Those who are not reduced to these conditions are 
only the owners of companies who, beyond profit, do not need to work so 
hard. From some 2021 data it can be noted that in large and medium-sized 
enterprises, in Campania, monetary productivity (2) is equal to almost 
double the income for each individual worker, in small and micro 
enterprises it is more than double the income of each individual ( see 
table 1) (3)

Table 1 added value, wages and poor workers by company size

poor workers are those who, despite working, have an annual income lower 
than 60% of the national gross median income.
However, this table does not take into account undeclared work, which is 
very widespread in the South. In Campania alone there are more than 
350,000 workers without contracts or with "strange" contracts: the 
employer saves taxes and the employee does not receive pension 
contributions, consequently the ratio between the two shares rises in 
favor of productivity. In the context of undeclared work, women are a 
high percentage, so much so that in the city of Naples alone it appears 
that 50% of women are without a regular contract or unemployed, a 
reality not far from the 70% of women living in Rabat[capital of Morocco 
ndt]. Naturally it follows that not having economic autonomy often 
accentuates the misogynistic element already existing in the area, as it 
makes them more vulnerable and blackmailable both at work and in social 
relationships with men.

This modern-day slavery perhaps produces more deaths for and on the job 
than slavery in the ancient Roman Empire or in the United States of 
America of 1700-1800. The rhythms and times of work absolutely do not 
take into account the minimum safety standards necessary in the 
workplace, with an increase in accidents and professional pathologies 
that seemed to have disappeared 30 or 40 years ago. The issue of working 
times is certainly the crucial point, the one we feel most immediately 
on our skin. We know, however, that if we do not grasp the causes that 
have led to this mass impoverishment, accentuated in recent years by the 
surge in prices of primary goods, household utilities and the cut in 
citizens' income, we certainly cannot begin to discuss how to free 
ourselves from this current slave condition. A few years ago it was 
typical among friends to play "Master and Below": whoever had the 
highest cards became the master and was the one who chose who should 
drink the glass of wine and who shouldn't. In the "game" of slavery 
there are no cards that turn, it is always the masters who decide who 
works, how much they have to produce, and therefore how long they have 
to work. Naturally there are intermediate managers between workers and 
bosses: department foremen, office managers, work managers, etc. a 
hierarchy reminiscent of the feudal one that gives power to a few over 
the majority of workers. Even these executives, however, are currently 
losing ground in terms of wages and work obligations. The true atavistic 
causes of slavery are hierarchy and power: the economic factor in the 
worker's condition of slavery is only the result of structural elements 
that existed before the birth of capitalism: hierarchy and power.

How then to combat the problem at its root? The current work of the 
unions, I am referring to the basic ones, the combative ones, which in 
recent years have triggered fair battles for wage demands or for the 
defense of the workplace, as has happened successfully in the logistics 
sector, is important but contains a very serious limit, that of 
detaching the interests of the activist from those of workers, which 
happens when the trade unionist's activity is paid for by the union 
structure itself. Nonetheless, this is where the nail needs to be 
hammered. The experiences of the anarchist unions of the past years and 
the council experiences were, in fact, a moment of concrete rupture with 
political and economic power - with the hierarchy in general. It is no 
coincidence that it is from structures like these that experiences of 
collectivisation of the means of production were born, as in Spain in 
1936 where, with the collectivisation of land and the self-management of 
factories, the aspect of trade union demands and workers went beyond 
they have taken the production of goods and services into their own 
hands. An important recent example was that of the Argentine workers and 
unemployed workers who occupied the factories at the beginning of the 
2000s, resisting government attacks and producing in self-management 
without bosses. In every workers' organisation, union, collective or 
committee, the mandates must be temporary and revocable. Being ready for 
a horizontally organized productive and social structure is not a tactic 
but a strategy to achieve a transformative path: from each according to 
their abilities to each according to their needs. We must not lose sight 
of the goal of destroying slavery and this can only be done by building 
organization from the bottom up.

Note

1) Today the majority of small guesthouses and B&Bs are managed by 
companies in the logistics, freight transport or hotel sector itself.

2) Monetary productivity is  an indicator that measures the quantity of 
added value produced by a production unit for each unit of  money spent. 
 In other words, monetary productivity measures the efficiency with 
which a company uses financial resources to generate added value.

3) 
https://www.economiaepolitica.it/lavoro-e-diritti/lavoro-povero-nella-citta-metropolitana-di-napoli-2021/

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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