H ΥΠΟΘΕΣΗ ΠΡΑΤΟ

Αrt2097 Τέτάρτη 28 Δεκεμβριου 2016

 The precariat stirred In 1989, the city of Prato http://www.comune.prato.it/ a short distance from Florence, was almost entirely Italian. For centuries, it had been a great manufacturing centre of textiles and garments. Many of its 180,000 residents were linked to those industries, generation after generation. Refl ecting the old values, this Tuscan town was solidly left in its politics. It seemed the embodiment of social solidarity and moderation.

That year, a group of thirty-eight Chinese workers arrived. A new breed of garment fi rms began to emerge – owned by Chinese immigrants and a few Italians with links to them. They imported more and more Chinese labourers, many coming without work visas. While noticed, they were tolerated; they added to the fl ourishing economy and did not place demands on public fi nances since they were not receiving any state benefi ts.


They kept to themselves, penned in an enclave where the Chinese factories were located. Most came from one city, coastal Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, an area with a long history of entrepreneurial migration. Most came via Frankfurt on three-month tourist visas and continued to work clandestinely after the visas expired, putting themselves in a vulnerable and exploitable position.

By 2008, there were 4,200 Chinese fi rms registered in the city and 45,000 Chinese workers, making up a fi fth of the city’s population (Dinmore, 2010a, b).
 They were producing 1 million garments every day, enough to dress the world’s population in 20 years, according to calculations by municipal offi cials. Meanwhile, undercut by the Chinese and buffeted by competition from India and Bangladesh, local Italian fi rms shed workers in droves.

By 2010, they employed just 20,000 workers, 11,000 fewer than in 2000. As they shrank, they shifted more workers from regular to precarious jobs. Then came the fi nancial shock, which hit Prato in much the same way as it hit so many other old industrial areas of Europe and North America. Bankruptcies multiplied, unemployment rose, resentments turned nasty. Within months, the political left had been swept from power by the xenophobic Northern League.

 It promptly instituted a crackdown on the Chinese, launching night-time raids on their factories and ‘sweatshops’, rounding up workers and demonising them, just as the League’s political ally, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, spoke of his determination to defeat ‘the army of evil’, as he described illegal immigrants. A shaken Chinese ambassador hurried from Rome and said that what was going on reminded him of the Nazis in the 1930s. Bizarrely, the Chinese government seemed reluctant to take the migrants back. Prelims.indb 4 4/11/11

The problems were not just caused by intolerant locals.

The nature of the enclave contributed. While Prato’s old factories struggled to compete, leaving Italian workers to seek alternative sources of income, the Chinese built up a community within a community. Chinese gangs reportedly organised the exodus from China and ran the enclave, albeit vying for control with gangs from Russia, Albania, Nigeria and Romania, as well as with the Mafi a. And they were not just restricting themselves to Prato.

Chinese gangs were linking up with Chinese companies in investing in Italian infrastructural projects, including a proposed multibillion Euro ‘China terminal’ near the port of Civitavecchia.

Prato has become a symbol of globalisation and the dilemmas thrown up by the growth of the precariat. As those Chinese sweatshops spread, Italians lost their proletarian roles and were left to scramble for a precariat job or none at all. Then the migrant part of the precariat was exposed to retribution from the authorities, while dependent on dubious networks within their enclave


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