Migrant politics on a small Italian vineyard
Migrant politics on a small Italian vineyard
by Carli Jacobsen (she/her)
Note: all names have been changed in this article.
“…in the 8 years Victor has worked here, he’s never once been offered a cup of coffee.”
In this article, I discuss employer to employee relationships on a small vineyard in Umbria, central Italy. Throughout my intense, strenuous, and wine indulgent stay there (a fortnight to be precise; albeit short, but as long as one can manage when earning nothing), I worked closely with a few members of the small ‘team’ on the vineyard. My work consisted of picking grapes, running lab tests, cleaning, refilling, emptying barrels, as well as bottling, labelling and boxing the wines. My boss, Lawrence, inherited the land via the Marquis legacy in 2002. The 1200-hectare space consists of dense black truffle forests, vineyards, farmland, olive groves, holiday homes, and a beautiful castle atop the hill that overlooked the village, which we called the Castello. He knew of all gossip throughout the town, as if his castle acted as a panopticon over the residents. His wife Rachel and I privately referred to him as the “King of the castle”.
My tasks were always done alongside two of the vineyard’s most loyal employees, Amanda and Victor. They were two of the three Romanian workers on Lawrence’s land: they had moved to the village roughly a decade ago, for reasons I didn’t ask at the time. Amanda had perfected her Italian while Victor and I communicated with hands and the occasional Romanian phrases. Victor was the oldest employee on the vineyard, aged nearly sixty, and lived with his Romanian wife down the road. He walked to work every morning, always so early to work that he completed bottling a few crates before I even arrived at 8am. Victor often worked longer hours than I did, and always refused to leave, even if our tasks were completed early: he always found something to do and very often underused his lunchbreak because of this.
My last few days in the cellar were spent bottling with Victor and my English colleague and roommate Olive, who was hired by Lawrence as head winemaker while he focused on the farming estates. Olive and I quickly developed an intimate relationship: aside from working together eight hours a day, six days a week, we were almost forced into each others’ arms from the get-go, partly due to the doorless shower on the open balcony that only had a tiny translucent curtain that we used to block the view from the chapel across the square. Essentially, we became best friends over cigarettes and box of wine.
The bottling machine
At one point, we ran out of boxes to pack because the shipping company needed special machinery to deliver up the hill and wouldn’t arrive until November. As there were few tasks for the three of us that day, we bottled together: a very slow process in which the bottling machine fills the bottles, inserts nitrogen to protect the vintage, which had been aged seven years, and corks it at approximately five bottles a minute. The speed of the machine meant it was a solo task, but the three of us took turns placing bottles on and taking them off the conveyer belt. A few hours into the job and Lawrence walks in, checking in on our progress. While Olive had her turn to sit aside as Victor and I stood at the machine, she asked Lawrence if she could run up to the castle to make herself a coffee, to which he responded that she had better stay down here and overlook the machine, but he’d ask his wife, Rachel, to make it. It was then I piped in and requested two more. Twenty minutes later, Rachel brings three espressos in green ceramic mugs on a metal tray, handing one each to Olive, Lawrence and I.
“No, I didnt ask for a coffee.” Lawrence said to Rachel.
“Oh, I thought you said 3.” I sometimes thought Rachel was scared of her husband.
“It was me. It was for Victor too.” I said.
Victor never turned away from the machine to look back, so when Rachel nodded, left the coffees on a stack of crates and left the cellar, Olive took one of the espressos, tapping Victor on the shoulder and offering the espresso to him with a smile, which he silently denied by shaking the empty bottles in hand. I noticed then afterwards that he also denied glasses of water from Olive and I throughout the evening, which he did for the next two days bottling with us.
I raised the awkward exchange at dinner with Lawrence and Rachel that evening. No other employees were invited into the Castello, but Rachel invited me for lunch and dinner almost every day and I only accepted if there was enough food to bring Olive as well. While Lawrence expressed excitement in sending Olive and I and our sharp tongues away, Rachel gladly took us in because we reminded her of when her two daughters lived at home and the concrete walls echoed with young girls’ laughter.
“I felt so awful when Victor said no to coffee earlier today. He must feel guilty relaxing on the job” Olive said.
“Probaly because in the 8 years Victor has worked here, he has never been offered a cup of coffee” Lawrence responded.
The conversation rolled on to inform me that Victor and his wife live in the village but do not own a car, so Rachel used to pick up Victor’s wife twice a week to take her to the nearest supermarket in Fabro, seven kilometeres away. During the pandemic, Rachel couldn’t take her in the car and expressed guilt for driving past her. In that time, Victor’s wife waited outside her home every morning in the hope that another villager would drive past and offer to take her to Fabro. I also learnt that a few years ago, Lawrence and Rachel offered Victor an old Moped that they never used, so he could commute to nearby villages, but his family forced him to sell the Moped for money, and so to this day his wife still waits on the curb for a lift.
The view on the estate from the Castello
Victor’s denial to take breaks, to accept coffee or water, to arrive early to work are measures taken seemingly as an act of gratitude toward his employer. Lawrence attempting to help him in the past, not out of selflessness but out of convenience so Rachel didn’t have to pick up Victor’s wife, was something Victor felt needed to be repaid. Even years after the Moped was ‘gifted’, he still made extra efforts through extra unpaid manual labour to reciprocate the exchange. I speculate that his obedience to overwork is also carried forth on the desire to ‘make it up’ to Lawrence and Rachel. There is some form of “de-facto occupational hierarchy” (Bourgois 1988: 331) in action, as his labour is often more strenuous, and his wage is less, than the Italian, English or Danish employees on the vineyard. Phillipe Bourgois’ term “conjugated oppression” with ethnic groups on a banana plantation is reflected in the various forms of oppression and exploitation that employees across ethnicities experience on the vineyard. Language, ethnicity, and class differences emphasise hierarchy between employers and employees as well as within employees themselves. The ways that Victor, like the Guyami workers in Bourgois’ ethnography, internalise oppression are practiced in similar ways, including “humiliating” and “self-destructive” alcohol consumption; a “forum for public degradation” (1988: 342), to the point of Victor not showing up for work on a single account last spring, for Rachel to call his partner and find he had slept through his shift after heavenly drinking the night before.
Lawrence also pays many of his employees in cash. Not only does this benefit his workers by enabling them to avoid taxes, but it also means that his few Italian employees can be registered for Reditto di Cittadinanza: the universal basic income given by the Italian state to unemployed citizens, and thus receive wage on top of the informal labour. This sits in a context of migrants in Italy learning to navigate bureaucracy efficiently, specifically laws concerning migrant labour, rather than being played by it. Anna Tuckett argues that there is certainly institutionalised irregularity that cannot be distinguished from migrant labour function (Tuckett 2015), and this is certainly visible here, as we see that the ways in which the system’s rules can be reinterpreted are dependent on the terrain in which they are navigated. In a rural town that is over an hour from Perugia, the nearest city, and is often inaccessible in the winters, there is little governmental regulation or enforcement, and such ‘illegal’ labour can be done publicly without fear of getting in trouble.
Tuckett explains that the fact that there are a “myriad interpretations of the law by different actors means that individuals experienced it as fickle and shifting” (Tuckett 2015: 116). While cash payment may appear the better option for Victor and his family, it merely reinforces “the interface between agency and social forces” (Vigh 2006: 14). The “actors” that Tuckett mentions can also be the Italian employees that receive cash payments to still be ‘legible’ for Reditto di Cittadinanza. The “actors” can also be employers: many farm owners or rural employers are highly dependent on migrant labour, and thus have become well accustomed to interpreting the system in ways that are beneficial to them. For example, Lawrence also benefits from paying his employees in cash, because it means he can underpay them without his migrant employees being capable of speaking up or reporting such exploitation. Olive and I experienced this personally as well. Olive was paid twelve euros an hour, also in cash as she was not approved a visa (much higher than his long-term migrant employees), while I was not paid at all. And while Olive sublet the apartment in private bank transfers to Lawrence, I did not pay for living costs all. I lived for free on the land for free labour, despite the cost of living being far less than I would have been earning.
Only a few days after I left, the authorities from the agricultural association in Orvieto (another town nearby) unexpectedly arrived at the vineyard. They walked through the town, checked the cellars, and drove through parts of the farmland, because they had gotten a tip from a waitress in Orvieto (who once used to work for Lawrence but was fired) that he had two foreign female employees that were working illegally on the land. The waitress had overheard Olive and I talking when we stopped for coffee at a café in the town. Lawrence simply invited the authorities in for coffee whilst Olive hid in the apartment until they left. It seems even the more privileged perceive the system as malleable and are able to influence it in ways that their migrant employees describe it as “fickle”. Additionally, Lawrence paying Olive a higher wage, and his extra effort to ‘employ’ me, such as driving 1.5 hours to the airport in Perugia to pick me up, and giving Olive and I coffee on shift, shows how even on a smaller scale, the “commitment to political and citizenship rights for long term residents is less tenacious” (Zincone 2006: 13), and how the advocacy for the rights of migrants is “paternalistic in nature and does not challenge the unequal inclusion which migrants encounter” (Tuckett 2015: 116).
Olive pouring wine into the barrels where it ferments
It seems Lawrence acts as a broker between his migrant employees and the law, emerging as an actor in navigating bureaucratic structures for his own, and crucially others’, benefit. As an Italian citizen and a (mediocre at best) winemaker that inherited a Castello estate, his position means he can “relate community-oriented individuals who want to stabilise or increase their life chances but lack economic security and political connections with nation-oriented individuals” (Wolf 1956: 1075-6 as cited in Blok 1974: 8). Lawrence, like the mafiosi as described by Blok, bridges as well as exploits these paths (Blok 1974) with his employees, by creating dependencies between them through acts of ‘generosity’ that condition his labourers to work dangerously for very little.
Three months after my return to London, I finally opened my journal and recalled my unexpected encounters with Victor. The journal that had originally begun as chemical equations and soil readings from the cellar laboratory very quickly transformed into a series of anthropological accounts. I observed migrant navigation through bureaucracy and power arrangements within the workplace that are deeply imbedded in class and ethnicity. On the vineyard, these manifested in intersectional ways. I often separate my passion for winemaking from my degree but now struggle to see them as individual aspects of my life. It seems that even wine can be complex and contested, with taste notes of misogyny, and with full-bodied politics through which hierarchies of taste and peoples are created.
Bibliography
Blok, A. (1974) “Argument,” in Part of The Mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860-1960: a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 5–16.
Bourgois, P. (1988) “ Conjugated oppression: class and ethnicity among Guaymi and Kuna banana workers,” American Ethnologist, pp. 328–348.
Foucher, V. (2009) “Henrik Vigh, navigating terrains of war. youth and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau, New York – Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2006, 258 pages, ISBN : 1-84545-149-X (« methodology and history in anthropology », 11),” Lusotopie, 16(2), pp. 275–278. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1163/17683084-01602024.
Tuckett, A. (2015) “Strategies of navigation: Migrants' everyday encounters with Italian immigration bureaucracy,” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 33(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2015.330109.
Zincone, G. (2006) “The making of policies: Immigration and immigrants in Italy,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(3), pp. 347–375. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830600554775.