Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T07:21:19.899Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Changing Registers of Visibility: Immigrant Labor and Waste Work in Naples, Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2019

Valeria Bonatti  and
Zsuzsa Gille
Valeria Bonatti
Affiliation:
LAS Global Studies Lecturer, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Zsuzsa Gille
Affiliation:
Professor of Sociology, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In recent years, growing emphasis on green economies and green capitalism have brought renewed attention to the waste practices of all places of work, including ones that are not directly linked to neither production nor waste management, such as schools, offices, and stores, as well as households, which European countries, in particular, are increasingly depicting as key sites of intervention for recycling economies. This trend represents a departure from historical waste management policies, which tend to view waste and waste work as separate from main economic and household activities, but is consistent with market economies’ trend of outsourcing dirty, demeaning, and dangerous labor to precarious and informal workforces, while at the same time granting them only limited legal access to waste materials and trash collection sites. The new forms of waste labor emerging from green capitalism's emphasis on private and small-scale recycling behaviors are largely invisible and unpaid; however, unlike more documented forms of global environmental racism denouncing the outsourcing of toxic materials to the Global South, they take place in industrialized countries where they are pushed upon disenfranchised minorities, such as informal workers, racialized ethnic minorities, and low-income women. In this article we examine women's participation in waste work through the lenses of waste, (in)visibility, and intersectionality. We draw on ethnographic and archival data collected in the city of Naples, Italy, an area with a prolonged history of toxic waste contamination and waste mismanagement which in recent years have drawn renewed scrutiny to public waste management as well as to everyday waste practices performed in households and workplaces, predominantly by women of different race and citizenship backgrounds. Through these experiences, we highlight how the increasing visibility of waste generated by green capitalism, coupled with the stigmatization and criminalization of informal waste collection and recycling, is generating new forms of social inequalities and exclusion.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 95: Labor Laid Waste , Spring 2019 , pp. 114 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

* A few exceptions to this negligence of domestic waste work are: Douny 2007; Bulkley and Gregson 2009, Gregson et al. 2011.

† This is the point the Zabbaleen, the Christian minority in Cairo, made when faced with being replaced by mechanical collection and sorting by a European waste management firm (Garbage Dreams. Documentary by Mail Iskander, 2009).

‡ As of 2016 for example, Campania recycled forty percent of all its waste, and the fourth highest volume of recycled plastic (Il Mattino, 2016)

1. Nicky, Gregson, Crang, Mike, Botticello, Julie, Calestani, Melania, and Krzywoszynska, Anna, “Doing the ‘Dirty Work’ of the Green Economy: Resource Recovery and migrant labour in the EU,” European Urban and Regional Studies 23, no. 4 (2016): 541–55Google Scholar.

2. Martin, O'Brien, A crisis of waste? Understanding the rubbish society. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

3. Susan, Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, NY : Henry Holt and Co, 2000)Google Scholar.

4. Zsuzsa, Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

5. Ibid. 4.

6. Jutta, Gutberlet, Recovering Resources-Recycling Citizenship: Urban Poverty Reduction in Latin America (Aldershot, England: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar. Yujiro, Hayami, Dikshit, A. K., and Mishra, S. N., “Waste Pickers and Collectors in Delhi: Poverty and Environment in an Urban Informal Sector,” The Journal of Development Studies 42, no. 1 (2006): 41–69Google Scholar. Medina, Martin, The World's Scavengers: Salvaging for Sustainable Consumption and Production (Rowman Altamira, 2007)Google Scholar. Miraftab, Faranak, “Neoliberalism and Casualization of Public Sector Services: The Case of Waste Collection Services in Cape Town, South Africa,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 4 (2004): 874–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pellow, David N., “Bodies on the Line: Environmental Inequalities: Hazardous Work in the US Recycling Industry,” Race, Gender & Class 6, no. 1 (1998): 124–51Google Scholar. Maike, Didero, “Cairo's Informal Waste Collectors: A Multi-Scale and Conflict Sensitive Perspective on Sustainable Livelihoods,” Erdkunde 661, no. 1 (2012): 27–44Google Scholar. Melanie, Samson, “Accumulation by Dispossession and The Informal Economy—Struggles Over Knowledge, Being and Waste at a Soweto Garbage Dump,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 5 (2015): 813–30Google Scholar.

7. Vinay, Gidwani and Reddy, Rajyashree N., “The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus,” Antipode 43, no. 5 (2011): 1625–58Google Scholar.

8. Joshua, Reno, Waste Away: Working and Living With a North American Landfill (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

9. Faulk Karen Ann, “Stitching Curtains, Grinding Plastic: The Transformation of Workers and Things in Buenos Aires,” (2012). Andrew, Szasz, “Corporations, Organized Crime, and the Disposal of Hazardous Waste: An Examination of the Making of a Criminogenic Regulatory Structure,” Criminology 24, no. 1 (1986): 1–27Google Scholar.

10. Catherine, Alexander and Reno, Joshua O., “From Biopower to Energopolitics in England's Modern Waste Technology,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 335–58Google Scholar.; Ibid. 8

11. TN, Nguyen Minh, “Trading in Broken Things: Gendered Performances and Spatial Practices in a Northern Vietnamese Rural-Urban Waste Economy,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 116–29Google Scholar. Stefan, Laser, “Why is It So Hard to Engage With Practices of the Informal Sector?: Experimental Insights from the Indian E-Waste-Collective,” Cultural Studies Review 22, no. 1 (2016): 168Google Scholar; Ibid. 10.

12. Guy, Standing, “The Precariat,” Contexts 13, no. 4 (2014): 10–12Google Scholar; Kalyan, Shankar V. and Sahni, Rohini, “The Inheritance of Precarious Labor: Three Generations in Waste Picking in an Indian City,” WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2017): 245–62Google Scholar.

13. Nicky, Gregson. Living With Things: Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling. Vol. 2. (Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2007)Google Scholar. Pellow, David N., “Bodies on the Line: Environmental Inequalities: Hazardous Work in the US Recycling Industry,” Race, Gender & Class 6, no. 1 (1998): 124–51Google Scholar. Pellow, David N., Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Urban and Industrial Environments) (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michelle, Yates, “The Human-As-Waste, The Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism,” Antipode 43, no. 5 (2011): 1679–95Google Scholar.

14. Faranak, Miraftab, Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)Google Scholar. Nancy, Fraser, “Capitalism's Crisis of Care,” Dissent 63, no. 4 (2016): 30–37Google Scholar. Hartsock, N.C.M. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In: Harding, S., Hintikka, M.B. (eds) Discovering Reality. Synthese Library 161 (Dordrecht: Springer, 1983), 283–310Google Scholar.

15. Carolyn, Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar. Val, Plumwood, “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism,” Hypatia 6, no. 1 (1991): 3–27Google Scholar.

16. Irmgard, Schultz, “Women and Waste,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 4, no. 2 (1993): 51–63Google Scholar.

17. Norris, Lucy. “Shoddy rags and relief blankets: Perceptions of textile recycling in north India in Economies of Recycling: the global transformation of materials, values and social relations (2012): 35–58.” Edited by Josh Reno and Catherine Alexander London, Zed Books.

18. Hill, Collins Patricia, “Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41, (2015): 1–20Google Scholar.

19. John, Clarke, “Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neo-Liberalism,” Journal of Social Policy 33, no. 1 (2004): 27–48Google Scholar.

20. C. Migrantes, XXVII Rapporto Immigrazione 2017–2018: Un nuovo linguagigo per le migrazioni Edited by Tau. 2018.

21. Lena, Näre, “The Moral Economy of Domestic and Care Labour: Migrant Workers in Naples, Italy,” Sociology 45, no. 3 (2011): 396–412Google Scholar.

22. Valeria Bonatti and Parthiban Mniandy, “Defiant aspirations: Migrant women’s struggles for stability and upward mobility in Naples and Kuala Lumpur,” Migration Studies (2018), mny039. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mny039

23. Franca, Van Hooren, “Welfare Provision Beyond National Boundaries. The Politics of Migration and Elderly Care in Italy,” Rivista italiana di Politiche pubbliche 3, no. 3 (2008): 87–113Google Scholar.

24. Valeria, Bonatti, “Taking Out the Garbage: Migrant Women's Unseen Environmental Work,” European Journal of Women's Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 41–55Google Scholar.

25. Ankica, Kosic and Triandafyllidou, Anna, “Albanian and Polish Migration to Italy: The Micro-Processes of Policy, Implementation and Immigrant Survival Strategies 1,” International Migration Review 38, no. 4 (2004): 1413–46Google Scholar.

26. Jacqueline., Andall Gender, Migration and Domestic Service: The Politics of Black Women in Italy (Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar. Heather, Merrill, Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy (New York: Routledge, 2018)Google Scholar.

27. Giacomo, D'Alisa, Burgalassi, David, Healy, Hali and Walter, Mariana, “Conflict in Campania: Waste Emergency or Crisis of Democracy,” Ecological Economics 70, no. 2 (2010): 239–49Google Scholar. Marco, Armiero, “Is There an Indigenous Knowledge in the Urban North? Re/Inventing Local Knowledge and Communities in the Struggles Over Garbage and Incinerators in Campania, Italy,” Estudos de sociologia 1, no. 20 (2014)Google Scholar. Nick, Dines, “Bad News From an Aberrant City: A Critical Analysis of the British Press's Portrayal of Organised Crime and the Refuse Crisis in Naples,” Modern Italy 18, no. 4 (2013): 409–22Google Scholar.

28. Marzia, Andretta, “Da” Campania Felix” a Discarica. Le Trasformazioni in Terra di Lavoro dal dopoguerra ad oggi, Meridiana 64 (2009): 87–120Google Scholar.

29. Legambiente Ecomafia 2018: Le storie e I numeri della criminalita’ ambientale in Italia Edizioni Ambiente 2018.

30. Ibid. 27.

31. Ibid. 27.

32. Ibid. 27.

33. Melanie, Samson, “The Social Uses of the Law at a Soweto Garbage Dump: Reclaiming the Law and the State in the Informal Economy, Current Sociology 65, no. 2 (2017): 222–34Google Scholar.”

34. Nastasi Giuseppe, “B.4 Case C-653/13, Commission v Italy, nyr., Judgment of July 16, 2015” in European Environmental Law Observatory News September 2015 [online], accessed June 1, 2018, Available at https://www.documents.clientearth.org/wp-content/uploads/library/2015-09-29-eelo-newsletter-september-2015-ce-en.pdf.

35. Pellegrino Carmen and Cristina Zagaria, Non E’ Un Paese Per Donne edited by Mondadori 2011.

36. Brooks, Gardner Carol, “Analyzing Gender in Public Places: Rethinking Goffman's Vision of Everyday life,” The American Sociologist 20, no. 1 (1989): 42Google Scholar.

37. Amrita, Pande, “From “Balcony Talk” and “Practical Prayers” to Illegal Collectives: Migrant Domestic Workers and Meso-Level Resistances in Lebanon,” Gender & Society 26, no. 3 (2012): 382–405Google Scholar.

38. Nguyen, Minh T. N., Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 170Google Scholar.