Devi Sacchetto

Drawing on multisited qualitative research in Italy and the UK, this paper documents the dark side of onward migration and the experiences faced by Italian-Bangladeshis in the UK after the Brexit referendum. The findings show that compared to their position in Italy, Italian-Bangladeshis experienced a downgrading in symbolic, identity-related, and, specifically, socio-economic and cultural aspects in the UK society. The paper also uncovers the potential strategies that Italian-Bangladeshis intend to adopt in case they lose the special rights provided to them by EU citizenship after Brexit. Since the majority of them have moved to the United Kingdom to build a future for their children, they find themselves forced to further reconfigure their strategies and reactivate different degrees of mobility in order to avoid the loss of social rights (access to welfare, the status of citizens) and material resources (housing and better working conditions) that they have long assumed.

ABSTRACT Scholars, mainly focusing on Asia, consistently describe the im/mobility of workers living at work as orchestrated from above. We bring to the forefront forms of workers' mobility that take place outside of the established and often policed tracks. Focusing on Europe, we show that the mobility of workers is the outcome of the interplay of both employers' strategies and workers' agency. Based on extensive fieldwork among migrant workers in Europe-Chinese migrants in the Italian fashion industry, and Eastern European migrant workers at the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic-, our paper offers a new approach. Instead of focusing on the single workplace at a certain point in time, we adopt a perspective that considers the multiplicity of accommodations at work for workers across Europe along the time dimension. By extending the study of the dormitory regime to the European Union, we highlight the way the growing frequency of factories cum dormitories to a certain extent empowers the workers as their horizons extend to other sites within Europe and are not limited to a single firm.

Based on long-term fieldwork in multiple locations, our article questions the approach that posits a Chinese model of work and employment relations as increasingly exporting its form of labour management and dominating worldwide. It does so by focusing on Europe and discussing two labour regimes considered as typically Chinese: the Chinese fashion workshops in the Italian fashion industry, and the Foxconn electronics plants in the Czech Republic. Our findings bring new insights to bear on issues for which research is still thin on the ground and challenge the hypothesis of a 'Chinesisation' of work and employment practices in Chinese small firms and MNCs operating in Europe. We move the focus away from the simple analysis of firm management prevailing in the literature and suggest that, in order to understand the firm's behaviours, the role of the state, the unions, the migrant workers and the role of temporary work agencies should all be taken into consideration.

Based on ethnographic research carried out between March and September 2014 in Foxconn’s factories and in the working-class district of Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), this paper analyzes some aspects of the role of gender in globalized industrial production for export. In particular, the ethnographic analysis suggests that the symbolic and discursive practices adopted by the corporation management and by the institutional apparatus for gender equal opportunities obscure the degradation processes to which women are subjected in both labor and reproductive processes. Furthermore, research highlights how these practices aim to transform the subjectivity of the workforce by bending it to the needs of global businesses and the patriarchal system. Finally, the analysis of the empirical material highlights how the female workers themselves, through direct and symbolic action, counteract this process
of degradation.

Based on an empirical research on Foxconn plants in the Czech Republic, the aim of this article is to analyze how global production networks enable a time and space compression of the production process. In this way Foxconn is able to respond to the just-in-time requests of the market, while at the same time keeping the conflicts with the plant at minimum. We suggest that such a working of the global production networks is contingent on the socio-institutional context and on the composition of the workforce. These two aspects are key for the fulfilment of Foxconn's production needs as they offer necessary conditions for the compression of space and time of the workforce. The time-space compression is upheld by the international recruitment agencies that select, recruit and transport workers from their countries of origin to the Czech plants and manage the workforce both inside and outside the factories. The article examines three key nodes of this space-time compression: the recruitment of the workforce, the organization of production, and the management of reproduction.

This article explores ethical dilemmas in researching the world of work. Recent contributions to WES have highlighted challenges for engaged research. Based on the emancipatory epistemologies of Bourdieu, Gramsci and Burawoy, the authors examine moral challenges in workplace fieldwork, question the assumptions of mainstream ethics discourses and seek to identify an alternative approach. Instead of an ethics premised on a priori, universal precepts that treasures academic neutrality, this article recognises a morality that responds to the social context of research with participation and commitment. The reflection in this study is based on fieldwork conducted in the former Soviet Union. Transformation societies present challenges to participatory ethnography but simultaneously provide considerable opportunities for developing an ethics of truth. An approach that can guide engaged researchers through social conflict's 'messy' reality should hinge on loyalty to the emancipation struggles of those engaged in it.

This article analyzes the transformations in tourism sector and in the workforce composition. Based on a research carried out in the hotel and tourism sector in Rimini through in-depth and semi-structured interviews, we argue that the forms of severe exploitation are related to both the recruitment and the reproduction process that occur mainly in the same place in which they perform their work, namely in hotels. In the last few years some of the hotel enterprises of the Rimini Riviera have turned to international manpower recruitment agencies. These workers often live in the same place where they work experimenting forms of social isolation. Despite these constraints, some migrant workers after suffering forms of severe abuse can be able, through social networks and unions, to rebuild own strategies of job and geographical mobility. The crucial element for the start of emancipatory processes, that can enable the enjoyment of certain citizenship rights seems to be the knowledge of the social environment and the availability of institutions and association in solidarity to support workers.

Drawing on a longitudinal research we conducted over fi ve years (2010–2015) with 40 documented migrant workers who lost their job at the beginning of the recession, this article analyses their routes to the informal economy in Northern Italy. Moving away from the expulsion and exit dichotomous theories on participation in underground work, we argue that it is necessary to take into consideration both the structural constraints pushing migrants to enter the informal economy and their subjective motivations, both economic and non-economic.
Th rough two waves of in-depth interviews with Moroccan and Romanian workers, we investigate the migrants’ working paths in order to understand diff erent conditions and motivations driving them to work off the books. First, we highlight that migrants who work irregularly are not only the unemployed, but also poor casual workers and deprived self-employed. Moreover, we sustain that working irregularly is not only a poverty escape strategy to deal with the casualization, worsening and reduction of formal working opportunities, but it is also a way to meet identity and social needs.

There is currently a large knowledge gap about intra-European labour migration. Commentators are caught up in a debate over whether such movement is best understood in terms of social dumping and hence a race to the bottom, or in terms of business opportunities and benefits for firms, states and mobile workers. The argument put forward in this article is that both approaches are inadequate in that they focus attention on a linear east-to-west Europe movement and discuss it from the vantage point of the state, businesses and trade unions in the country of destination. In order to gain a clearer understanding of emerging migration patterns in the enlarged Europe this article adopts mobility of workers as the analytical lens through which to examine the integration of labour markets as well as the tensions between capital, trade unions and labour to which mobility gives rise. Building on fieldwork conducted at Foxconn electronics assembly plants in the Czech Republic, the article suggests that the term 'multinational' worker is best suited to convey the experiences and practices of this emergent workforce. Ré sumé Nos connaissances actuelles sur les migrations du travail intra-européennes sont largement insuffisantes. Les commentateurs sont pris dans un débat portant sur le fait de savoir si ce mou-vement doit e ˆtre interprété en termes de dumping social, et donc de nivellement par le bas, ou en termes d'opportunités e ´conomiques et d'avantages pour les entreprises, les E ´ tats et les travailleurs mobiles. La thèse défendue dans le présent article est que les deux approches sont inadéquates, dans la mesure où elles focalisent l'attention sur un mouvement linéaire Est-Ouest qu'elles examinent en termes d'avantages pour l'E ´ tat, les entreprises et les syndicats dans le pays de destination. Afin de mieux comprendre les modèles e ´mergents des migrations dans l'Europe e ´largie, cet article adopte la mobilité des travailleurs comme un outil analytique permettant d'analyser l'intégration des marchés du travail, ainsi que les tensions, créées par cette mobilité,

Nell’estate del 2011 le campagne del basso Salento sono state scenario del più importante e lungo sciopero auto-organizzato di braccianti stranieri, tutti africani, impiegati nel settore agricolo. Nel cuore dell’estate salentina tra spiagge, concerti e notti tarantolate, alcune centinaia di braccianti occupati nella raccolta delle angurie e del pomodoro sotto la sferza del sistema del caporalato «etnico» e di un padronato italiano poco propenso alla meccanizzazione hanno incrociato le braccia e preso la parola direttamente. Questo volume ricostruisce le dinamiche che hanno determinato prima e sostenuto poi allo sciopero. Si tratta di un’esperienza che ha costituito per alcune settimane un vero e proprio laboratorio politico.

This book investigates restructuring in the electronics industry and in particular the impact of a ‘Chinese’ labour regime on work and employment practices in the electronics assembly in Europe. It studies Foxconn, the world largest electronics manufacturing service provider and the main assember of Apple's iPhone and iPad.

The authors examine in detail whether work and employment practices established in mainland China have been exported to factories in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Turkey, and how these practices have been adapted to the social actors and institutional context of the European host country.

The book thus provides a basis for identifying challenges involved in organising workers and opportunities for improving working conditions in the electronics industry through labour representation.

Foxconn, the biggest electronic manufacturer worldwide, has strong assembly operations in Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexico-US border. Abundant migrant labor-force, extreme social violence and multinational production are among the main factors that characterize this operation.

Parlare di cittadini cinesi e soprattutto di coloro che sono immigrati in Italia, ed evocare al contempo il concetto di movimento non è certo strano se pensiamo alla distanza che separa il loro luogo d’origine da quello d’arrivo, ma è opportuno anche richiamarsi alla nostra quotidianità che là dove non è fatta di relazioni tra persone è certamente pervasa dal consumo di merci marchiate con quell’immancabile made in China che le connota. Un made in China che talvolta si nasconde sotto a un made in Italy ingannevole, ma che non raramente descrive la realtà delle cose di un made in Italy by Chinese workers.
Dalle diverse analisi presentate in questo volume emergono con chiarezza i tratti salienti che contraddistinguono la presenza cinese in Veneto e che risultano comuni a larga parte del contesto nazionale: l’elevata propensione all’imprenditorialità; la ancora rilevante specializzazione settoriale; la forte mobilità lavorativa; la reattività rispetto alle congiunture economiche. Il volume mira a sostanziare le evidenze empiriche quantitative con le narrazioni individuali per comprendere come le persone vivono soggettivamente il loro percorso migratorio e come sviluppano i loro rapporti lavorativi e interpersonali nella sfera produttiva e riproduttiva.
Il percorso di analisi quantitativa e di indagine sul campo presente in questo volume porta qualche nuovo elemento di conoscenza e di problematizzazione dei rapporti sociali che si stanno sviluppando nell’arena quotidiana. Si tratta di saperi che potrebbero risultare importanti per chi cerca di superare stereotipi e pregiudizi.

Dalla raccolta di articoli contenuta in questo numero emerge un concetto di cooperazione sfaccettato e molteplice, attraversato da ambivalenze ed antinomie. Attraverso una breve ricostruzione in chiave storico-politica si evidenziano i significati dell'idea di cooperazione utili a ricostruirne la crescente importanza assunta nel dibattito contemporaneo. Si anticipano anche le problematiche più rilevanti che possono portare a una teoria politica della cooperazione.

Il progetto Digi-Life, finanziato dal Fondo Sociale Europeo (FSE) - Regione Veneto, intrapreso nell'ambito di un partenariato che vede coinvolte le Università di Padova e di Verona, intende studiare il fenomeno del lavoro da remoto nel contesto della digitalizzazione. La ricerca pone particolare attenzione alle implicazioni del lavoro da remoto per l'organizzazione spazio-temporale della produzione e dei processi lavorativi, alle ricadute sui modi di lavorare e sui lavoratori e lavoratrici, alla contrattazione e alle relazioni industriali.
Il progetto si articola in 4 obiettivi scientifici e tecnologici, ognuno dei quali è realizzato attraverso un assegno di ricerca.
-Digitalizzazione e wellbeing. Soluzioni innovative per il miglioramento del benessere organizzativo e lavorativo nella digitalizzazione
-Work-life balance nella trasformazione tecnologica. Nuovi strumenti di conciliazione vita lavoro;
-Ruolo del dialogo sociale nel favorire processi di sviluppo digitale socialmente sostenibili.
-Digitalizzazione e contrattazione collettiva. Innovare la rappresentanza per la trasformazione digitale inclusiva