«Slavery ultimately means being torn from one's context and thereforefrom all those social relationships that constitute a human being. Putanother way, a slave is in a certain sense a (social) dead man" (DavidGraeber) ---- While still a student, when I stated that slaves stillexisted in the current era, they thought I was crazy, the idea ofprogress was so rooted in the history they taught us. Yet if we considerGraeber's definition of the term "slavery," then perhaps my ideas werenot so unbalanced after all. In fact, if we reflect on the conditions inwhich so many of us live in our daily work, these, unfortunately, arenot 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 ofemigration. The difficulty of finding work and a purchasing power thatis even lower than the average for each category of employed workersmeans that they are torn away from their context and therefore lose manyof the social relationships that up until then had constituted them andsupported as human beings innervated in a social fabric. The reality offoreign workers employed in the agriculture and catering sectorsexacerbates these conditions even more, as for them the blackmail oflegal documents (residence or work permit) is added to the alreadymiserable hourly wage. , blackmail that lowers labor costs and allowseffective 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 takehome the necessary salary to survive. Such daily time spent on workactually devours the aforementioned necessary social relationships tolead a dignified life.For employeeVal. adj.n small engraving. When over ten years ago Naples regained popularity asa high-level tourist destination, for some time the middle/lower classesrecovered a certain balance between work and income, above all throughthe management of small B&Bs and restaurant activities. It was a briefperiod in contrast with the trend which is, however, rapidly returning.In fact, in recent years, the sharks of companies already established inthe sector or operating in apparently distant contexts (1) haveswooped on many apartments to structure themselves into widespreadcommercial chains, bringing a condition of super-exploitation for youngpeople, mostly students *, employed* in this type of activity. With thesmall initial earnings having largely disappeared, in addition to a newsuper-exploitation, the ever-increasing difficulty of families in thehistoric center remained in paying ever-increasing rents. In short, heretoo the logic of the capitalist market has prevailed: those who had morecapital to invest have remained in business while the few trulyfamily-run businesses now survive by staying afloat, while theconditions of employed work, which already were what they were, theyfell into poverty. Those who are not reduced to these conditions areonly the owners of companies who, beyond profit, do not need to work sohard. From some 2021 data it can be noted that in large and medium-sizedenterprises, in Campania, monetary productivity (2) is equal to almostdouble the income for each individual worker, in small and microenterprises it is more than double the income of each individual ( seetable 1) (3)Table 1 added value, wages and poor workers by company sizepoor workers are those who, despite working, have an annual income lowerthan 60% of the national gross median income.However, this table does not take into account undeclared work, which isvery widespread in the South. In Campania alone there are more than350,000 workers without contracts or with "strange" contracts: theemployer saves taxes and the employee does not receive pensioncontributions, consequently the ratio between the two shares rises infavor of productivity. In the context of undeclared work, women are ahigh percentage, so much so that in the city of Naples alone it appearsthat 50% of women are without a regular contract or unemployed, areality not far from the 70% of women living in Rabat[capital of Moroccondt]. Naturally it follows that not having economic autonomy oftenaccentuates the misogynistic element already existing in the area, as itmakes them more vulnerable and blackmailable both at work and in socialrelationships with men.This modern-day slavery perhaps produces more deaths for and on the jobthan slavery in the ancient Roman Empire or in the United States ofAmerica of 1700-1800. The rhythms and times of work absolutely do nottake into account the minimum safety standards necessary in theworkplace, with an increase in accidents and professional pathologiesthat seemed to have disappeared 30 or 40 years ago. The issue of workingtimes is certainly the crucial point, the one we feel most immediatelyon our skin. We know, however, that if we do not grasp the causes thathave led to this mass impoverishment, accentuated in recent years by thesurge in prices of primary goods, household utilities and the cut incitizens' income, we certainly cannot begin to discuss how to freeourselves from this current slave condition. A few years ago it wastypical among friends to play "Master and Below": whoever had thehighest cards became the master and was the one who chose who shoulddrink the glass of wine and who shouldn't. In the "game" of slaverythere are no cards that turn, it is always the masters who decide whoworks, how much they have to produce, and therefore how long they haveto work. Naturally there are intermediate managers between workers andbosses: department foremen, office managers, work managers, etc. ahierarchy reminiscent of the feudal one that gives power to a few overthe majority of workers. Even these executives, however, are currentlylosing ground in terms of wages and work obligations. The true atavisticcauses of slavery are hierarchy and power: the economic factor in theworker's condition of slavery is only the result of structural elementsthat existed before the birth of capitalism: hierarchy and power.How then to combat the problem at its root? The current work of theunions, I am referring to the basic ones, the combative ones, which inrecent years have triggered fair battles for wage demands or for thedefense of the workplace, as has happened successfully in the logisticssector, is important but contains a very serious limit, that ofdetaching the interests of the activist from those of workers, whichhappens when the trade unionist's activity is paid for by the unionstructure itself. Nonetheless, this is where the nail needs to behammered. The experiences of the anarchist unions of the past years andthe council experiences were, in fact, a moment of concrete rupture withpolitical and economic power - with the hierarchy in general. It is nocoincidence that it is from structures like these that experiences ofcollectivisation of the means of production were born, as in Spain in1936 where, with the collectivisation of land and the self-management offactories, the aspect of trade union demands and workers went beyondthey have taken the production of goods and services into their ownhands. An important recent example was that of the Argentine workers andunemployed workers who occupied the factories at the beginning of the2000s, resisting government attacks and producing in self-managementwithout bosses. In every workers' organisation, union, collective orcommittee, the mandates must be temporary and revocable. Being ready fora horizontally organized productive and social structure is not a tacticbut a strategy to achieve a transformative path: from each according totheir abilities to each according to their needs. We must not lose sightof the goal of destroying slavery and this can only be done by buildingorganization from the bottom up.Note1) Today the majority of small guesthouses and B&Bs are managed bycompanies in the logistics, freight transport or hotel sector itself.2) Monetary productivity is an indicator that measures the quantity ofadded value produced by a production unit for each unit of money spent. In other words, monetary productivity measures the efficiency withwhich 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/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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