The case of the massive exploitation of foreign labor, predominantly Indian, at the construction site of the former National Shooting Range in Piazzale Accursio in Milan is emblematic of the Milanese model of urban development. Emerging a few months after another investigation based on accusations of gangmastering, involving one of the giants of platform capitalism, Glovo, and in light of the veritable black hole represented by the future US Consulate, it highlights and confirms, 15 years after similar investigations during the pre-Expo 2015 season, a distinctive feature of the city's permanent construction site: unregulated labor, with no top-down rules, and the resulting total arbitrariness of small-time bosses and foremen.
According to the prosecutor's indictment, Caddell Construction (a US company based in Alabama, responsible for the project) exploited more than 300 Indian workers, out of over 500 migrant workers employed on the construction site, forcing them to work 12-hour shifts at wages ranging from 2 to 4 euros per hour, and forcing them to repay half their wages for room and board. In addition to the company's legal representative, Ulkas Demir, 52-year-old Aji Appukuttan, born in India, was also arrested. Officially responsible for personnel management on the construction site, several witnesses reported him as having pressured and abused workers, demanding they remain silent about working conditions. The "multinational's watchdog," as reported in the reports, acted as the "operational foreman" and intermediary in the system of exploitation on the New Delhi-Milan route discovered at the construction site (the extent of which extends to other construction sites is yet to be determined).
The project planned for the former National Shooting Range is the final step in the overall transformation of Portello, one of Milan's most important industrial districts in the 20th century (Alfa Romeo, above all, with its history of partisan resistance and labor conflict until its closure in the late 1980s). Today, included in Local Identity Nuclei (NIL) 71 ("Villapizzone, Cagnola, Boldinasco") and 67 ("Portello"), after the divestments of the 1980s and 1990s, it became one of the first areas, along with Bicocca, to reconvert its manufacturing identity from blue-collar to tertiary. This, of course, also occurred through the privatization of the public city: the construction in 1997 of the Fiera, owned by Fieramilanocity, a key player in Expo 2015; Portello Park, also known as "Parco Vittoria" after the owner of the area, Vittoria Assicurazioni, has seen the construction of a new business center and an extensive shopping area, replacing a portion of green space; the elusive Alpha District, which was to be a new "Design District," announced during the Fuorisalone and now abandoned. The transformation of Portello is inevitably linked to ongoing or planned transformations in the surrounding neighborhoods, from San Siro to the adjacent Cascina Merlata, with direct impacts on the adjacent public housing developments: the working-class quadrilateral around Piazzale Segesta and Quarto Oggiaro, respectively. The change in social composition has been less smooth: historically a mixed context, Portello's new residential vocation has not led to a seamless transition from working-class residents to the new upper-middle class. Furthermore, the self-managed Cascina Torchiera Senz'Acqua, which, while not within the Portello area, is nevertheless surrounded by multiple pressures for displacement from the surrounding development lines, is also resisting full privatization.
Returning to the US Consulate situation, we can see how several factors intersect within it: the need to accelerate shifts and construction work, dictated by urban planning obsession; the increase in gray and opaque areas, to the point of veritable legal black holes, permitted by the liberal regulations on contracts and subcontracts; the framework for the exploitation of foreign labor permitted by the Bossi-Fini Law, which, like all laws on "controlling migrant flows," is actually a labor market law and its regulation in favor of the employer operating on Italian soil. Furthermore, in the specific case of the former shooting range, there is also the claim of "extraterritoriality," with which the United States has always justified its denial of entry to trade unions. This is in addition, of course, to the secret custody of the future Consulate headquarters, which, seen in its construction phase, has the structural characteristics of an impregnable fortress rather than a commercial and institutional building.
In the events surrounding the so-called "urban planning earthquake" in Milan, an increasingly overlooked aspect is the exploitation of labor, along the lines of precarious employment and gang-mastering. These are the living bodies of the workforce that, ultimately, after administrative simplifications and the absence of a unified national law on urban development, allow the rapid profitability required by financial and real estate investments to be met.
With the cases of Glovo and the US Consulate, therefore, gang-mastering and piecework increasingly appear to be foundational elements of the workforce that supports the Milan model and its lifestyle-or rather, the lifestyle of the new, higher-income residents who have arrived in the city over the last 15 years, replacing approximately a third of the population, and of a bourgeois middle class that has prospered on the privatization of public space. This is precisely what happens in the hotel and restaurant sectors, whose conditions were recently denounced precisely during the Winter Olympics, being at the center of the political economy of the event-city.
Off Topic Workshop
https://umanitanova.org/milano-caporalato-espulsione-e-finanziarizzazione/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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