Translated by Roberta Buiani and Enda Brophy
Abstract: This essay reports on the temporary and unpaid forms of labour around which the 2015 World’s Fair (Expo 2015) in Milan is organized and upon which it depends. The collective agreement supporting Expo 2015 is especially significant, the paper contends, in that it has been seized upon by the government of Matteo Renzi as a blueprint for the future of labour relations in Italy. Expo 2015 ushers in the institutionalization of unpaid work in the crisis-stricken Italian economy—a transformation approved by the major Italian trade unions that signed off on the collective agreement, but forcefully opposed by social movements who have decried the expansion of unpaid work permitted by the contract.
From Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Vol 13, No 2 (2015) > Unpaid Work, Creative Industries, and Higher Education.
See also on Academia.edu
See also on Academia.edu
1. “Why the Hell Are You Asking Me to Volunteer?”
Take 18,500 young people
and student volunteers, all working for free, while the judiciary
investigates a million dollar bribery scheme, prosecuting and
arresting entrepreneurs and corrupt lobbyists. Welcome to the Milan
Expo.2 Throw in a communications team which rou- tinely turns to the
web to ask for “advice” on how to improve the event (one that
senior figures in the Italian government maintain will contribute to
the country’s economic recovery). Add to this the most brilliant
and critical activist network in Italy and you’ll get a glimpse of
what the future has in store for the precariat in this country:
unpaid work.
These are the elements that, on May 21, 2014, combined
to produce what we could rightly call a communicative “epic fail.”
For the first time since the confederal trade unions and Expo Ltd.
signed a collective agreement in July of 2013, Expo 2015 organizers
clumsily sought to engage the internet in the discussion of a topic
that—like the unspeakable (in Latin, nefas) in Greek tragedy—makes everybody feel uncomfortable and thus usually remains
unspoken. Launched by the event’s organizers, the hashtag #AskExpo
was soon flooded by the messages of hundreds of people demanding
explanations regarding a collective agreement that, for the first
time in the history of Italian labour law, enshrines free work for 90
percent of those involved in the production of what Premier Matteo
Renzi sees as a “source of pride” for the country (Expo 2015).
Meanwhile, only 835 people among the thousands of interns, ap-
prentices, and limited contract workers will be “hired” for a
period of 7 to 12 months.
“Why is #Expo2015—an event that
was supposed to create jobs—depending on volunteers?” wrote
@TwashWish. “This public event supported by public funds is 90%
dependent on unpaid work. Why are the private companies the ones
making money?” asked @ufo_inthesky. It was impossible not to draw
connections between all of this free labour and the arrests of a
bid-rigging racket of contractors (the so-called “Cupola degli
appalti”) carried out on May 8, 2014. Among others, those detained
included the General Manager of Expo 2015 Ltd., Angelo Paris, and a
number of entrepreneurs and lobbyists recruited from the ranks of the
Tangentopoli scandal of the early 1990s.4 “With all the money
you’ve gotten (some of it mysteri- ously vanished), why the hell
are you asking me to volunteer?” tweeted @divexdj.
2. Anatomy of an Unpaid Workforce
Following this
controversy, Expo 2015 organizers assured the public that the number
of interns and volunteers had been reduced to less than 10,000 and
that 7,000 of these will be employed for a maximum of 14 days. There
was no explanation offered for the diminished numbers—perhaps the
organizers feared the unpaid volunteers might not demonstrate the
enthusiasm that was originally anticipated. The Expo volunteer
program itself includes at least three tracks. A “short-term
experience” option is available for those who want to commit five
and a half hours a day to the event over a two-week period.
“Long-term volunteers” will be able to participate more
extensively through civil service projects connected to the event or
through projects coordinated by the event’s volunteer program,
Dote Comune Expo, working for five days a week during the six months
Expo is staged.
A further form of volunteering is referred to as
“volunteers for a day”, and includes corporate volunteers who
will work at Expo for a one-time, five-hour day. Students from
Progetto Scuola (The School Project) will act as guides for their
peers through the pavilions. Screening of candidates for all of these
positions are managed by the Centri di Servizio per il Volontariato
(Volunteering Service Centres) which will train the selected
volunteers. The plans laid out by Expo organizers have included the
hiring of 640 workers on temporary contracts and 195 interns at a
monthly pay of 516 Euro. More than 300 of these short- term positions
have prioritized workers who are either unemployed or receiving
social assistance.
In all likelihood, at the end of the exhibition,
these individuals will return to a state of precarity, hoping for a
call to work at a festival or some other event generated by the
virtually bottomless reservoir of immaterial labour in the city of
Milan. One of the most disturbing aspects of the working arrangements
at Expo is the creation of a two-tier system
dividing temporary workers and volunteers: on one side there are the
short- term contractors, the apprentices, and the interns, who will
obtain certifications with titles such as “event manager”, “big
event specialist”, or “big event technician and manager”.
On
the other side are the vast majority of volunteers, who work for free
and must demonstrate an appreciation of Expo’s “values”,
namely, “feeding the world” and “ensuring quality, healthy,
just and sustainable nutrition”—values that are widely shared, to
be sure. In short, Expo 2015 demands of its over 10,000 volunteers an
(mostly) unpaid commitment in exchange for some visibility and a
chance to showcase their talents and broaden their relational
networks, all in the hopes of another internship, a short-term
contract or perhaps even a job down the road.
3. The Political Economy of Visibility
The volunteers, interns,
and temporary workers at Expo 2015 share a single destiny: a re-
volving-door scenario in which they will move between jobs in the
formal and informal economy, between unemployment and
apprenticeships, between precarious jobs and working for free. With
the approval of the confederal trade unions, the Milan Expo has thus
become a crucial first step toward the institutionalization of
underpaid and free labour in Italy. By relying on a network of
volunteering agencies and non-profits, this system puts precarious
workers and volunteers in competition and harvests their hopes with
the justification that “it’s better than nothing.” In other
words, better to work for free than to be unemployed.
By
participating in Expo, by working shifts of six hours a day for six
months, these young people will acquire the most coveted commodity in
circulation in the era of financialized capitalism: visibility, or,
the possibility to show themselves off and prove their existence in
this world, hoping that one day this existence will come to have some
value in the market. Whether real or only promised, this visibility
is most certainly not a commodity: in actual fact, Expo volunteers
will receive no money in exchange for their efforts. Technically,
theirs is nei- ther a job contract nor can it be considered job
training. Volunteers’ presence around the pavilions is purely
performative.
Both Expo organizers and the confederal unions
encourage the volunteers’ participation as a form of ethical
engagement. This engagement, one reads in the agreement endorsed and
signed by the unions and Expo Ltd., has to be offered exclu- sively
“with the goal of actively participating, as a gesture of
solidarity and pluralism” (Expo 2015 et al. 2013).
“Ethics” here is a key concept in the neoliberal management of
labour. The individual is asked to subscribe directly and without
mediation to the goals and values imposed from above by the private
company or by the state. Participation must be spontaneous,
disinterested, and voluntary. That is,
the individual has to demonstrate maximum availability and a
commitment to the ethics and values of the market, as well as to the
principles of the social economy, in this case the “green economy”
in particular.
The individual’s availability must be so broad and
indiscriminate as to turn the labour relationship into one of
self-exploitation. In other words, the volunteer at Expo is the
quintessential 21st century worker. In exchange for zero Euros, she
invests what Marx called “absolute surplus labour”—or the
excess of work which cannot be measured in terms of wages—in
response to the requests of a given firm. Maybe one day she will
receive some form of compensation from working precariously for one,
two, or three months, for another big event to be programmed in an
indeterminate fu- ture. It will be up to big investors or the state
to organize—whether it is in Milan or in any other city in Italy or
in the world—another event that might catalyze sufficient funding
to pay to- day’s precarious work force.
4. New Labouring Subjects
The great contractual
novelty of Expo resides in the fact that the trade unions have fully
en- dorsed an agreement that introduces the notions of “volunteering”
or “volunteer” labour. In other words, free labour. Volunteering
exists already everywhere in Italy, as in the rest of the world. Its
nature is generally religious, political, or civic. The conventions
of the big political parties are teeming with young people who lend
their free time in exchange for the opportuni- ty to participate in
an event. However, Expo is neither a religious event nor the Festa
dell’Unità. Expo is a capitalist enterprise with a long history
dating back to the nineteenth century.
The co-opting of volunteers is
of course a constant in big, spectacular events: the Olympics and a
range of other kinds of cultural events have relied on volunteer
labour for many years. This does not take away from the fact that, in
the context of Italian law and the recent history of the country’s
trade unions, what is happening with Expo in Milan is without
precedent. In fact, this event has formalized the existence of a
double labour market that the trade unions intend to manage along
with capital and the state: on one side, there are the precarious
worker and the unemployed; on the other side, there are the younger
generations, those without “work experience”, as well as workers
in the informal economy, the chronically unemployed, and those that
are “inactive” in that they are no longer even seeking work.
These figures merge into a three-fold subject: the
worker/precarious/unemployed. In the past, these three conditions
constituted three different statuses. Today they coexist in the same
individual. This individual can gain regular working experience, as
well as engage in precarious work or suffer a period of unemployment,
all within a few months. She might even find herself in all three
conditions at the same time. In other words, the volunteer at Milan
Expo represents the future subject of work living in an immense grey
area of informal and precarious labor. This is the condition of what
Giorgio Allegri and I have described elsewhere as the Fifth Estate
(Allegri and Ciccarelli 2013)
5. No Future
The Italian government’s
preference has been clear since July of 2013. Former premier Enrico
Letta called for an extension of the Expo labour agreement to all
employment contracts before he was removed from office by a party
conspiracy led by the current premier, Matteo Renzi. This proposed
extension only pertained to the portion of the agreement covering
free work and the number of apprenticeships to be offered. What has
become obvious however is that the creation of new employment in
Italy occurs almost exclusively during these “big events” funded
by finance capital. These spectacles are marked by ephemeral work
arrangements whose duration is only equal to the event itself, a
temporary interruption of structural unemployment, or an occasional
variation within the recursive regime of precarity. The sole interest
of the State, and likewise of capital, is to maintain a constantly
flexible employment regime, as well as to regularly modify labour
laws in order to keep wages low and deny individuals the fundamental
legislative protections they once enjoyed. It’s a regime that is
demanded obsessively by transnational governance bodies ranging from
the International Monetary Fund to the European Central Bank, and
national governments dutifully turn it into reality, as the case of
Expo 2015 so clearly demonstrates.
6. Freedom and Slavery
The final aspect that
this Italian story contributes to a broader reflection on labour
rights, pre- cariousness, and the fifth estate is the almost
compulsory participation on the part of subjects that is demanded by
the governance mechanism of free labour. As a result, the emergent
sensibility displayed by these subjects is the result of a double
movement: a subjection of the individual to the path imposed by the
firm (i.e., ongoing education at no cost to the company) and the
subjectivation of the individual who freely accepts work without pay
for the prospect of an income or a professional position to be
secured in an uncertain future.
This mixture of freedom and slavery
is typical of contemporary neoliberal subjectivity. It is an attitude
that characterizes the subject from the earliest days in the
education system, and consigns her in adulthood to permanent failure,
cultural and political impotence, and apathy in the workplace and
society. It is a self-governing mechanism along the lines of what
Etienne De la Boètie would call “voluntary servitude”. In
neoliberalism voluntary servitude is a model upon which states invest
beginning from the subject’s earliest years of existence. In turn,
the subject is obliged to accept this model as the only way to
achieve social inclusion, a goal important enough that she agrees
even to pay for the opportunity to work and survive as a member of
the working poor.
This phenomenon is not
new in Italy or in the United States. It affects the middle class,
in- dependent professions, immaterial labourers, and the knowledge
economy in particular. There is nonetheless something new in the
situation that is unfolding: unlike the years of the economic boom
that saw the rise of the middle class, today the substantial
resources that are invested by households toward university education
and professional training for their children are chronically
undermined by unemployment and mass precarity. In the U.S., debt
resulting from borrowing from the state and from the banks has
generated a market bubble is even bigger than the one that was
created by subprime mortgages, and there is talk of a default similar
to the one that hit the U.S. in 2007.
Members of the so-called middle
class between 30 and 40 years of age are no longer able to pay their
debts due to a drastic redis- tribution of resources and job
insecurity. Yet the only access to employment, and later on, one
hopes, to a middle-class existence, remains to pay in order to find a
job. This situation is not very different from the one we are
experiencing in Italy, even though the financial dimensions of this
rupture are hardly comparable. In Europe the financialization of
society is not as advanced as in the United States. However, the
institutionalization of free labour by trade unions, businesses, and
the state has evolved on both sides of the Atlantic in very similar
ways. The subject with no financial resources or support is asked to
pay for a graduate degree or certification courses that promise
professionalization, and to work for free in the hopes of being able
to get an education through precarious and temporary assignments.
It is the ultimate
demonstration that for at least another generation capital will need
not a skilled middle class (if not in miniscule quantities) but
rather a vast proletariat to shape into whatever form is required
according to the economic conjuncture. In the midst of the most
postmodern economic event that there is, we are witnessing in Italy a
return to the conditions of life and work that were typical of early
modernity: seasonal labour, day labour, or free labour as a form of
survival for subjects bereft of either financial income or social
protection. This leap backwards in time could also lead to the
discovery of solidarity, to those forms of individual and collective
subjectivation that might bring this new kind of proletariat—as
David Harvey (2012) calls it in Rebel Cities—to a radical break
with exploitation.
This would mean, of course, overcoming that
mechanism by which the maximum freedom of the subject corresponds to
her maximum self-exploitation.
References
Allegri, Giuseppe and Roberto Ciccarelli. 2014. What is the Fifth Estate? Open Democracy. Accessed June 18, 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/giuseppe-allegri-robertociccarelli/what-is-fifth-estate.
Allegri, Giiuseppe and Roberto Ciccarelli. 2013. Il Quinto Stato: Perché il Lavoro Indipendente è il Nostro Futuro. Milan: Ponte alle Grazie.
De La Boëtie, Etienne. 1988. La Servitude Volontaire, or the Anti-Dictator [Slaves by Choice]. Egham:Runnymede Books.
Expo 2015. 2015. The Premier Renzi Visits the Site of Expo 2015: “Source of Pride for Italy.” Accessed April 15, 2015. http://www.expo2015.org/en/the-premier-renzi-visits-the-site-of-expo-2015--- source-of-pride-for-italy.
Expo 2015, CGIL Milano, CISL Milano Metropoli, UIL Milano e Lombardia, UIL TUCS Lombardia, FISASCAT Milano Lombardia, CGIL FILCAMS. 2013. Protocollo Sito Espositivo Expo 2015. Accessed June 18, 2015. http://www.provincia.pv.it/attachments/article/1540/Protocollo Apprendistato EXPO 2015.pdf
Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities. London: Verso.
About the Author
Roberto Ciccarelli is a journalist and philosopher based in Rome, Italy. His blog can be found at furiacervelli.blogspot.it.
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