EXPO MILANO 2015: THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF WORKING FOR FREE IN ITALY

Roberto Ciccarelli

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

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.

WHAT IS THE FIFTH ESTATE?

Giuseppe Allegri and Roberto Ciccarelli 

 

Che cos'è il quinto stato? Una nuova Europa dal basso è possibile con le nuove coalizioni sociali del quinto stato (versione inglese)

 

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A renewed Europe from the bottom up is possible: with the new social coalitions of the Fifth Estate.

 

(OpenDemocracy)

 

(Academia.edu)

 

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For the first time since 1848, a renewed Europe from the bottom up is possible: with the new social coalitions of the Fifth Estate.

‘A spectre is haunting Europe’: the spectre of the Fifth Estate, which follows Sieyès’s Third Estate and the Fourth Estate of peasant workers and the proletariat. The Fifth Estate can become ‘a new kind of proletariat’, but without any consciousness of class. It is made of stateless people, the outcast ‘precariat’ of Europe, to whom a new social figure is connected, ‘the included outcast’. This is the one who pays taxes, votes, expresses his/her opinion in real or virtual squares, but never comes out from the grey area between work and non-work. 

This stateless person is the puzzle of contemporary citizenship. It is the product of the current European governance: a system formed by national governments and global economic institutions deferring to a technocratic elite and to a form of statism without a State. The outcast is left outside parliamentary representation, trade union or existing business. It floats in the empty space created by the disappeared balance between secular citizenship and the state, state sovereignty and the authorities that govern their lives at a super-national level (the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank: the ‘troika’ which monitors the crisis of European states and their populations).