1 Introduction
This article addresses socially reproductive labour and ‘migrant’ labour together to examine how labourers who are fundamental to the functioning of local agricultural economies are denied recognition within the legal form. The denial of recognition is legally and socially reproduced. This denied recognition reveals a darker side of social reproduction, which contributes to and supports the circulation of capital. To be considered a legal subject of labour law, specific terms of formal work or employment need to be satisfied. These terms limit the scope of protection offered to persons at work. Moreover, the legal and sociocultural context surrounding legal status reinforces the conditions in which people are working without legal recognition and protection for their labour situation (Rose Reference Rose2020). That legal status, including the protection of labour rights at work, is denied to persons whose immigration status is precarious or absent, reinforces an invisibilisation of the work carried out by migrant, often undocumented, workers. Looking at labour exploitation in the production of Sicilian agricultural products, I examine two products, Nocellara del Belice Denominazione di Origine Protetta (Protected Designation of Origin, DOP) olives and Pachino Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Denomination, IGP) tomatoes, through the lens of social reproduction. Both products, Nocellara del Belice olives and Pachino tomatoes, are commercially associated with quality and authenticity. The lens of social reproduction allows us to see that in this agricultural and commercial production, the framing of labour and labourers is both silenced and silencing. The ‘migrantisation’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2019, discussed below) of the labourer is silenced while the commercial appeal of authentic, local production has a silencing effect, preventing the transnational and exploitative nature of this agricultural sector from being exposed. This latter effect of silencing is referred to in this article as the darker side of social reproduction. By expanding the use and the critical benefit of a social reproduction lens in critical labour law, this article contributes to scholarly research challenging limited frames of legal recognition. By bringing social reproduction together with attention to the hidden work carried out by migrant workers, we add complexity to the realities of labour and labour exploitation, specifically in agricultural work and food production. This complexity is necessary as we imagine alternatives for labour law and its legal categories.Footnote 1
Urban social reproduction is intimately linked with food systems and capitalism (Castellani Reference Castellani and Proglio2023, pp. 15–16). Using a case study of the Sicilian agricultural sector, this article sheds light on how the invisibilisation of labour is legally and socially reproduced through a labour market that relies on migrant workers, in irregular labour situations, to produce local speciality food products. Invisibilisation is a term that has been used, primarily but not exclusively, to refer to unpaid labour (Adams Reference Adams2022). Invisible work is work that is ‘overlooked, ignored, and/or economically devalued’, and appears to be ‘natural’ to that person (Rose Reference Rose2020, p. 595, citing W. R. Poster et al. Reference Poster2016). In this article, the term invisibilisation is extended to the labour of workers in agricultural production in Sicily. In the simple meaning of the term ‘invisibilised’, the work of these labourers is kept invisible due to a lack of legal recognition for forms of work that are being procured or demanded; it is work carried out in the shadow of the law and the formal economy. Invisibility in law can be a result of the outright denial of recognition in situations of migration illegality (via the doctrine of illegality discussed below) and/or through denying legal protection because of contractual terms that maintain a ‘casual’ status in contract, even in cases of ongoing employment in practice. A contract, when it intentionally misrepresents reality, can allow employers to avoid hiring workers with secure and permanent employment status. This will be discussed in the examples below. Consistent with the way invisibilisation has been discussed in the literature cited above (Adams Reference Adams2022; Rose Reference Rose2020; Poster et al. Reference Poster2016), the ‘migrant’ status of irregular labourers in Sicilian agriculture renders their position of invisibility as if it were natural, given their irregular or illicit relationship to law whether real or assumed, together with their racialised, migrantised status. Invisibility, both because of law and through law, also refers to the sector’s dependence on hidden, foreign, transnational workers who make possible the availability of commercially successful local speciality produce.
These agricultural workers are, furthermore, invisible to the market that consumes the products. When consumers purchase the speciality olives and tomatoes, the transnational, often illegalised population that cultivated the local produce is ‘overlooked, ignored and/or economically devalued’ (Rose Reference Rose2020, citing Poster et al. Reference Poster2016). The invisibility of their labour is what allows the produce to be sold as part of a protected DOP, IGP economy. Undeniably the labour of migrants in olive and tomato cultivation and harvesting is real, physical, labour. But they are hidden workers cultivating products prized for their local character. This suggests that there is an obfuscation of the full truth of what goes into the production of DOP and IGP produce. The invisibilisation of these workers is sustained by the socially reproduced silencing of how local, ‘authentic’ produce is cultivated in Sicily.
Many parts of the world see produce marketed and sold for its local regional origins, while those agricultural sectors are dependent on non-citizen, migrant, labourers for cultivation and production (Todaro and Lo Piccolo Reference Todaro, Lo Piccolo, Piccolo, Picone and Todaro2021). In Sicily, DOP Nocellara del Bellara olives and IGP Pachino tomatoes, which includes ciliegino, costoluto, tondo liscio and grappolo varieties, are products highly valued for their specific local quality and are sold in speciality food shops worldwide (Eataly 2024, 2024b; Italian Food News 2024). DOP and IGP recognition in the production of high-intensity crops suggests that the produce and/or secondary products such as olive oil from olives, carry authenticity, quality and purity. Italian products enjoy a status in international markets as ‘clean’, ‘niche’ and are even marketed alongside a booming wellness industry (Italian Food News 2024). Despite the cachet of artisanal production, the harvesting of these agricultural products depends on a transnational and often undocumented labour force. This labour force is both migrantised and feminised – terms discussed below. These labour practices are allowed to continue through the social reproduction of exploitation, perpetuated by ‘reproducing a culture and ideology’ (Alessandrini Reference Alessandrini2022, p. 16). In this case, the Sicilian DOP olives and IGP tomatoes are celebrated for their cultural origins, yet there is no recognition of the labourers who make these products available to consumers (Hai 2021; Einashe Reference Einashe2022; Wallis Reference Wallis2022a; Pai Reference Pai2020a, Reference Pai2020b). Their labour is kept invisible and invisibilised by law, society and consumers, and by the social reproduction of labour that is hidden from formal economic participation.
Social reproduction and irregular labour carried out by undocumented and/or non-citizen workers consist of forms of work that are sidelined or outright ignored in conventional frameworks of labour and employment law. Labour law looks for a standard employment relationship to recognise and organise labour rights and protection (Fudge Reference Fudge2014, Reference Fudge2017). Despite extensive scholarly attention spanning at least four decades, the marginalisation of socially reproductive labour and invisibilised work in the shadow of legality continues. Moreover, certain labour is actively invisibilised through consumer practices and market priorities that derive benefit from labour being irregular. Labourers whose status is ‘irregular’ are often denied basic protections in their work, such as rest time, adequate safety equipment, non-hazardous working conditions and hourly wages or otherwise adequate pay (Piro Reference Piro2021; Pai Reference Pai2021). Meanwhile, their employers (e.g. farmers) can thereby reduce costs. The lens of social reproduction reveals complex work behind the scenes of formal economic participation. As we analyse how the labour in Sicilian agriculture is silenced and silencing, what is identified as social reproduction is a dual movement, exposing how capitalist markets work within the law and in excess of the law.
Weaving together two strands of critical labour law analysis – social reproduction and migrantised labour – in the context of Sicily’s agricultural sector, we are challenged to think past the limits of dominant labour law categories. I will briefly outline the former and the latter, following with situating the case study.
1.1 Social reproduction
Social reproduction works as a dual movement. In one sense, social reproduction includes:
‘biological reproduction, including sexual, affective and emotional services; unpaid production of goods and services in the home and within the community; and the reproduction of culture and ideology, which are all aspects necessary for the daily and generational maintenance of populations’ (Alessandrini Reference Alessandrini2022, p. 16).
Socially reproductive labour is labour that takes place within law, often unrecognised as it is in support of – and obscured by – formally recognised work, for example, waged labour. Socially reproductive labour is essential to the functioning of law and the economy. Economically, the work that is carried out in the home supports and nurtures workers who then participate in the formal labour force. This work ‘in the home’ is marginalised and unrecognised as labour of equal value to waged labour. Legally, that this labour stays marginalised as work of lesser value bolsters the singular lens that law utilises when legally recognising work: labour and employment law privileges employment status, as formal work outside the home, in the distribution of rights and status. Non-formal work, especially when carried out without a clear employment contract or contractual work arrangement, does not fit into the legally recognised category of employment and work. Moreover, when the person working is in a country without legal immigration status, this further complicates their access to labour rights and protections, either by rendering rights void due to migration illegality, or preventing that person from seeking help or assistance due to a fear of deportation or prosecution (Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021). Social reproduction maintains the silence and invisibility of persons who exist outside of law’s recognition, thus bolstering the tenacity of existing limited legal categories. Social reproduction in this first sense is therefore within the law because this marginalised and/or unrecognised work enables and buttresses work that is recognised in formal legal categories.
In a second sense, social reproduction includes the labour that reproduces an overarching capitalist agenda of maximising profit from exploited labour. This, Weeks (Reference Weeks2011) argues, is a more expansive sense of social reproduction. Social reproduction, according to Weeks, is ‘understood as the production of the forms of social co-operation on which accumulation depends or, alternatively, as the rest of life beyond work that capital seeks continually to harness to its times, spaces, rhythms, purposes, and values’ (Weeks Reference Weeks2011, p. 29). For example, emotional labour and care that takes place in the domestic sphere bolsters one’s ability to be a better consumer or worker; the domestic sphere is exploited for the profit capabilities of the worker (Hadas Reference Hadas2021; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2016; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez Reference Gutiérrez-Rodríguez2014; Federici Reference Federici2006). This movement of social reproduction – the reproduction of capital – is essential to the function of law. It is through the learning and practice of capitalist relations that modern legal categories and processes, such as contracts (law of obligations), operate as if they were the only way to recognise valid work relations (Adams Reference Adams2021, Reference Adams2022). The limited recognition of labour and work, through standard contracts, is reinforced and reproduced through legal practice and scholarship as the building blocks of labour and work relations (Adams Reference Adams2021).
According to this second sense of social reproduction, which will be pursued in this article, by ignoring social reproduction, and arguably its expansion within twenty-first-century capitalism, labour law continues to recognise the labour of labour law solely as the work that is carried out in the formal labour market, established through a contractual arrangement. This view of law is a limiting factor and one that supports the social reproduction of invisible labour. Law maintains ‘invisible labour’s structurally subordinate status’ (Adams Reference Adams2022, p. 387) through the limited legal recognition given to work that falls outside of traditional employment categories and contracts. Adams (Reference Adams2021) explains that ‘law’s essential assumptions tend to be internalised, and naturalised—taken for granted when social and legal problems are identified, and solutions to those problems posed’ (Adams Reference Adams2021, pp. 464–65). This naturalisation, bearing similarities to what Susan Marks has elsewhere explored as ‘false contingency’ (Marks Reference Marks2009), suggests that law as it is – here, the traditional employment categories based on a contractual relationship where wages are exchanged for service in the formal market economy – is not only normal, but natural. Consequently, little attention in mainstream scholarship is given to what labour relations or arrangements may exist outside this predetermined legal frame.
Feminist labour law scholarship has brought to light the ways in which formal law and the legal system regulate labour and employment relations without acknowledging the significant contribution of invisible labour (Fudge and Strauss Reference Fudge and Strauss2014; Hayes Reference Hayes2017; Beynon-Jones and Grabham Reference Beynon-Jones and Grabham2019; Busby and James Reference Busby and James2020; Adams Reference Adams2022). Invisible labour is often considered predominatly work that has been gendered as ‘women’s work’ but increasingly extends beyond gender to include a broader precaritisation of labour. The feminisation of labour refers to the ‘devaluation of work’ through the ‘expansion of temporary work coupled with a cheapening and flexibilisation of the workforce’, conditions typical of women’s historically devalued and precarious position in labour markets (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez Reference Gutiérrez-Rodríguez2014). Labour law is complicit in this devaluation by maintaining a primary focus on traditional employment contracts and wage relations. When businesses engage in contractual agreements external to employment laws and protections, and do so as a way of cutting costs and maximising profit, labour law is slow to catch up and protect non-traditional workers, including those carrying out socially reproductive labour and therefore invisible labour.
Social reproduction, used in this second sense, is a lens that seeks to illuminate the sanctioning through social learning, acceptance of and even complicity in modes of production and labour market practices. In this article, the invisibilised labour of migrant workers is situated as an activity of social reproduction, where – as Weeks (Reference Weeks2011) argues – social reproduction is the work that sustains and maintains capitalism. This involves the processes through which social and economic life circulate. Embedded in this version of social reproduction theory is a critical analysis of how these processes and social and economic life are seized by neoliberal, capitalist accumulation to the extent that ‘rest of life’ (Weeks Reference Weeks2011) is made to serve economic progress. Immaterial, invisible and aesthetic labour are elements of social capital that enhance one’s experience of capitalist exchanges and/or enhance one’s position and success in a capitalist labour market (Rose Reference Rose2020). For example, in care work, one’s ability to care is not limited to the job description of carrying out specific medical or hygienic duties. Caring means going ‘above and beyond’ a checklist of tasks (Hayes Reference Hayes2017). In the service industry, appearance, accommodation or friendliness elevate a worker above simply being able to carry out orders to providing an experience of service (Albin Reference Albin2010). In the fitness industry, physical strength, a toned slim body, together with charismatic enthusiasm, signal capabilities that exceed a technical certification requirement. These almost ephemeral qualities are in and of themselves not the ‘productive’ elements of the labour being carried out. Yet their ambient, persuasive and constitutive effect on labour market practices is experienced and valued.
Social reproduction, specifically the dark side of social reproduction that is the sanctioning of and complicity in silencing invisible work, plays a role in continuing exploitative labour relations in agricultural labour that is dependent on migrant or transnational, workers. Recognising that the invisibility of certain types of work/er is legally and socially reproduced, we see how the law is constituted by and interwoven with the social. As Rose contends, not only does the law obscure or deny legal status to workers carrying out invisible labour, but legal status affects one’s socio-economic status with the effect of marginalising sectors of the population due to the labour they perform (Rose Reference Rose2020). Persons whose legal immigration status is irregular and/or who are racialised and gendered into certain subjugated labour sectors work in invisibilised sectors of labour. Their legal-socio-economic position is maintained and reproduced by actors and interests, including consumer habits, that benefit from their marginalisation.
1.2 Undocumented migrant labour
Work that is carried out by undocumented or precariously documented, ‘irregular’, non-citizen ‘migrants’ – that is, those whose immigration status is precarious, in limbo, denied or deferred – is widespread around the world. From construction of the World Cup stadiums in Qatar to olive, asparagus and tomato harvests in Southern Italy, to invisible hospitality in urban centres: cleaning kitchens, hospitals, warehouses and factories and overnight security, this is labour carried out by persons who lack secure immigration status and work arrangements without stability or work contracts (PICUM 2024; Buller, Stoklosa and Zimmerman Reference Buller, Stoklosa and Zimmerman2018). Often referred to as ‘illegal migrants’, the illegality of these persons stems from restrictive national immigration and asylum laws that construct illegality based on the rules of the state (Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021).
Migration law has a blinding effect on labour relations and the labour market. In other words, migration law and its focus on borders, entry requirements and formal immigration status distracts attention away from what is happening in labour markets and labour practices. Movement across borders is treated by governments and media as if immigration, or the act of crossing borders, explained and accounted for labour exploitation. This is especially true of movement that is deemed a ‘migrant crisis’ like the movement of persons from North Africa to Italy across the Mediterranean. The focus on migration law and regulating migration obscures the pull factor of labour demand for cheap irregular labour that contributes to the illicit movement of persons across borders (Corrado et al. Reference Corrado2018). Low-waged, precarious workers fill a labour demand. Labour sectors, such as Sicilian agricultural production and harvesting detailed below, benefit from illegalised labour. These workers often consent, due to limited options, to work for less money in unregulated conditions. These conditions see them working without formal contracts, without minimum wage guarantees, without protection regarding working time and necessary breaks (Piro Reference Piro2021).
Immigration law mandates a blanket of illegality around non-citizen workers who lack a work permit/visa while the labour market encourages their participation, as undocumented and irregular (Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021). Immigration laws in many countries – for instance, Italy, UK, Canada – deem non-citizens who are claiming asylum or who are awaiting decisions on asylum claims as either unable to work, or with limited ability to enter legal work or employment contracts, depending on the country. When persons with precarious, irregular or undocumented immigration status (i.e. when immigration or refugee status has been denied or deemed ineligible) work, they are illegally employed or illegally at work in contravention of immigration laws. Labour law has little to say in these situations because the illegality of the immigration status deems any subsequent contract, including a work contract, void. This exploited and exploitable labour force is furthermore a consequence of ‘a world of uneven sovereignties’ (Hamlin Reference Hamlin2021). As Hamlin explains, Westphalianism – the primacy and sovereignty imbued in the nation-state which allows the nation-state to determine who is let in and under what conditions – and colonialism continue to shape inequalities and cause displacement, only to then deem certain racialised, but economically required, bodies as illegal (Hamlin Reference Hamlin2021, p. 30). As racialised, illegalised bodies, undocumented persons fill labour demands that no local worker, aware of their rights and options with access to citizenship, would willingly accept.
Ashiagbor demonstrates that labour law has historically ignored how ‘race [is] constitutive of labour markets but, like women’s work, is invisibilised’ (Ashiagbor Reference Ashiagbor2021). The impact of race and racialisation of work is not represented in the legal form emerging from industrialisation. The legal form, including the limited recognition of labour relations through the contractual form discussed above, exists as if all workers, all bodies, could be represented in the law, if only for the appropriate conditions, legal machinations and recognition. In contrast, the ongoing seemingly perpetual, struggle against the exploitation of workers in precarious, non-standard, work demonstrates that the legal form is not open and receptive to all forms of labour. Racialised, ‘migrant’ bodies from the Global South are legally, commercially and socially reaffirmed as an invisibilised labour force that reproduces colonial routes of extreme exploitation, slavery and extraction (Pruglio et al. Reference Pruglio2021). Their invisibilised labour is even more invisible because, following these well-worn colonial tracks, it seems natural. The invisibility of undocumented, migrant and migrantised labourers in Sicily is an active invisibilisation. Like Rajan-Rankin’s exploration of call workers in India (Rankin Reference Rankin2018, p. 10), the invisibility of undocumented workers is implied by their illegalised status; they are kept invisible because they do not have the legal ‘right’ to be present in the nation-state. Persons without legal or regular status have little interest in bringing attention to their labour market position for fear of being detained and deported. Yet their bodies, racialised and Othered for not being White, Italian, European are highly visible for their exploitability.
The labour of undocumented migrants is distinct from the labour of documented migrants. The work carried out by undocumented labourers happens deeper in the shadows of legality. While the labourers involved in the cultivation and harvesting of olives and tomatoes in Sicily are not the same, similarities in these sectors allow comparisons to be made for this article’s case study. In the details of olive harvesting, we see the labour predominantly dependent on undocumented labourers. Tomato harvesting and greenhouse labour are complicated by the variety of greenhouse workers, including variability in the length of time they have been working in greenhouse labour and their migration statuses – Tunisian workers can be hired under labour contracts tied to immigration status, but some remain in Sicily with expired permits and are therefore ‘illegal’ and undocumented. Romanian workers are EU internal migrants and therefore do not need to prove an immigration status. Sub-Saharan African workers are frequently working without legal documentation or are working in contravention of ongoing asylum claims (Piro Reference Piro2021). Each labourer has a particular experience of irregularity and specific reasons for working in a low-paid labour sector that lacks labour rights and protections. Tracing the various and personal experiences is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, the shared experience of irregularity that defines labouring in this sector is an example of migrantisation (Anderson Reference Anderson2019).
Migrantisation refers to the process through which labour sectors have come to demand a form of labour that is low paid, exploited and exploitable. Like the feminisation of labour noted above, migrantisation refers to a shift in both demographic – racialised as foreign (if not legally irregular or undocumented) – and the form of labour: low wages that can be withheld by employers, poor, unsanitary and dangerous conditions, extreme precarity of labour, with expectations of being at the whim of employers without recourse to labour rights (Anderson Reference Anderson2013; Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021; Piro Reference Piro2021). A migrantised labour force is assumed to be easily replaceable, given a steady supply of desperate, precarious workers. Due to labour supply and market demand, employers bypass employment contracts and employer obligations to workers (Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021).
In Sicily, labourers in the agricultural sector are predominantly Tunisian, Romanian and now, sub-Saharan African (Piro Reference Piro2021, pp. 26–27; Pai Reference Pai2021). Workers hold different legal statuses but share the conditions of working in subjugated, exploited labour that is racialised and stigmatised. This migrantised labour is made invisible due to the inability of existing labour and employment law to recognise workers who are working without defined contracts, in unregulated labour sectors and/or without any formal recognition of the terms, wage and conditions of their work. The migrantisation of olive and tomato production is significant, if not ironic, considering these items hold an integral place in Italy’s national branding (Aronczyk Reference Aronczyk2013) and gastro-nationalism (Grandi Reference Grandi2018).
1.3 Sicilian agricultural sector
The agricultural sector in Sicily is in crisis (Castellani Reference Castellani and Proglio2023; Rossi et al. Reference Rossi, Coscarello and Biolghini2021). Farm ownership is concentrated in the hands of wealthier farmers, many of whom run their own packaging warehouses and deal directly with the large retail distributors and/or supermarket chains (Cole and Booth Reference Cole and Booth2007, p. 75). Castellani (Reference Castellani and Proglio2023) refers to this as the oligopoly of agri-food business. As farmer protests throughout Italy in early 2024 demonstrated, Italy’s dominant agri-food system has been failing to support farmers (Roberts and Ford Reference Roberts and Ford2024; Rossi et al. Reference Rossi, Coscarello and Biolghini2021). Farmers protested the ‘rise in taxes, high cost of diesel, cheap imports, low supermarket prices and restrictions imposed by EU climate change targets’ (Roberts and Ford Reference Roberts and Ford2024). Protests also extended to demonstrating against products that are made outside Italy but marketed as ‘made in Italy’, providing unfair competition to local agricultural products (EuroNews 2024). Farmers are under pressure to cultivate products that are competitive in a globalised market and financially accessible to consumers but still grown and harvested on Italian soil. DOP and IGP standards and certifications (Ministry of Agriculture 2002) exacerbate the pressure on farmers and the burden of rising costs.
The extraordinary care needed to produce DOP and IGP agricultural products contrasts the intensity of twenty-first century agri-business and high-yield mono-crop agriculture. While DOP and IGP certifications recognise attentiveness that aims to protect heritage and quality, under current globalised market conditions and economic crises that have sparked high costs of fuel and agri-chemicals, consumers are often reticent to pay more money for agricultural produce. Farmers are mitigating crisis by lowering labour costs; in other words, relying on migrant labour (Castelleni Reference Castellani and Proglio2023; Todaro and Lo Piccolo Reference Todaro, Lo Piccolo, Piccolo, Picone and Todaro2021). Already in 2015, Piro noted the difficulty that small to medium-sized farmers encounter when trying to ‘remain as independent producers’ in local retail markets due to ‘exploitation and corruption in the supply chain’ (quoted in Killeny and Urzi Reference Kilkey and Urzi2017). Maintaining a business in a highly competitive, and corrupt (Seifert and Valente Reference Seifert and Valente2018), sector forces many farmers to seek out affordable, meaning cheap, labourers. Piro explains how the downward pressure on labour wages constitutes ‘the only cost they [producers] have agency over, since the price of other inputs (such as plastic, agrochemical products and grafted seedlings) are beyond the control of the agricultural enterprises’ (Reference Piro2021, p. 25). In agricultural greenhouse production on the Transformed Literal Strip (TLS) – the longest stretch of greenhouses in Italy that expand along the southeastern coast of Sicily in the province of Ragusa – and on farms in the province of Trapani, migrant labour has allowed small and medium-sized farms to survive and for large companies to maintain a strong economic position (Piro Reference Piro2021). The TLS has regenerated a failing Sicilian economy (Bravio and Piro Reference Brovia and Piro2020). Indeed, greenhouse production has even been referred to as an ‘engine of socio-economic development’ (Todaro and Lo Piccolo Reference Todaro, Lo Piccolo, Piccolo, Picone and Todaro2021). However, this comes at the high price of labour rights and protections for agricultural workers.
The exploitation of labourers in the agricultural sector in Sicily has been established over decades. The condition of irregular, if not illegal, labour has become a de facto normalised practice where the labourers, trade unions and local inspectors follow channels of irregularity to maintain this labour supply. This includes ‘informal and unwritten rules’ of payment and benefit claims to the Italian government, as well as the purchasing of labour contracts (Piro Reference Piro2021, pp. 71–73). Trade unions work with labourers to help them access government unemployment benefits while still illicitly working in agricultural labour. The unemployment benefits can be helpful to the labourers if they work in seasonal labour: olives are seasonal, tomatoes in greenhouses are year-round. Farmers also benefit from labourers making benefit claims because it allows farmers to pay their workers less, adding yet another layer to the subversion of law while deepening irregularity (Piro Reference Piro2021, p. 72). Ultimately, the evasion of laws and legal regulations that creates exploitable – invisible – labour is advantageous to the various actors involved, including agri-business and consumers. The labourers, although not without agency, are the lowest on the ladder of advantage.
2 Social and legal reproduction of exploitation
2.1 Local products by foreign workers
The commodification of invisibilised labour contributes to the material culture of Italy and Italian authenticity that the nation-state seeks to harness and convey internationally. Aronczyk refers to this harnessing as a ‘country of origin effect’ (Aronczyk Reference Aronczyk2013, p. 47). Vendors and farmers sell DOP and IGP produce locally and internationally (Italian Food News 2024). Similarly, reproductive labour is harnessed by ‘firms/organizations to support profit making, without, however, being legally or institutionally recognized as part of the work for which individuals are hired’ (Adams Reference Adams2022). Instead of embodying the image of the brand, as is often the case with aesthetic and immaterial labour, the authenticity of Sicilian produce depends on keeping the labouring bodies hidden, in other words, invisible. These labourers embody a transnational and exploitative dark side to Sicilian products.
Similar to traditionally gendered labour, migrantised labourers are a:
‘wage-dependent population in a situation of economic vulnerability’ that ‘empower firms/organizations to ensure the existence of a “gap” … between the wage that they pay for labour power in the market and the value of the benefit that is extracted from workers in the production process (Adams Reference Adams2022, p. 392).
Indeed, the value rendered from DOP Nocellara del Belice olives (and olive oil) and IGP Pachino tomatoes (and tomato products including tinned varieties and passata) does not transfer to a celebration of the workers who cultivate these products. Paradoxically, certified IGP tomatoes and DOP olives are part of a global trade that values cheap, accessible products and farmers are subjected to this economic pressure. Farmers’ market and local street market consumers, as well as international consumers, assume superior quality and flavour, but expect accessible prices (Cacchiarelli et al. 2016). Given the cost of transport, fuel and taxes, it is little wonder that farmers are in financial crisis, and the system of irregular illegalised migration facilitates farmers to cut costs at waged labour. Arguably, there is a wilful ignorance as to the actual labour arrangements that render these olives and tomatoes accessible to consumers, especially as costs of production increase.
2.2 Protected place of origin
DOP and IGP certifications are regulated by European and Italian laws (Cacchiarelli et al. 2016). National certifications on product origin mandate strict cultivation rules and territorial protection (Ministry of Agriculture 2002). These are seemingly positive certifications that protect the purity of the product based on its origin, as well as on local industry, food traditions and production. DOP, IGP and similar certifications for wine (DOC, IGT), ostensibly maintain a high-quality agricultural product connected to its land, while combating mass-produced globalised food production that is disconnected from land quality and cultivation practices (Bulchi and Mancuso Reference Bulchi and Mancuso2008; Cacchiarelli et al. 2016, p. 826). However, the DOP and IGP certifications do not give equal attention, if any, to the labour and labourers that are needed to meet and maintain DOP and IGP certification. In neglecting labour, DOP and IGP standards simultaneously erase the labour rights of those working in high-intensity, care-ful agriculture.
Sicilian DOP Nocellara del Belice olives and IGP Pachino greenhouse tomato cultivation and harvesting are intensive. For Nocellara del Belice olives to maintain DOP recognition, the harvest must be done by hand, without the use of droppers, with transport taking place in mesh boxes or racks and processed no later than twenty-four hours after harvesting (Ministerial Product Sheet 2022). DOP certification guarantees that all stages of production are carried out in a specific geographical region (Ministero dell’agricoltura, della sovranità alimentare e delle foreste n.d.). The Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry oversees the suitability of olive groves to produce Nocellara del Belice olives and annually updates certification. In 2018, Nocellara del Belice olives and IGP Pachino greenhouse tomatoes were cultivated by a workforce that was believed to be 46–47 per cent hired irregularly (Bravio and Piro Reference Brovia and Piro2020).
2.3 Olives
Nocellara del Belice olives DOP and olive oil pressed from these olives, are gourmet products exported from Sicily to chic delis and food boutiques around the world. A quick web search of Nocellara del Belice olives in North America finds that they are, ‘versatile, pleasant, and a crowd pleaser. Perfect for Martinis’ (Olive Emporium 2023). These olives date back to ancient Greek uses. The quality of these olives, indeed what adds to their value and consumer price, is their prestige as a local, heirloom product, grown only in specific Sicilian soil under strict, regulated conditions of hand-harvesting and timely processing. Moreover, the meticulous requirements of olive harvesting for Nocellara del Belice requires intensive manual labour to be performed carefully at specific times. Conceivably, a dedicated and monitored – quasi captive – labour force is needed to ensure that the DOP requirements are met. While the harvesting for some specialty products in Sicily, such as grape harvesting for wine and orange picking, has become a tourist opportunity (Agricontura 2017; Italia Delight 2019), the specificity and difficulty of olive harvesting do not lend themselves to Instagram tourism.
Piro (Reference Piro2021) emphasises that the Italian agricultural sector does not suffer from a lack of labourers but a lack of labour rights. Decades of economic struggle and emigration have left many regions of Sicily with a depleted, aging population, and as noted above, the viability of small-scale family farms is challenged by rising costs of production, younger generations opt for employment in larger urban centres (Hilton Reference Hilton2022). Meanwhile, migration has brought workers ready to work to Sicily. In 2023–2024, many of these workers arrived at Sicilian shores from sub-Saharan Africa, using infamously treacherous routes passing through Libya, Tunisia and crossing the Mediterranean Sea.Footnote 2 It is important to emphasise that their labour does not have to be exploited. Yet, filling a need for cheaper labour, the current practices of DOP Nocellara del Belice olive harvesting and cultivation rely on the captive labour of undocumented persons, often homeless due to frequent evictions from camps and temporary ‘processing centres’ (Pai Reference Pai2021; Forin and Frouws Reference Forin and Frouws2022).
Migrants arriving in Italy are trapped in an increasingly hostile environment (European Council on Refugees and Exiles 2023). Circular migration opportunities could facilitate legal and regular labour opportunities between North Africa – with migrants from across the African continent – and Italy, with direction from the EU. However, current EU governments have failed to facilitate meaningful labour migration flows. For many people landing in Italy, the goal is to continue travelling north to Sweden, the UK or Germany (European Commission 2018, p. 18). However, after lethal and expensive journeys across the Mediterranean, migrants are registered as ‘arrived’ in Italy. Financial and legal reasons compel many to stay in suspended limbo in Italy.
The Italian interior ministry oversees reception centres. The Interior Ministry was led by notoriously right-wing and anti-migrant Minister Matteo Salvini from 2018–2019 and in 2023–2025 under the similarly unsympathetic political mandate of Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy). With United Nations (UNHCR) support, reception centres ostensibly provide temporary accommodation for asylum seekers while their asylum applications are being processed. During this time, applicants are not legally permitted to work (UNHCR, n.d.). In 2017, reception centres were outsourced to private companies that bid for contracts by cutting costs and providing the lowest standard of care (Pai Reference Pai2021). The legislation changed in 2018 and again in 2020, resulting in the current decentralised Sistema di Accoglienza ed Integrazione (Reception and Integration System, SAI).
Reception centres for asylum seekers and refugees receive little support from the national government and are mainly run by local municipalities, charities and co-operatives (Wallis Reference Wallis2020). Many are infamously underfunded, poorly maintained and unregulated, overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary (Vigano Reference Vigano2023). Persons housed in reception centres are barred from working while their application is being processed, thus losing valuable time to earn money for further travel, or to support dependants in their countries of origin. Furthermore, reception centres are available only to those who meet specific criteria – minors, persons awaiting asylum claims (Pai Reference Pai2020b). If an application is refused, if there is a delay in beginning the process to appeal a decision, or if an appeal is not allowed, accommodation in the reception centre may expire or be denied, rendering the person homeless (Seifert and Valente Reference Seifert and Valente2018).
The desperation to find work while forced to live in inhumane conditions, without basic access to water, shelter or sanitation, leaves people vulnerable to extreme forms of exploitation by mafia-led brokers and farmers seeking cheaper labour. If an asylum claim is denied or delayed, or if the desire to make money to support family back home overrides the ability to stay in overcrowded housing while awaiting a decision on a refugee claim, people end up in makeshift camps. These camps serve as recruitment hubs for the reproduction of a migrant, undocumented workforce in agriculture (Peano Reference Peano2021). Workers are taken from these camps to olive groves to work twelve-hour shifts in all forms of weather – suffocating heat, rain, wind. Transport is brokered by gangmasters, caporalato, who are linked to local mafia organisations and organised criminal networks (Wallis Reference Wallis2022a). Gangmasters charge for transport and take a cut of the farmers’ per-crate pay, leaving workers with significantly less than €30 at the end of the day (Todaro and Lo Piccolo Reference Todaro, Lo Piccolo, Piccolo, Picone and Todaro2021; Seifert and Valente Reference Seifert and Valente2018). Such makeshift camps, most infamously Campobello di Mazara near Trapani, are devoid of permanent shelters, electricity or running water. Referred to as ‘no man’s land’, these are dangerous, dirty and dehumanising places (Wallis Reference Wallis2022a). Although the camps exist because of farm work opportunities, the lack of sanitation means that people are frequently unable to work due to illness, injury or devastatingly, Covid-19 outbreaks during the pandemic. Deaths from fires are common, given the lack of housing infrastructure, cooking facilities or heating (Pai Reference Pai2021). Camps are periodically cleared by police, causing more homelessness.
This is the invisible labour behind Nocellara del Belice DOP olives – olives whose distinction as a local artisanal product is highly valued in capitalist markets. Conditions for these labourers have been reported by the BBC, Deutsche Welle and the UN, among other smaller news outlets cited in this article. However, ongoing silence – indeed, silencing through a refusal to consider labour practices – suggests that consumers would rather eat cheaper olives than protest the conditions of those working in olive groves. Perhaps this is because immigration laws deem these workers ‘illegal’ in the country; their status of legal ‘illegitimacy’ may mean consumers see them being less deserving of rights and protected labour conditions. Social norms, reproduced if not articulated, suggest that without legal immigration status one deserves less workplace safety and lower wages. Consumers in Sicily, Toronto, Rome and London purchase Nocellara del Belice DOP olives, reproducing exploitation while perhaps believing that their consumption supports of Italian culture and local agriculture.
2.4 Tomatoes
The production of quality agricultural products has been a pillar of Italy’s global fame, and of its ‘gastro-nationalism’ (Giusti Reference Giusti2023; Grandi Reference Grandi2018). Tomatoes are emblematic of Italian cuisine despite being a non-native species in Italy. Tomatoes gained popularity in Italy in the late nineteenth century (Gentilcore Reference Gentilcore2010). Seemingly innocuous, Italian tomatoes ‘exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, contested agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics’ (Faleschini Lerner and Past Reference Faleschini Lerner and Past2020). The latter is regrettably beyond the scope of this article, beyond the lens of social reproduction drawing attention to the feminisation of labour. Yet undeniably female farmworkers in greenhouse labour bear the brunt of the worst jobs, concentrated in packing and processing facilities in the TLS, where they are forced to contend with sexualisation in the workplace and the stigma of being both ‘questionable mothers and sexually available women’ (Piro Reference Piro2021, p. 117, citing Preibisch and Encalada Grez Reference Preibisch and Encalada Grez2010, p. 299; Moreno Nieto Reference Moreno Nieto, Gertel and Sippel2014).
The desire for local, authentic tomatoes has been identified as an ‘excuse for nativism, racism and exclusion’ (Nixon Reference Nixon2011) and has generated a wilful ignorance of the actual origin of tomato species. Furthermore, the cultivation and harvesting of tomatoes, especially specialised and protected varieties that require intensive labour, demands a labour force that is – like olives – not supplied by local, citizen Italian workers. In Ragusa’s TLS, greenhouses ‘formerly dependent on familial labour, today [are] almost exclusively migrants [who] work inside the green houses’ (Kilkey and Urzi Reference Kilkey and Urzi2017). Non-Italian migrantised and feminised (precarious, low-paid, devalued) workers are the backbone of Italian tomato production.
IGP Pachino tomatoes are celebrated as the ‘real’ taste of Sicily (Pomodori 2022). Since 2003, this tomato variety has enjoyed IGP certification, which includes strict rules for place of cultivation. IGP mandates that at least one stage of cultivation takes place in a specific geographical area. Pachino tomatoes are named after the town in south-eastern Sicily. Contrary to their name, Pachino tomatoes are not native to Pachino. This variety of small tomato was introduced to Sicily in 1989 by an Israeli company, Hazera Genetics (Hazera 2023; Bassi Reference Bassi2023). Pachino tomatoes, held up as the pride of Sicily (Concorzi 2023), are part of a chain of movement and production that not only involves a foreign company owning the seeds for this variety of tomato, but also foreign workers who carry out the labour in greenhouses. These ‘local’ tomatoes are then shipped to distribution centres in Lazio, a region outside Sicily that encompasses Rome, where transport, packing and wholesale distribution are negotiated, often by organised criminal networks (Gentilcore Reference Gentilcore2010; Corrado et al. Reference Corrado2018, p. 12). According to Gentilcore, even when tomatoes are sold in Syracuse – the province that Pachino town is located in – the tomatoes would have arrived to Sicilian markets and grocery stores via Lazio. Where supermarkets may charge around $4.60 CAD (€3) per pound for these imported specialty tomatoes in Canada, and based on the author’s experience in the spring of 2023, Pachino tomatoes were sold at around €2–3 per pound in Catania’s fruit and vegetable markets; farmers may only earn about €0.90 cents of this (Gentilcore Reference Gentilcore2010). Labourers, in gruelling repetitive physically exhausting work, earn significantly less from each pound of tomatoes sold.
Piro’s analysis based on participant observation in the TLS greenhouses details the conditions of extreme precarity and uncertainty, as well as the physical and mental challenges of greenhouse labour. Some workers engage in contract labour, often after long periods of contract-less day labour; others work as day labourers/travagghairi a jurnata (Piro Reference Piro2021, pp. 58–62). Notwithstanding the existence of a contract, or verbal agreement at the greenhouse, labourers’ wages are low (approximately €4 per hour; €25–30 per day) and sometimes withheld. Hours are long, hot and gruelling; workers are exposed to pesticides and chemicals without protection, without sufficient breaks or water, and there is always uncertainty as to whether there will be work the following day, week or month (Piro Reference Piro2021, pp. 35–53, 63, 128).
3 Social reproduction and the myth of law
In this article, social reproduction refers to the activities essential to life that are expropriated for the benefit of capital accumulation. Klein, drawing on Fraser (Reference Fraser2018), discusses expropriation as domination along gender and racial lines that is ‘unmediated by a labour contract’ (Fraser Reference Fraser2018). Undocumented migrants, non-citizens and migrantised labourers living in makeshift camps to be transported to olive groves, or living onsite in cramped, unsanitary tents near tomato greenhouses, are expropriated of the conditions of their daily life. Their legally invisibilised presence is part of what supports and allows Sicilian agriculture to remain viable. The daily lives of farmers, business owners and consumers are maintained through the social reproduction of exploitation. The social reproduction of these exploitative labour relations occurs not only in Sicily: labourers in Sicilian olive groves and tomato greenhouses are part of a chain of social reproduction that links back to the home countries of the persons labouring in Sicily. The economic motivation for their participation in the Sicilian agricultural sector is often to support families back in their countries of origin (Beber and Scacco Reference Beber and Scacco2022). This chain of social reproduction extends to the reproduction of the myth and optimism – fostered in people’s country of origin – that Italy and Europe are safe places to work and earn money. Beber and Scacco argue, based on extensive survey and interview data with undocumented migrants in Europe, that despite having some, though varied, knowledge of the hardships and violence of migration journeys from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, individuals remain optimistic that their experience will be different – that they will have ‘better luck’ (Beber and Scacco Reference Beber and Scacco2022). The potential opportunity to earn money in Europe continues to compel people to migrate without legal documentation. Beber and Scacco note that returnees – those who have been deported or had to turn back before arriving in Europe – are often shamed by their families and friends for failing to make the journey. Transnational migrant labour in Sicily is bolstered by social reproduction in the labourers’ countries of origin and in Europe.
In Europe, the myth of European supremacy is socially reproduced. The privilege of Europeanness is upheld as the bastion of civilisation, enlightenment and legal, intellectual and political progress. This contributes to the invisibilisation of migrantised labour. The myth of Europe makes invisible the precarious, hidden, labour that has for centuries fostered European wealth. Comparisons between present-day migration and slavery are not clear-cut, nevertheless racial difference and exploitation have remained consistent (Martins Junior and O’Connell Davidson Reference Martins Junior and O’Connell Davidson2022). Indeed, as a product of colonialism, European and Western modern law reinforces this myth of neutrality, obscuring imperial violence (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1992). Modern law proffers the mythology that the frame of law – that is, modern legal tenets of wage labour, contractual labour relations and participation in the nation-state mediated by legal immigration and citizenship – is not only normal but natural (Marks Reference Marks2009). This creates, as has been discussed above, the invisibilisation of labour through law. Unquestioned, modern law both relies on and reproduces the belief that, if only the right rules are followed and conditions are met, legal rights, including citizenship rights, will be extended. In immigration law, this is demonstrated in the assumption that immigration law can justly deem a person present in any nation-state ‘illegal’ (Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021). Illegality waives recourse to legal protection: the failure of the individual to operate within the bounds of legality deems that individual beyond the protection of law. In labour law, there is an assumption that a labour contract will provide adequate protection according to the rules of contract law. When labourers consent to irregular terms of work and participate in irregular practices, such as claiming unemployment benefits while working (Piro Reference Piro2021), the blame is not placed on the employer or the contract but on the consenting labourer. It is the fault or failure of persons for being caught in undocumented or irregular situations in which they find themselves.
Failure is individualised on to the foreign body, and not recognised as a failure of law when it withholds recognition and protection (Anderson Reference Anderson2019; Reference Anderson2013). Nor is the dependence on exploitative labour linked to a failure of agri-business, agri-food systems or consumption. If labour exploitation were connected to a failure in current market demands and consumption habits, then consumers may have to question the availability of specialty local agricultural products at accessible prices. Italy’s brand of gastronomical excellence, through connection to land and authenticity exemplified in IGP and DOP certification, would be challenged. Italy’s gastro-nationalist identity, and the business, consumer and political interests that rely on this identity (Giusti Reference Giusti2023), demand that the realities of labour exploitation remain obfuscated and silenced.
4 Conclusion
The social reproduction of labour is essential to the functioning of law as we know it. Social reproduction is labour that is subordinate but vitally imbues value into formally recognised work or the product of one’s work. Through invisible labour, unpaid labour, aesthetic labour, immaterial labour and emotional labour, products and experiences are enhanced. The artisanal touch of something being hand-picked or carefully hand-selected, as DOP conditions mandate, can similarly add this enhanced value. Further, socially reproductive labour is labour that repeats and sanctions the dominant frames of law and economics, buttressing our capitalist system. As Adams explores, work is legally recognised through the existence of a contract – a work or employment contract. In labour law, the contract is understood as being the source of the imbalance between employer and employee that the law then seeks to remedy (Adams Reference Adams2022, pp. 393–96). There is little discussion of arrangements and contexts beyond this. Indeed, ‘law’s essential assumptions tend to be internalised, and naturalised—taken for granted when social and legal problems are identified, and solutions to those problems posed’ (Adams Reference Adams2021, pp. 464–65). However, Adams argues that it is the very way that wages are conceptualised and recognised as part of this contractual relationship that excludes the possibility of different wage relations being included in law’s scope. Such is the case with migrant invisibility and illegality: there is no scope or category within labour law or immigrant law as they currently exist to recognise and address the labour that is being carried by these workers. Even the contractual form is complicated, as Piro demonstrates, when workers are savvy in learning how to use and manipulate their work contracts to gain or distribute employment benefits and insurance (Piro Reference Piro2021, pp. 71–73). This is, as Rose (Reference Rose2020) emphasises, how law influences the behaviour of workers and labour markets beyond asserting who is able to access labour protections and who is not. Their racialised, non-citizen, bodies invisibilise their presence, as if working in dangerous, unregulated conditions were natural for persons labelled as ‘migrant’ and ‘irregular’. They are made invisible to the market that seeks out the product of their labour as local, specialty Italian products.
The forms of invisible labour discussed here – socially reproductive labour and migrantised labour – are material but depend on the silent consent to their exploitation. Labourers, producers, consumers, trade unions, corporations and politicians maintain an interest in continuing the status quo, with disparities of power and capital mapped along lines of race, immigration status, gender and gendered forms of labour, socio-economic position and legal literacy. Framing invisible labour as social reproduction, including labour that is hidden as illegalised, migrantised and feminised illustrates the vast infrastructure of work that is carried out beyond the frame of legally formal market labour and employment relations. This work exists beyond the confines of labour and employment law and is fundamental to the social and economic reproduction of capital. The fact that this work continues to remain invisible points to the inability of the dominant legal frame to recognise what occurs beyond a limited legal lens. The creative ways in which labourers, trade unions and producers use legal tools to maintain irregular conditions also demonstrate that the dominant legal frame is constantly being mobilised and subverted.
As practitioners, writers, teachers and theorists of law, it is insufficient to look for quick fixes and easy solutions. There is no three-step plan that can be given to a labour lawyer, because the problem lies in the form within which labour law operates. Despite decades of discussions on social reproduction, traditionally women’s work remains devalued in the market economic system. Yet other frames exist, including addressing work and labour as a complex, material practice that starts from material experience rather than a definition of ‘work’ or ‘employment’. The materiality of labour is where law and value originate. Making invisibilised labour visible necessitates a different lens to prevent that visibility from being co-opted into the same modern legal system that dictates hierarchical value to waged labour. A different lens involves a plural understanding of work, labour and value; it involves relationality as an intrinsic part of labour and the reproduction of the social as it is happening, rather than the sociopolitical as it contributes to the liberal democratic nation-state. This means that understanding work and labour goes beyond organising labour in the traditional sense. What is valued and given value needs to come from lived experience and practice, not theory or market financial systems. As scholars have noted, a lens of social reproduction contains the imperative to rethink what ‘social’ is being reproduced, thinking beyond existing legal categories and limited subjectivities (Mezzadri Reference Mezzadri2019). Exploitation does not need to be reproduced. Farm workers could be paid a decent, living wage, but this depends on challenging the agri-business oligopoly and mobilising consumers to pay the real costs of high intensity (DOP, IGP) agricultural production.
Labour law necessarily intersects with campaigns for food sovereignty, agricultural transformation and consumer awareness. A different lens will involve questioning and refusing to disconnect food production and food quality from labour conditions and standards. Commonly, food and consumer consumption (the experience of buying groceries and produce) are detached from the people who work in the greenhouses, farms, processing facilities and distribution warehouses, both psychologically and in terms of an understanding of the fair payment of wages for work (Castellani Reference Castellani and Proglio2023). This further reproduces the exploitation of farm and greenhouse workers. The fragmentation of the relationship between food that is consumed, and its production, leaves a gap that seems to be filled by a consumer’s search, or an idealisation, of/for originality and simplicity – that is, the place of origin speciality Italian/Sicilian products. This search for authenticity in food products, olives and tomatoes is similar in pursuit to the search for recognition, resolution and justice in law, particularly labour law. As critical legal scholars have explored, law cannot fulfil the myth of its omnipotence, particularly when the limits of legal categories are drawn at the borders of sovereign nation-states, defined by economic market strength and Western liberal ideals of exclusive citizenship (Tataryn Reference Tataryn2021). Yet is there hope in law? This question, for me, is not the starting point. The starting point is what is happening socially and materially, in the experience of persons living and labouring in each place and time (Baobab Experience 2024). Then, law responds, plurally, to what is happening in sociality without expecting sociality to conform to one framework. Labour and the food that is both produced and consumed are especially important as activities of being in sociality and (re)producing this sociality.
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