Investigating Occupational Migrants’ Health in the Italian Agricultural Sector

Drawing on ethnographic data collected within the multidisciplinary project InMigrHealth, Investigating Migrant Occupational Health, this presentation offers a comparative analysis of two different agricultural fields in North and South Italy: the Prosecco wine valley in Veneto, and the Transformed Littoral Strip (TLS) the largest tomato greenhouses in Sicily. In both regions, migrant gendered workforces are exposed to heavy, poorly paid and dangerous agricultural work. Veneto’s famous Prosecco DOC wine valley is a well-known Unesco World Heritage site, however migrants’ labour exploitation and soil erosion caused by monoculture cultivation seem not to be so visible. As for Sicily, the tomato greenhouses of Ragusa which employ formal and informal labor force from Eastern European, Asian and African countries are mostly known for their deseasonalized vegetable production. In this presentation, by adopting a comparative perspective, we engage with ‘occupational health’ as a structurally asymmetrical relationships between capital holders and the workforce. We ask: How do working conditions impact migrants’ health? How are variables such as nationality, gender, ethnicity legal status, age rendered visible? This presentation delves into the social construction of health-related risks for migrant workers at discursive and practical levels as well as the reproduction of hierarchies and inequalities by offering an analysis of three different dynamics: (i) the naturalization and invisibilization of risk in agricultural work and the possible resistance strategies put forward by migrants; (ii) the construction of gendered identities within the agricultural sector and the impact of the gendered division of labor in the fields and greenhouses and on workers’ health; (iii) the invisibilization of health risks through how 'safety' is "regulated" in intensive agriculture by global standards related to the food safety of consumers rather than workers.