You may have seen this photo on the news and the whole thing’s being framed as a ‘race war’ between Bulgarian workers and Italian residents, so, for context:
This is Mondragone, a city near Naples, in the South of Italy.
There’s still a strong mafia presence in that area.
The local mafia (camorra) has teamed up with the Bulgarian mafia to bring cheap seasonal workers to Italy for the summer months.
Most of those workers come from the same region of Bulgaria and many are Romani.
Some choose - or have to - come with their families, so that women and children also end up working in the fields.
The minimum salary in Italy is around 8 EUR per hour (about $9).
MIgrant workers in Mondragone work for much less than that: men get 3 to 4 EUR, women 1 to 2 EUR and minors 0.5 to 0.75 EUR.
(One reason salaries are so low is that supermarkets are keeping produce prices artificially low to increase their margins.)
That doesn’t account the ‘fee’ collected by their ‘boss’ (some are Italian, others Bulgarian), which is around 5 EUR.
They also need to pay rent - most of them live in condemned buildings owned and rented out illegally by Italian citizens.
They normally work 12-hour days.
Many develop health issues because they’re breathing in and touching pesticides for hours, every day, and they don’t have access to toilets or running water.
Two years ago we learned some of the migrant children were being sold for sex work - the clients were mostly Italian men.
The investigation never went anywhere, nobody was ever arrested.
Now they found a few dozen cases of coronavirus in this community, and the authorities attempted to enforce a quarantine.
Which means no work and no salary.
Some of the migrant workers protested in the streets.
The far-right is now organizing, or riding on, crowds of exasperated residents who fear the virus will spread and blame the migrants themselves for the entire situation.
The local government (centre-left) is threatening to lock down the entire town; for now, they’re sending the army to ensure no one comes out of the buildings where the migrant workers live.
So tl;dr this is not a race war. It’s the inevitable result of years of systemic failure, corporate greed, political incompetence and the fact that despite everything (despite the Holocaust) we still can’t find a way to include Romani people in our communities and nobody gives a fuck what happens to them.
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