In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Living It on the Skin An institution, even an economy, is complete and fully viable only if it is durably objectified not only in things . . . but also in bodies. —Pierre Bourdieu (1990) It was the spirit of capitalism made flesh. —Upton Sinclair (1906) It seems that Italian offices are, in reality, sick from mobbing. —Barbara Ardù (1999) Mobbing’s endangerment to health has been foundationally part of its national and transnational circulation, as in Italy’s minister of health’s proclamation that cigarette smoking and mobbing were among Italy’s top national health problems in 2000 (La Repubblica 2000b); and the 2001 european Parliament resolution which called attention to the effect of mobbing on workers’ health (Mobbing in the Workplace, A5-0283, 2001). These high-profile political actions reiterated and established a greater legitimacy for the notion that mobbing is indeed imperiling the health of workers, and in quite grave ways. But even though attention focused on mobbing as something that correlates with poor health, mobbing had not been distinguished from other work-induced factors for poor health, such as stress. So when, in 2003, the state occupational insurance agency, INAIL, codified a new illness, organizational coercion pathology (oCP), that resulted from mobbing, the terrain shifted dramatically (INAIL 2003).1 In less than ten years, mobbing had become not only a salient way of describing a set of vexing practices within the work environment, but also a psychological and physical medical pathology that could be grounds for workers compensation. While there was clear evidence that mobbing has consequences for workers’ health, such bare facts did not necessarily mean that it would become an institutionalized and codified way of engaging with the state. Workers’ bodily symptoms, bolstered by the robust authority of medical knowledge , allowed subjects to know mobbing, and they became a stable indicator of an otherwise elusively defined labor practice. The mobbing-related occupational illness oCP grants workers new discursive pathways and institutional mechanisms to critique neoliberalism and their own devaluation, while also 108 Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy resulting in both increased state monitoring and demands for biological proof for all claims. Mobbing, already linked to vast neoliberal economic changes and Italy’s historical labor protections, has become inextricably tied to bodies and health. The medicalization of mobbing has expanded the potential for workers to receive benefits and resources, even as it produced new structures of state surveillance that limited such possibilities. As workers struggle to define an agent behind their ill health, the body’s everyday breakdown becomes a way of knowing one’s subjectivity as a worker and a citizen. Quite ironically , then, precisely at a moment when the post-industrial workplace poses less visible physical risks, “health becomes the locus for discourses on civilian versus state rights and responsibilities” (Maceachen 2000: 323). The management of health becomes a vital technique of neoliberal governance, as Nikolas Rose suggests: In the name of social and personal wellbeing a complex apparatus of health and therapeutics has been assembled, concerned with the management of the individual and social body as a vital national resource and the management of “problems of living” made up of techniques of advice and guidance, medics, clinics, guides and counselors. (1996: 37) What this also requires and what has been critical in the making of oCP are a variety of specialized experts who manage the problem of mobbing. These specialized knowledge producers, concentrated in the medical field, play a role in creating the ways in which worker-citizens can interact with the state. I have so far maintained that mobbing represents a clash, a way of mapping the disjunctures between and complex simultaneity of neoliberal labor reform, precariousness, and welfare state safeguards and protection. But the issue of oCP sheds light on how the duality of the state produces unpredictable and often negative effects for citizens. As neoliberalism becomes intimate and embodied for Italian workers, it requires a renegotiation of the relationship between worker-citizen and state. But neoliberalism is not the only political discourse and ideology in effect here. Cultural understandings about the role of the state in safeguarding the bodies of worker-citizens are informed by a unique friction between neoliberalism, the protectionist welfare state, and Italy’s fascist past, which has produced historical conditions and institutional structures in which work is closely related to and measured in terms of bodily health. oCP became a way not just to medicalize forms of work harassment, but also to pathologize what was fast becoming...

Share