Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy: Mobbing, Well-Being, and the Workplace

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. In Padua, local parts of the city are designated “the Casbah,” “the Bronx,” and “Africa,” indexing where many immigrants sell goods or live (Colatrella 2001: 326). Many Paduan youth who attend the university and commute to the city talk openly about their disgust or fear of the train station, a visible contact point for ethnic Italians and immigrant communities. 2. Still, there have been publications in english that adopt the term mobbing (e.g., Davenport, Schwartz, and elliott 1999; Spindel 2008; Westhues 2008; Atkinson 2009). 3. Neoliberalism, understood as a global historical process shaped by specific market-oriented economic policies, has become increasingly dominant since the 1970s (Barry et al. 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Sandbrook et al. 2007). Beginning in the 1970s, “free market fundamentalists” Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek helped to disseminate notions of radical neoliberalism in europe and the United States (Sandbrook et al. 2007: 213; Berend 2006: 275). Neoliberalism ideologies, which oppose most forms of state intervention , regulation, and ownership (Berend 2006: 275), sustain a view that “selfregulating ” markets will “resolve problems of destitution, joblessness and insecurity ” (Sandbrook et al. 2007: 15). 4. The two-tier phenomenon is shaped by what Saskia Sassen has called “bipolarity” in employment regimes: “a demand for highly specialized and educated workers alongside a demand for basically unskilled workers whether for clerical, service, industrial service, or production jobs” (1998: 146). Long-term workers , however, do not always fall within Sassen’s first category. 5. In the early 1990s, championing the ideology of family and hard work and positioned against notions of southern indolence and criminality, the party initially began as a movement for the independence of northern Italy as the Republic of Padania. Refashioned as Italy’s pro-federalist party rather than a separatist party, the Northern League opposes heavy taxation, support for southern Italy, and immigration (Colatrella 2001: 316; Tambini 1996; Ardizzoni 2005: 515). Party leader Umberto Bossi’s speeches often construct the North as more “european” than “backward” and “bureaucratic” Rome (Tossutti 2001: 69). 6. Hardt and Negri refer to “informatization” as a process including the use of new technologies, the robust growth of the service sector, and the expansion of immaterial labor (see Castells 1996). Though I draw from radical political theorists such as Hardt and Negri, I do not impute to capital its own intentionality or, more critically, inevitability. The state, theorized by anthropologists as only appearing to be a distant and distinctive entity, is shaped by and part 170 Notes to pages 11–29 of daily practices and the production of meaning (e.g., Scott 1985; Steinmetz 1999; Mitchell 1999; edelman 1999; Gledhill 2000; Gill 2000). 7. The word mobber was used in these instances, though the proper Italian word is mobbizzatore. 8. Biopolitics includes new forms of self-governance deployed to modulate bodily well-being and health (Collier and ong 2005; ong 2006b; Rose 2007), the biological need to control risk (Beck 1992), “ontological security” (Turner 2001), and the biological basis of citizenship (Heath et al. 2002; Rose and Novas 2003; Petryna 2002, 2004). 9. I have used pseudonyms for all of the names and companies in this book. 10. My daily practice in Padua was to take field notes in small notebooks and then extend these notes into full-length descriptions on my computer; in the end, I collected over 500 single-spaced pages as a record of my fieldwork. I also gathered a variety of written documents throughout the months of fieldwork: (1) corporate documents (newsletters, conduct codes, etc.) from human resources or personnel workers that deal with interpersonal relationships in the workplace in general and (if available) with mobbing in particular; (2) published legal bulletins of the european Union and local institutions; (3) news articles primarily from two main newspapers: Corriere della Sera, a national newspaper based in Milan, and Il Gazzettino di Padova, Padua’s main daily newspaper ; (4) union pamphlets, brochures, conference materials, and books on mobbing; and (5) legal and archival materials related to mobbing, labor law, and Italy’s economic development. 1. Toward Neoliberalism 1. I will use either “indefinite time contract” or “lifelong contract” to refer to these contracts. 2. Italy allowed temporary employment for the first time after two european Court of Justice rulings obligated the country to do so (Ferrera and Gualmini 2004: 100). Implementing european recommendations, employment placement centers were to implement a “preventive” approach to the labor market, providing highly trained consultants and electronic data banks in order to...