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

4. Feminizing the Inflexible

4 Feminizing the Inflexible The company that bought us has a very precise philosophy: total flexibility. —From I Like to Work: Mobbing (Mi Piace Lavorare: Mobbing, 2004) I want more autonomy, more flexibility. —Giulia, self-identified mobbee You can’t have the keg full and the wife drunk. —Veneto saying Neoliberal work regimes reduce labor costs not only by outsourcing, but also by building and sustaining a growing body of peripheral or semi-permanent labor, often dubbed flexible labor (Harvey 1989; Sennett 1998; Collins 2006). Within the semantic architecture of flexibility is the figure of a pliable, adaptable, docile worker. However, for working-class and middle-class workers in Italy, the idea of flexibility has been reframed, rapidly and publicly, as precariousness: as high risk, estranged, uncertain. From a moral standpoint, the discourse of precariousness casts flexibility as an immoral and intruding social value incompatible with Italian notions of just welfare citizenship and with Fordist orders. Mobbing , if understood as a strategic and covert means to reduce the number of permanent and even semi-permanent employees, would thus be a process able to generate a regime of labor of precariously employed workers. But a close investigation of mobbing shows it to be far more circuitous and less linear, yet consistently gendered. National reports about mobbing and gender vary widely; however, some statistics indicate that as many as one in three Italian women have been mobbed, and 39 percent were mobbed by other women (ANSA 2005b). Researcher elena Ferrara, a contributor to the european Commission’s Daphne Report, dedicated to “raising awareness of women and mobbing,” reports that 62 percent of mobbing victims are women (Ferrara 2004: 21). Like other mobbing literatures, the report em phasizes women’s tendency to mob other women due to jealousy, hypercompetitiveness, and deviance from gender norms. Mobbed women may be denounced as inflexible, unable to follow orders, and incapable of swiftly adapting to corporate regulations such that they become the bulk of Italy’s precarious workforce. That is, the ideal of flexibility is salient in discourses about inappropriate or weak workers even though, at the Feminizing the Inflexible 83 same time, many Italians refuse to recognize and adopt the normative value of flexible labor by deeming labor markets precarious. Not only are Italian women disproportionately excluded from being recognized as flexible, despite the practices they adopt and the work they perform, but, in certain cases, women’s proclaimed desire for work and their willingness to work become grounds to name them as unsuitable and ill adapted to work environments. As the inflexible becomes feminized, mobbed women are then routed into Italy’s so-called flexible workforce where post-mobbing employment is far more likely to be in the form of short-term precarious contracts. Thus, flexible (precarious) workers are produced through discursive constructions and exclusionary mechanisms that proclaim certain workers to be inflexible. Many studies, by contrast, have detailed how women in industrializing nations are considered to be the central figures of flexibility par excellence (Kondo 1990; Mills 1999; Collins 2005). In her study of the sexualization of maquiladora factory workers in Mexico, Leslie Salzinger (2000) reveals how women come to be coveted as workers because of cultural beliefs and discourses that link high productivity and pliability to women workers. Within the global labor force, women’s persistent refashioning as desirable workers is animated by assumptions that their gender “naturally” makes them fit for certain kinds of labor, and “natural” characteristics such as “nimble fingers” are exploited as highly economically valuable (Safa 1981; Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Martin 1992: 113). Carla Freeman, for example, delves into the complexities of how women in Barbados came to be considered ideal and docile data entry workers (2000, 2002). Yet proclamations of and performances of flexibility do not always allow women to achieve social recognition as flexible. even when Italian women both desire and perform flexibility, they are nonetheless labeled as inflexible and excluded , via mobbing, from the workplace. There is an additional doubling within flexibility. According to emilio Reyneri , who examined the contours of Italy’s labor market, the desirable worker must adapt to changing work schedules, entrances and exits from a specific corporation or location, and mobility within the enterprise (2005a: 22). But he suggests that such employment actually erodes workers’ identification and limits their affiliation with corporate production; thus, the very process of being employed in this fashion makes it more difficult to cultivate the “elevated polyvalent professionalism” and changeability that are desired (ibid.: 24). Italy’s...