Private governance, migrant workers, and labour conditions in Southern Italy’s tomato sector

: Effective for whom?

Abstract

Every summer, thousands of migrant farmworkers endure terrible working conditions harvesting Foggia’s tomato fields. In response, between 2019 and 2022, a number of private governance initiatives were introduced, including retail-led auditing schemes, processor-led supply chain agreements, and NGO-led brands. During this period, farmworkers’ conditions significantly improved, with average daily wages growing from €30 to €45. Based on a 9-months long ethnography and 47 qualitative interviews conducted with actors in the processed tomato Global Production Network, this research analyses the relationship between private governance and working conditions. My research finds that despite their coincidence, the initiatives did not lead to the improvement in farmworkers’ conditions. This is because the private governance initiatives suffered from multiple structural, design, and monitoring issues.

Instead, this thesis argues that the improvement in wages and conditions resulted from independent trends in population movements, political struggles, and police controls (the “three Ps”). Changing patterns of human mobility caused a labour shortage. And farmworkers were able to leverage this opportunity to negotiate better conditions thanks to high levels of political militancy and the criminalisation of exploitation in the fields. In these circumstances, what role did the private governance initiatives play? I argue that private governance offered opportunities for tomato companies to defend their falling profit margins. The initiatives enabled firms to mobilise humanitarian values to pursue strategies of product differentiation, inter-firm cooperation, and cost reduction.

Date of Award	10 Dec 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Bridget Anderson (Supervisor) & Manoj N Dias-Abey (Supervisor)