Entering the “plastic factories”. Conflicts and competition in Sicilian greenhouses and packinghouses

By focusing on an agricultural district located in South-Eastern Sicily, the chapter attempts to investigate the conflictual dynamics, carried on by migrant and Italian precarious laborers, emerging everyday inside the workplaces. The chapter hinges on a rich set of ethnographic data, gathered through periods of participant observation within greenhouses and packinghouses, and through semi-structured interviews realized in the so called Transformed Littoral Strip. The text provides, in particular, three examples of conflicts that take place frequently inside the work environments. The first case attempts to illustrate how nationality could be used by the employers as a dispositive in order to stimulate horizontal forms of competition at work. The second example tries to highlight how conflicts could arise among female Italian laborers, equally harnessed by precarious working conditions. Finally, the chapter deals with a situation of competition emerging on the basis of different religious practices. The three examples provided in the text should help to illustrate how conflicts and competition (based on nationality, religion or different hiring conditions inside the same workplace) are structurally produced and reproduced by an agricultural labor market characterized by precariousness and unevenness.