Italy’s tomato-export boom depends on exploited migrant labor.

Evidence

This reliance on a stratum of unfree and subjugated people, racially marked as inherently violable, is crucial to lowering production costs. Consider Italy’s tomato-sauce export business, which peaked at 4.4 billion euros (4.62 billion) in sales in 2022, making Italy the third largest exporter after the United States and China. The fancy cans you find in supermarkets worldwide rely heavily on migrant workers who labor more than twelve hours a day, earn 3 euros (3.40) for 300 kilos (660 pounds) of tomatoes, and often die from heat exhaustion. They endure inhumane working conditions in which fires break out in their lodgings and burn people alive every summer. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 260

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Concrete Italian case anchoring Mattei’s reserve-army argument — useful to pair with the reader’s Italy case study.
• XREF: Italian case data — the reader plans to trace austerity’s class discipline through Italy specifically.