A shipyard is like a big factory, a tangle of cranes as tall as five-story buildings, sheds and dry docks. This is how the Fincantieri shipyards in Marghera appear as you cross the Mestre bridge, the one that tens of thousands of tourists take every day to visit the city of Venice. Ironically, large cruise ships are built here, of the kind that provoke the ire of residents when they enter the Giudecca Canal, towering over St Mark’s Basilica. When I visited in January, a nineteen-deck, 153,000-ton giant was taking shape. In the still hollow steel structure, ‘il condominio’, as the central body is called, had been assembled. With overlapping balconies and a panoramic rotunda, it actually looked like an apartment block. A crane was laying the last prefabricated pieces. Inside, hundreds of carpenters, welders, grinders, painters, cable and pipe-layers were at work. Soon the electricians and interior finishers would spring into action.
The shipyards at Maghera are a case study of what exploitation looks like in an age of precarious, mobile and transnationalized labour. Over the last quarter century, the European shipbuilding industry has suffered at the hands of East Asian competitors, first South Korean then Chinese. Shipyards in many countries were drastically downsized, when not simply shuttered. The Italian firm Fincantieri, however, has held up. It is currently the fourth largest shipbuilder in the world, with eight production sites in Italy, and another dozen scattered across Norway, Romania, Vietnam, Brazil and the United States (where it works on military orders). Majority-owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Fincantieri’s continued success has in part been thanks to technological innovation, as well as know-how in constructing cruise ships not yet replicated by its competitors. But a major factor is the way it has reorganized its production processes. Since the 1990s, it has cut three-quarters of its employees and outsourced production to other companies, according to a super-flexible system.
From the welding of the first hull plates to applying the final touches to the interior fittings, at least a thousand people work on a Fincantieri ship. Few of them, however, are Fincantieri employees; the majority are recruited from contractors and subcontractors. As of December 2023, the company claimed to employ just over 21,000 people, 11,000 of which at its Italian sites. Comparable figures for contract workers are hard to find, but one 2020 company report refers to 2,415 contracting firms in Italy, with 41,000 employees. As of January, in Marghera there were 1,052 direct employees with between 4,200 and 4,500 contract workers, depending on the orders of the moment. In Monfalcone, near Trieste, where Fincantieri is headquartered, there are about 1,700 direct employees with 6,800 from contractors.
‘At this point, Fincantieri is little more than a brand’, Fabio Querin tells me, a former shipyard worker who is now a leader of the Venice Metropolitan CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro). Direct employees, he explains, are mostly limited to supervision and support, while actual production is outsourced. This system of contracting has at least three layers: each ship is broken down into several parts that Fincantieri entrusts to one or more companies, which then usually subcontract part of the work to other companies, which in turn often enlist others to get the work done on time. In Marghera, there are hundreds of such companies: some large consortia operating at multiple sites, some firms of just a few people, which spring up, disappear and are reborn under another name at great speed.
It will come as no surprise that while direct employees have full-time, permanent positions, with all the benefits provided by labour laws, contracted workers typically do not. The further down the contracting and subcontracting hierarchy, the more short-term and precarious the role. And there is an ethnic character to these divisions. Direct employees are mostly native Italians. Even among contract workers, Italians are usually in the most skilled positions. Then come Eastern Europeans, working in specialized jobs (electrical systems workers, for example). At the bottom of the ladder, the riskiest and poorly paid work is reserved for Bangladeshis.
I spoke to several workers at the nearby Venetian Chamber of Labour, where the view from the window is dominated by an overhead crane with a Fincantieri sign on it. My interlocutors were all no more than 30 years old; some had been in Italy for a long time and handle the language better, others are recent arrivals. One from Bangladesh, M., described months spent sanding and bevelling sheet metal in the poorly ventilated bottom of the hull. ‘It is the hardest work and the least paid. It raises a lot of dust, you breathe it even if you have a mask. At night you have a black nose. One gets worn out. You work like that for 20 years, and you lose your health’. Currently a welder for a contracting company, M. first worked in the shipyards six years ago as a carpenter’s assistant. ‘I was getting 5 euros an hour’, he recalls. The employer was also from Bangladesh and worked as a subcontractor. ‘To make a thousand euros a month I had to do at least 200 hours. But I agreed, what could I do: I needed the contract to renew my residence permit.’
It is during these conversations that I first heard about ‘paga globale’. ‘That’s how it works: when you work you get paid, otherwise nothing: no vacation or sick time’. The firm must appear to abide by legal agreements over conditions: the statutory metalworkers’ contract, for example, provides 173 hours a month, 1,350 euros in basic pay and surcharges for overtime or night work, as well as paid vacation and sick leave. The subcontractor’s pay cheques appear legitimate at first glance. But fewer hours are marked than those worked, with no surcharges for overtime or night work. Deductions appear for absences that never occurred, leave never taken; there is recovery of advances that were never paid. In the end, nine hundred or a thousand euros a month are left, for a person who has worked ten or even twelve hours a day. Sometimes the company pays a regular wage but forces the worker to return part of it in cash.
‘Everything appears to be in order: however, it does not correspond to the truth’, explains Querin. It is ‘a system of tax and social security evasion, and a theft from the worker. They steal his salary, pension, even the possibility of receiving unemployment benefits when the contract ends.’ Arguing is impossible: ‘The owner would say: sign and leave, if you don’t like it I’ll fire you’, M. told me.
These conditions persist because workers, especially immigrant workers, are highly vulnerable to blackmail. A labour contract is necessary to obtain and renew a residence permit. Immigrant workers usually must send money back to their family, perhaps pay debts, and so do not have the luxury of turning down a job even if conditions are bad. Research conducted by Al Amin Rabby has revealed how networks among Bangladeshi workers are both a source of control as well as support: they make it possible to find work thanks to more established compatriots who may even run their own micro-business; they may rent out accommodation. Marghera is a hostile environment: it is very difficult for a foreign-born worker to find housing, and they are usually confined to the most run-down areas: many end up renting beds in overcrowded apartments, or have to go into inland municipalities, which then means long bus rides to work. But anyone who makes a fuss is frowned upon: although few know what a union really is, they know that making trouble means risking your job.
Monfalcone, a city of 30,000 near Trieste, could be called the company-town of Fincantieri. Its shipyards generate more than half of its economic activity. Today workers from Bangladesh and their families make up about one-third of the residents, yet it has been an inhospitable place for them. The former mayor, Anna Maria Cisint, built her electoral fortune with a fierce campaign against ‘ethnic substitution’, supported by the Northern League and then by Fratelli d’Italia. She had benches removed from squares to discourage gathering in public places, and went so far as to close mosques, prayer rooms and cultural centres. Legal challenges and protests followed (Fincantieri notably remained silent). The controversy made international headlines, partly because of the obvious contradiction: the company depends on the labour of Bangladeshis yet they are ‘unwanted’ in the company-town. Yet perhaps this is less of a contradiction than it appears. Indeed, perhaps this is precisely what the company needs: blackmailed, disciplined workers forced to accept hostile conditions.
No system of blackmail, however, is absolute. In recent years, workers of various nationalities took their grievances over unpaid wages and unrecognized hours to the Venice Metropolitan CGIL. ‘It seemed clear to us that these were not individual cases, but a real system based on underpaid labour’, explains Michele Valentini, secretary of the Venice Metalworkers’ Federation. In 2018 the CGIL collected documents and testimonies and filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office. In March 2023 the Venice court indicted 26 people, including Fincantieri officials and the owners of several contracting firms. The indictment concerns the conditions of nearly two thousand workers; charges include exploitation, fraud and bribery.
A trial is a rather technical and boring thing, but sometimes it cuts through: as when, this April, workers testified in a public hearing. The local press reported with a stir that in the renowned shipyards people work for only five euros an hour. In September, the hearings continued, with more damning testimony. Beyond individual cases, the magistrates are faced with a basic question: did Fincantieri know? Is it jointly responsible for the violations carried out by the firms it contracts?
Fincantieri denies this of course. Yet they could not possibly have been unaware, Querin insists. ‘There is strict control in the shipyards. All workers, including those on contracts, have a magnetic badge to enter the shipyard, access the locker room, then the work area, the canteen: every break, every move is recorded, the company always knows where each person is and how many hours they work.’ Squeezing every worker to the bone is no oversight. According to the Sabatini Foundation, a research centre close to the GGIL, a worker employed directly by Fincantieri costs an average of €55,000 per year, compared to €30-35,000 for a contract worker – a saving of at least €20,000 per worker per year, to be multiplied by tens of thousands. The Sabatini research also examines the internal organization of work: a ship is broken down into the individual parts, and for each part the production time and costs are estimated. In other words, the parent company knows in detail how many man-hours it takes to build each element of its ship, so it can accurately estimate how much each individual contract is worth. That is, when it imposes lower costs, it also knows that the pressured contractor will fall back on the workers. Since contractors are often hired on an exclusive basis, and are therefore unable to work with other firms, if they lose the order they are finished; they too are under blackmail.
A few months ago, Fincantieri announced that it had been awarded the title of top employer for the third year in a row, an accolade meant to reward a company that cares about the well-being of its employees. Its website shows well-dressed and smiling workers. The company statement makes no mention of the super-exploited workers whose job it is to build its ships.
Read on: Matteo Pucciarelli, ‘Salvini Ascendant’, NLR 116/117.