The Unbearable Absence of Women
The presence of women among the logistics workers is quite modest. This indicates a clear choice that has been made regarding the profile of workers employed in the industry. However, when they are present they usually play a leading role in protest and organization, notwithstanding the pressure on them in the workplace and outside it. Women have to struggle with what has been called a triple precariousness: The continual risk of unemployment and the constant threat of losing the residence permit that this implies. For women this can be a very strong threat since most of them have families to care about in their country of origin or where they live; The segregation in law paid and unskilled work sectors or tasks and the pressure from bosses to work faster and longer even when they actually have a second job at home; Amongst many other prejudices against women, they are required to preventively sign the resignation form, which thus enables the bosses to fire them whenever necessary. It is often used as a quick way to settle the issue of maternity leave.
The quickly expanding movement of the logistics workers, that has imported “Tahrir square into the Po valley”, open new interesting points to investigate. Today migration is the most ”natural” condition of living and more than 232 million of people are migrant so that we could almost say that migrants are the «fifth world State», a State that has no fixed borders and for this is politically and globally central.
The relations inside this «fifth world State», or rather this ”migrant State” that has permitted the spread of this protest inside and outside workplace, the new perspectives and expectations of this new path of migration and re-politicization of global spaces, the way in which migrants are both inserted in the production’s processes also trough the regulative EU migration’s policies are all central issues to read correctly the present day in its global meaning.
