Giulia Blasi is a writer and activist based in Rome, and the author of the feminist primer “Manuale per ragazze rivoluzionarie” (Rizzoli, 2018) and “Rivoluzione Z” (Rizzoli, 2020).
ROME — As Italian political leaders go, Aboubakar Soumahoro shouldn’t work. Yet somehow, he does.
In the age of soundbites and Twitter-sized pronouncements, the outspoken labor activist speaks in long, looping sentences. He is fond of quoting French philosophers and African poets. Where others strip their message down to a few talking points and thrive on division and turf wars, Soumahoro insists on acknowledging complexity and calling for unity.
He’s also black — “tanned,” he says of himself, with more than a hint of irony — in a country afflicted by deep-seated structural racism that still largely goes unacknowledged. A country that has never looked up to a black political activist before — much less one that talks of collective happiness and routinely speaks out against the evils of capitalism.
And yet on a hot summer day in July, Soumahoro stood on a stage in Rome’s iconic piazza San Giovanni delivering closing remarks to a half-day-long workers’ rally.
If his core message could be distilled, it would be this: The pandemic did not break the system. The system was already broken, and the pandemic simply shone a light on its fundamental injustice.
The gathering was cheekily named Stati Popolari, a riff on an Italian government meeting a couple of weeks earlier at which Soumahoro chained himself to the gates of Villa Doria Pamphili to demand a meeting with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. It had been thrown together in a matter of days and yet was an undeniable success, drawing a major crowd despite the prevailing wariness over public gatherings.
For Soumahoro, the event was the culmination of years of incessant campaigning, and it cemented his role as the voice of the voiceless and advocate of underpaid field hands, domestic workers and delivery drivers.
If his core message could be distilled, it would be this: The pandemic did not break the system. The system was already broken, and the pandemic simply shone a light on its fundamental injustice. Whether you’re a farmworker or an architect, we’re all just cogs in the machine and no amount of emergency stimulus money can change that. The only way out is to organize.
When we spoke on the phone, a few days later, he said the greatest difficulty was getting started.
“Any path that might lead to some form of awareness is stigmatized and brought back to known structures, the existing economic paradigm and the model of society it engenders,” he said. “Our current economic model generates profit and maximizes discomfort: These are two sides of the same coin, rooted in the ideology of greed.”
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Soumahoro, until recently the leader of the USB field workers’ union, first stepped into the spotlight in 2018, after a fellow union worker, Soumaila Sacko, was shot and killed while trying to procure sheet metal in an abandoned site. He had been trying to build a shelter for other workers.
Soumahoro led a crowdfunding initiative to send Sacko’s body back to his homeland, Mali, for burial. The success of the operation gave him a platform, which he used to raise awareness about the abysmal condition of field hands in the Italian countryside.
Little is known about Soumahoro’s life, and he appears to be wary of sharing details, perhaps in fear of being cast as yet another pop icon of Italy’s perpetually stranded political left.
Born in the Ivory Coast, he came to Italy in his late teens to study sociology at Federico II University in Naples, and for a time he supported himself by working in the fields. These days he tours the country talking to agricultural laborers and field hands, as part of his ongoing campaign to shine a light on the problems of that community.
In Italy, the agricultural workforce is largely composed of people whose background or lack of documentation makes it impossible for them to find employment elsewhere. Italy’s strict immigration laws — which became even stricter during far-right leader Matteo Salvini’s brief tenure as interior minister from June 2018 to September 2019 — prohibit migrants living on Italian soil from working a regular job. For most, it becomes a Catch-22 situation: They can’t get a job because they don’t have a permit, and they can’t get a permit because they don’t have a job.
A demonstrator at a march organized by the USB field workers’ union in June 2018 | Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
Undocumented migrants are easily exploited by unscrupulous employers. At the start of Italy’s COVID-19 outbreak in March, an estimated 150,000 migrants were working in the Italian countryside, picking fruit and vegetables for a salary of €20 to €30 per day, off the books. The workers’ inability to report to the authorities leaves them vulnerable to violence and abuse, and their living conditions are often extremely precarious.
Faced with a predicted shortage of seasonal workers caused by the lockdown and the risk of a severe outbreak among those unable to safely shelter in place, the government in early May drafted and later vetted a bill granting temporary residency to all so-called “irregular” migrants, on condition that they find a job within six months.
Soumahoro greeted the move with skepticism. “In the midst of a pandemic, the government feels that it needs to tie the ability to save and protect immigrants to their usefulness in harvesting fruit and vegetables in our fields, when the duty of a government is to protect everyone,” he said.
Linking a person’s right to a permit to the number of boxes of produce they can pick is proof of deep “cynicism,” he added.
“We have become convinced that the only way to do our jobs is by exploiting somebody else; that the only path to our happiness is through the restriction of other people’s freedom” — Aboubakar Soumahoro
Instead, Soumahoro is advocating for better quality checks on the country’s food production, which he said currently has an “ethical problem.”
“People should be able to eat clean food, produced in a way that is respectful of the right to fair pay and social security,” he said. “No one can work under the summer sun for €3.50 per hour. That’s impossible, we cannot let that happen. In the same way that we cannot allow people who delivered food to our homes during the lockdown — and all riders — to be paid under the current contractual conditions, and the same goes for supermarket staff.”
The problem, he said, broadening the scope of our conversation, is that the economic system and our collective unwillingness to move away from what we’ve always known.
“We need to decolonize our mindset from what we have been taught is the only certainty, the only model for life and relationships,” he said. “We have become convinced that the only way to do our jobs is by exploiting somebody else; that the only path to our happiness is through the restriction of other people’s freedom.”
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The July rally in Rome was Soumahoro’s first attempt at having this wider, more inclusive discussion on a large scale. Where his focus was previously narrowly trained on migrant workers, he now talks about “all workers.” Everyone participates in the same system of oppression, he says, but we are discouraged from cooperating with each other in favor of an individualistic focus on improving our own wealth.
“We need to redefine the concept of ‘us,’” he told me. “We came out of Stati Popolari with a manifesto for freedom, justice and happiness. We need to work on the issues and formulate a proposal, and this proposal should come out of a collective effort.”
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the establishment of the Field Workers’ League, the union Soumahoro founded after his departure from USB. Older, more established unions are suspicious of Soumahoro’s devotion to Giuseppe Di Vittorio, a politician and union leader he often cites as an inspiration and to whom he dedicated the new union.
In an interview with daily newspaper Il Manifesto, Cgil’s secretary-general, Giovanni Mininni, had harsh words for Soumahoro’s project, slamming him for appropriating a public figure and for claiming to have done something new in the history of Italian unions.
The criticism doesn’t appear to have slowed Soumahoro’s momentum or narrowed the scope of his ambition. His hope for the movement, he says, is for it to act as “a training ground for ideas, which becomes a training ground for action.”
The ultimate goal, he says, “is happiness.”