Toffanin’s book offers an innovative and insightful contribution to global and Italian labour history, by considering the theme of homework in Italy, and particularly the case study of homeworkers in the area of Riviera del Brenta, in the north-eastern Italian region of Veneto. The author shows how homework was and continues to be fundamental for capitalist production, and how women’s underpaid and devalued homework – together with unpaid domestic work – constituted the backbone of Veneto’s economic miracle and dispersed urbanisation from the late 1950s onwards, assuring the reproduction of male breadwinners while at the same time providing a reserve army of labour among women, who were mainly producing textiles or shoes for export. This gendered division of labour, according to the author, was functional to the needs of capitalist production, but also benefited the Italian state, limiting its welfare costs. At the same time, homework reproduced the patriarchal norm of women’s confinement to the private sphere. The condition of homeworkers, according to Toffanin, can be seen as an ‘icon of subalternity’, not only in Italy but globally, since it reflects women’s subordination to the needs of home and family. The invisibility and lack of social protection for homeworkers, therefore, is treated in the book as a constitutive aspect of global capitalism. This is aptly pointed out in the first chapter, in which the author underlines the global character of homework, in dialogue with the international literature on this theme. Piece-rate home-based manufacturing is in fact a form of production that is widespread both in industrialised and industrialising countries, as it currently accounts for approximately 300 million homeworkers across the globe (p. 23).
The first chapter, thus, places homework within the global history of industrial production, emphasising its gendered aspects and its complementarity to factory work. The second chapter investigates the position of female workers in Italy from a historical perspective, from the beginning of the industrial revolution to widespread Fordist industrialisation in the 1970s, up to the recent processes of neo-liberal delocalisation to Eastern Europe and Asia. The author emphasises how patriarchal culture led to a spatial segregation of female workers, fostering homework across the country. The third chapter situates homework in different regional contexts, from northern to southern Italy. It also describes how poisonous materials were commonly used among homeworkers, generating a wide range of occupational diseases and disabilities. The chapter also explores the debates concerning the status of homeworkers that took place within the trade unions, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Union of Italian Women (UDI) in the 1960s and 1970s, pointing to the limits of public interventions in terms of protective legislation regarding homework. The fourth and last chapter describes the case study of Riviera del Brenta, a region characterised by widespread small-scale industrialisation and by shoe production, which employed several thousand women as homeworkers. The last chapter includes several sections dedicated to the voices of shoemakers, whom the author interviewed in two phases, in 1998 and from 2012 to 2015.
According to Toffanin, a specific combination of economic paternalism, patriarchal culture and industrialisation manifested itself in the shoe industry of Riviera del Brenta, which employed entire families, and which became one of the few options available for married women with children, with low educational background, who were pushed by the family of origin and by their reproductive tasks after marriage to take up homework. Young women generally learnt shoemaking as unpaid apprentices, from older women, through a gendered form of labour socialisation. Homeworkers abstained from taking up formal factory work outside the home, due to occasional bad experiences in the factory (power hierarchies and sexual harassment), but also because they had witnessed male factory workers’ alienation. Homework, instead, was associated with the perception of being autonomous from the bosses, managing one’s own labour time in the safe space of the home. However, according to the author, due to the low-paid piece rates and the intensity of the tasks, homeworkers ended up in a cycle of self-exploitation, which forced them to adopt a very tight schedule in order to combine productive and reproductive work. Care tasks (cleaning, childcare, cooking) occupied most of the day, so that homeworkers often took up piecework shoemaking at night, working up to 14 hours a day. With the economic crisis of 2008, and the on-going global outsourcing of shoe production, home-based shoemaking practically disappeared from this region, further marginalising women’s contribution to the success of fashion items Made in Italy.
The volume has the merit of highlighting an under-researched aspect of women’s labour in Italy. The economic and sociological analyses are rich and supported by a wide range of statistics, policy documents and historical material. The author’s thesis of homeworkers’ subalternity to capital, patriarchy and the state, however, means that women’s life narratives, while evoked in the title of the volume, are less prominent within the book. Women’s affective investments in productive and reproductive work are often equated with alienation and limited life choices, so that our understanding of homeworkers’ subjectivity and agency remains limited. The interviewees’ quest for autonomy through homework, or the fact that they encouraged their daughters to study and to ‘emancipate themselves from any form of dependency from the male gender’, are thus cast into the background, whereas they are deserving of further investigation.
