Chinese immigrants face long night work in Italian
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-12-13 08:37

Thousands of Italy's Chinese immigrants face long hard nights, working under the glare of neon lights in sweat shop-style small clothing factories.

A Chinese woman works in a Carpi, Italy factory in November 2004. Thousands of Italy's Chinese immigrants face long hard nights, working under the glare of neon lights in sweat shop-style small clothing factories. [AFP]

But now in the northern Italian textiles district of Carpi, the local authorities are seeking to bring the moonlighting under control, after a mushrooming in the number of Chinese workers in Italy from 16,000 to 100,000 since the year 2000.

"We can not force them to come into line, but we offer them explanations, services," said Stefano Borsari, the head of the Spinner Point project, which is leading the fight against a black-market labour force.

Spinner Point is pioneering a unique scheme, setting up a group of mediators to try to get clothing companies to come into line.

But they admit they face an uphill task, as about 15 percent of the Chinese workers are living in Italy illegally, while 30 percent have no work contracts.

The group of three economists, two sociologists and three Chinese mediators, have, with the help of funds from the European Union, published bilingual leaflets, laying out Italian legislation.

And they have forged contacts with some 9,000 small textiles companies in Carpi, which lies near northwestern Italy's city of Modena.

Unlike in the rest of Europe, the Chinese immigrants have gone into the textiles processing, rather than the restaurant and catering sector.

"They came to Italy to earn money, not to have a good time, and that means they allow themselves to be exploited," said Borsari.

Here, in this Italian textiles stronghold where some 1,500 small companies are fighting for the foreign wholesale market, the factories employing Chinese workers offer the same kind of cut-prices and flexible deadlines companies as in China itself -- thanks to working through the night.

"We work when the goods arrive. Then we rest," Jiang Kong Fu, the vice president of Modena's Chinese community told AFP solemnly in pidgen Italian, as he showed AFP around one small business.

Small vans pulled up in relay during the evening, underlining the nocturnal nature of orders.

"It is tiring," said Shan En Li, the pregnant owner of the factory, who lives on the spot with her husband and two young children.

In the large, airy, well-lit space up to six Chinese workers were bent over industrial knitting machines, making the sleeves, the backs and fronts of pullovers.

Only mattresses rolled up under the table revealed the tiring nature of the work.

And the workers, who hail from Zhejiang in southern China, have become part and parcel of the local community, filling jobs young Italians do not want to have.

"To throw them all out, as some would like, is a bit difficult. We do not have the army to patrol and some Italian textiles businessman tell use that without the Chinese, they might have to close their businesses," said deputy mayor Alberto Allegretti.

"We have asked for more controls, but we also have tried to find a realistic attitude. Today the tension has decreased," he said.

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