The Opening to the North
From RICHA RD BAILEY TURIN
El VERY day, week in week out, throughout the year some eighty Southern Italians arrive in Turin looking for work. Groups of them are to be seen at all hours standing around in the station thinking out their next move. Apart from their dark complexions and rough clothes the Southerners are easily distinguished by their battered suitcases and cardboard boxes fastened up with rope. For these men the North means work. The 'opening to the Left' may be important to the political life of Italy but for them the opening to the North spells the difference be- tween poverty and the chance of relative affluence.
Few of the new arrivals have to wait long for work. The recruiting agencies that supply the motor and engineering factories are easy to con- tact. Their representatives appear at the railway stations at certain times every day and pick up their quota.
Unlike the unfortunate characters in Visconti's film Rocco and his Brothers who arrived in Milan en famille, the practice generally is for the man of the family to come first and send for his wife and children when he is established. How long this takes is largely a matter of luck. Saving the money for a home is less difficult than actually finding one. The prejudices causing resistance to the entrance of groups of strangers in any community operate very strongly here. Advertisements of flats in the Turin newspapers stipulate Piedmontese families only, or no children, and occasionally and exceptionally 'no Southerners.'
The familiar objections raised against West Indians in Britain seem to apply to the Southerners in Turin. They are said to be noisy and not to keep their houses clean. Landlords complain that they let a room to a quiet, appar- ently respectable young man and then ten others immediately move in with him. And Southerners are said to be given to enjoying life in all its manifestations somewhat at large, and to be unreliable about paying the rent. It is also pointed out that there has been a sharp increase in the crime rate in the past three or four years since the Southerners became more numerous. Never- theless the demand for labour is so far from satisfied that the international agreement under which Italian workers go to work in Switzerland has been suspended for the time being. The influx into Turin, one of the most staid and conservative towns in Italy, has set problems that the author- ities have so far been unable or unwilling to solve. Since 1951 when the last census was taken, the population of Turin has risen by 42 •per cent. and is now around 1,020,000. So far the problem of providing accommodation for the incomers has been left to private enterprise. Not surpris- ingly this takes many forms, not all of them satisfactory.
The general pattern of events, so far as the individual Southerner is concerned, is fairly straightforward. A young-man arriving from the South gets a job either through a friend already in Turin or by giving his name to an agent. There is no need for him to go to the city authorities looking for work, and in fact it is unusual for any able-bodied man to be more than two or three days finding a job. For a start he will live in a boarding-house for which he will pay 10,000 lire here (say £6) a month. For this sum he will get a bed in a room with eight or ten other Southerners, sleeping under dormitory condi- tions. The result, not surprisingly, is that many of the unmarried men scatter their money around on the various forms of entertainment the town now has to offer. Prostitution, which was an extremely discreet activity a few years ago, is now thriving. Venereal disease has increased rapidly and is causing concern to the health authorities. The Piedmontese, the original in- habitants of Turin, suffer from the increase in disorder in their city, and the fact that so much spare money about pushes up prices for every- body.
After the boarding-house stage, what the in- corner does next depends entirely on family circumstances. A man with a wife and one child can get a flat provided he has a job with a long- term contract. This. means that a factory has taken a man on on a permanent basis with annual increments and pension rights. The opposite and, from the point of view of getting accommodation, fatal arrangement is the contrail 'a (ermine, the short-term contract lasting three months. No landlord will let a flat to a man working on this basis. In the past month Southern workers at some of the factories in Turin have been on strike for longer-term contracts. The object was not to get higher wages, but simply to have the basic security of employment needed to get a house. The extraordinary thing about the strike was not that it was successful but that it was fought by men entirely outside the Italian trade union movement.
Not surprisingly a number of rackets have been started to take advantage of the chronic housing shortage. Some furniture dealers offer to find a house for those who buy their furniture from them. 'You buy the furniture, we find the house' is the slogan. The catch is that a whole houseful of furniture must be bought before the house is forthcoming. As most Southerners buy their furniture piecemeal, a chair at a time, the number able to meet an obligation on this scale is small. Unfortunately many of them only realise this after they have committed themselves to a pur- chase that absorbs their savings for a consider- able period.
It used to be said, and widely believed, that the Southern Italian just wanted to lie in the sun all day and do no work. It now appears that given the opportunity to earn money his applica- tion can be just as great as that of the Pied- montese. Indeed many Southerners in Turin are working on two jobs like the 'moonlighters' in the United States. The long tradition of poverty has conditioned them against spending money on luxuries. So the custom is that the wage from the day-time job at the factory goes on rent, food, clothes, and the bit that is put by. The evening job with some small workshop provides the money for the television set or washing machine. Southerners have great difficulty in getting credit, so that hard work to save hard cash is necessary if they are to have their quota of consumer durable goods.
So far the process of integrating the Southerners into an industrial society has been accomplished in a very rough-and-ready way. The big factories find that the incomers soon get the hang of work on the production lines if they are put among experienced men. The Fiat Company, which now makes over half a million cars a year and is reported to be planning to double this rate of output by 1964, is taking in a steady stream of Southern workers.
The big question on the present shift of population in Italy is, will the boom continue? Some Italian economists argue that raising average living standards for the country as a whole will create sufficient demand for all the products of the factories of Turin, Milan and Genoa. Others take the view that what is happen- ing now is simply a period of catching up on past deficiences and once this is over the level of employment will fall again. This is certainly not the opinion of the industrialists of Turin. They argue that, even if the annual rate of growth of the gross national product falls below the present phenomenal 9.2 per cent. it will have to be a long drop to bring back unemployment to the two million mark at which it stood until the mid-1950s. The great problem is that as time goes by it is increasingly difficult for newly arrived Southerners to establish themselves in Turin. But the demand for labour is unsatisfied and the steady flow of eighty or ninety men a day con- tinues. This can have only one result, and every- one here agrees that unless the municipal author- ities waken up to the needs of the situation they may have a very nasty situation on their hands which they may find it difficult to cope with. The thought of this eventuality detracts consider- ably from the enjoyment of the benefits of economic prosperity in Turin.
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