Four thirty. It’s the alarm time that Hassan sets on his Nokia. One of those with still buttons and no internet. He has a few hours left before he plays. Meanwhile he sleeps on an old mattress without sheets, resting on the floor of an abandoned building. Then the cell phone vibrates. He has to get up and pedal. But above all, hope to be chosen and loaded onto a truck that takes him to work. Underpaid, unregulated, unprotected. At five he arrives at the roundabout next to the business park Great South of Giugliano. He parks his bicycle in the traffic island of via San Francesco a Patria.
He ties her to the guardrail with a rusty chain, crosses and sits on the edge of the roundabout. With him about thirty men, all African and looking for Work. They try their luck. Lady luck for them is the truck driver, who arrives at the collection point, pulls up close to the crowd and chooses how many men to let on. Who to make work. With the same criteria as concentration camp executions: the strongest and fittest get away.
The selection
And so Hassan goes up. He doesn’t know where he will go and what he will do. He doesn’t even know how many hours he will work and how much they will pay him. But the important thing is that they do it, because he needs to survive. Buy food and send some money to your children in Nigeria. Hassan’s truck heads towards Lago Patria. A field of fruit and vegetables awaits him. Tomatoes mostly. He has to collect them and place them in plastic crates, then put them in order for transport to the fruit and vegetable market. Under the non-stop June sun, water and food. But he works trying not to show his fatigue.
The hope is that the “boss” notices him and gives him the opportunity to earn even the next day. And the one after that. As if it were a stable job. But it is only the word that regulates it. Meanwhile the clock strikes midday and he is given a break, even some tomatoes. But those not suitable for sale, rotten or grazed by worms. Hassan eats them, because he has nothing else and the harvesting day will still be long. Others he puts in his pocket for dinner. A short stop in the shade and then returns to the cultivated field. With bare hands, with cuts and calluses: the signs of the days of “lucky work”.
The day
It’s twenty-eight degrees at fifteen thirty. The “master” tells Hassan that he is finished. He was good, he filled twenty cassettes. Tomorrow he can return. He loads him back into the van, but this time he has to be careful: with him are the fruits of his work, he must not crush them by sitting down. So he hunkers down and tries to rest during the journey. The truck takes him back to the bicycle “parking area”. Stopping in front of the entrance to the former Auchan, he lets him get out. The driver pays him with a twenty note: about two euros an hour and one euro per box. «I was lucky – he says. Working in the countryside isn’t the hardest job I’ve done. I once carried large bricks on a construction site for hours. Afterwards I couldn’t walk. But they paid me forty euros. That matters.
You wake up in the morning and never know what will happen. If you can work, eat.” And while he unties the chain of his only means of transport he explains that that road is Giugliano it acts as an employment office for them. An illegal employment agency. «This is our meeting point. We Africans know that they come to take us here to make us work. And the owners know that we are here waiting for them. There is word of mouth. Sometimes you don’t need to get to the roundabout, already along the road trucks come alongside you and ask you if you want to work. In lucky cases they give you an appointment.” Meanwhile, Hassan gets on his bike, leaves the traffic island and heads onto the road towards what is home for him. His earnings in your pocket. The symbol of exploitation: twenty euros and a few tomatoes.
