Nardó (Puglia): Solidarity with the Strike of Immigrant Farm labourers What is claimed to the first spontaneous strike of immigrant farm labourers is taking place be in the province of Salento. It is taking place near Nardó, a tourist destination where every year thousands of Africans and Maghrebians come to take in the water melon and tomato harvests. They rejected working on the tomato harvest as the wage is too low. Until a year ago they slept under olive trees or in makeshift shelters. Since last summer (i.e. for the second year running) they have been housed at the Boncuri Farmhouse run by the voluntary association Finis Terrae and the Active Solidarity Brigade thanks to reconstruction of the farm by the local council. On July 30 the labourers left at dawn to go to the field but at 6.00 returned because they had been asked to harvest tomatoes at €4 a box (it takes an hour to fill one) according to Gianluca Nigro of Finis Terrae [End of the Earth]. All 40 of the workers then blocked the road and began negotiations with the police. That evening they called a mass meeting of all immigrant workers to draw up their demands in a document. In Nardo the situation for field workers has become a lot more serious as the crisis means that it has been harder to sell watermelons. This has led the producers to sell them at a low price leading to lower wages for the workers or they have been left to rot in the fields (as CWO comrades have seen frequently over the last few years happened to the tomatoes in the Mezzogiorno). To add to the problem there are more workers as Tunisians from the fields of Manduria have recently joined the workforce at Nardó. Employment opportunities have thus declined and many are either forced to work in the black economy or face a return to picking tomatoes at a lower wage. A few metres away tourists crowd the beaches of Salento province on this final Saturday in July. Using mobile phones and personal contacts the workers (who include Tunisians, Moroccans and Sudanese) have managed to spread their message to other workers to avoid the bosses playing one group off against another. “Persons unknown” have issued death threats against the striking workers. The strike is now in its fifth day and the information on www.terrelibre.org suggests that it is widening as the workers become more confident that they don’t have to submit to any old conditions. One group has taken up the slogan “everything beautiful in this world has been won through struggle”. Like the victimised labourers of Rosarno last year they deserve our deepest solidarity. [Roughly translated from an email of Luigi with additional material from the website quoted above.] Jock