@2a

I've read this before.... Actually it's the thing that gives me pause when people automatically rank the average Sicilian family-clan higher than the ones in Naples... Here an excerpt.. ( I'm all about the sources these days...) I can't really explain it fully.....
Matter of fact, fuck it, here's the WHOLE CHAPTER, read for yourself, draw your own conclusions...


“ANGELINA JOLIE

In the days that followed, Xian took me along to his business meetings. He seemed to enjoy my company as he went about his day or ate his lunch. I either talked too much or too little, both of which he liked. I followed how the seeds of money are sown and cultivated, how the economy’s terrain is allowed to lie fallow. We went to Las Vegas, an area to the north of Naples. Las Vegas: that’s what we call it around here, for several reasons. Just like Las Vegas, Nevada, which is built in the middle of the desert, the urban agglomerations here seem to spring up
“out of nothing. And you have to cross a desert of roads to reach the place. Miles of tar, wide thoroughfares that whisk you away from here, propelling you toward the highway, to Rome, straight to the north. Roads built not for cars but for trucks, not to move people but clothes, shoes, purses. As you arrive from Naples, these towns appear out of nowhere, planted in the ground one after another. Lumps of cement. Tangles of streets. A web of roads on which the towns of Casavatore, Caivano, Sant’Antimo, Melito, Arzano, Piscinola, San Pietro a Patierno, Frattamaggiore, Frattaminore, Grumo Nevano, endlessly rotate. Places so indistinguishable they seem to be one giant metropolis, with the streets of one town running into another.
I must have heard the area around Foggia called Califoggia a hundred times, the southern part of Calabria referred to as Calafrica or Saudi Calabria, Sala Consilina Sahara Consilina, or an area of Secondigliano (which means “second mile”) called Terzo Mondo, Third World. But this Las Vegas really is Las Vegas. For years, anyone who wanted to try his hand at business could do it here. Live the dream. Use his severance pay, savings, or a loan “to open a factory.

You’d bet on a company: if you won, you’d reap efficiency, productivity, speed, protection, and cheap labor. You’d win just the way you win by betting on red or black. If you lost, you’d be out of business in a few months. Las Vegas. No regulations, no administrative or economic planning. Shoes, clothes, and accessories were clandestinely forced onto the international market.”


“The towns didn’t boast of this precious production; the more silently, the more secretly the goods were manufactured, the more successful they were. For years this area produced the best in Italian fashion. And thus the best in the world. But they didn’t have entrepreneurs’ clubs or training centers; they had nothing but work, nothing but their sewing machines, small factories, wrapped packages, and shipped goods. Nothing but the endless repetition of production.

Everything else was superfluous. Training took place at the workbench, and a company’s quality was demonstrated by its success. No financing, no projects, no internships. In the marketplace it’s all or nothing. Win or lose. A rise in salaries has meant better houses and fancy cars. Yet this is not wealth that can be considered collective “This is plundered wealth, taken by force from someone else and carried off to your own cave. People came from all over to invest in businesses making shirts, jackets, skirts, blazers, gloves, hats, purses, and wallets for Italian, German, and French companies.

Las Vegas stopped requiring permits, contracts, or proper working conditions in the 1950s, and garages, stairwells, and storerooms were transformed into factories. But lately the Chinese competition has ruined the ones producing midrange-quality merchandise. There’s no more room for workmanship. Either you do the best work the fastest or someone else will figure out how to do average work more quickly. A lot of people found themselves out of work. Factory owners were crushed by debt and usury. Many absconded.....



“But not everyone is underground here. Not everyone has ended up in the quagmire of defeat. At least not yet. Some successful factories are still strong enough to compete with the Chinese because they work for big designer names. By delivering speed and quality—extremely high quality—they still hold the monopoly on beauty for top-level garments.

“Made in Italy” is made here. Caivano, Sant’ Antimo, Arzano, and all across Las Vegas, Campania. “The face of Italy in the world” wears fabric draped over the bare head of the Naples suburbs. The brand names don’t dare risk sending everything East, contracting out to Asia. Factories here are crowded into stairwells, on the ground floors of row houses, in sheds on the outskirts of these outlying towns. Lined up one behind the other, staring at the back of the person in front of them, the workers sew cloth, cut leather, and “assemble shoes.

A garment worker puts in about ten hours a day, bringing home from 500 to 900 euros a month. Overtime usually pays well, as much as 15 euros an hour more than the regular wage. Factories rarely have more than ten employees. There’s almost always a television or radio so the workers can listen to music, maybe even hum along. But during crunch times the only noise is the march of needles.

More than half the employees are women; they’re skilled workers, born staring at a sewing machine. Officially these factories don’t exist, and neither do the employees. If the same work were done legally, prices would go up and there’d be no more market—which means the work would disappear from Italy. The businessmen around here know this logic by heart. There’s usually no rancor or resentment between factory workers and owners; class conflict here is as soft as a soggy cookie. Often the owner is a former worker, and he puts in the same hours as his employees, in the same room, at the same bench. When he makes a mistake, he pays for it out of his own pocket, in mortgages or loans. “His authority is paternalistic. You have to fight for a day off or a few cents’ raise. There’s no contract, no bureaucracy.

It’s all head to head, and any concessions or benefits are individually negotiated. The owner and his family live above the factory. His daughters often babysit his employees’ children, and his mother becomes their de facto grandmother, so that workers’ and owner’s children grow up together. This communal existence acts out the horizontal dream of post-Fordism: workers and managers eat together, socialize, “with each other, and are made to feel they’re all part of the same community.”


“No one acts ashamed here. They know they’re doing top-quality work, and that they’re being paid a pittance. But you can’t have one without the other. You work to get what you need and you do it as best you can, so that no one will find any reason to fire you. No safety net, just cause, sick leave, or vacation days. It’s up to you to negotiate your rights, to plead for time off. But there’s nothing to complain about. Everything is just as it should be. Here there’s only a body, a skill, a machine, and a salary. No one knows the exact number of clandestine workers in these parts, or how many legal employees are forced to sign a monthly pay slip for sums they never receive.



“Xian was to take part in an auction. We went to an elementary-school classroom, but there were no children and no teacher, just sheets of construction paper with big letters tacked to the walls. About twenty company reps were milling around. Xian was the only foreigner. He only greeted two people, and without excessive familiarity. A car pulled into the school courtyard, and three people entered the room: two men and a woman. The woman was wearing a leather skirt and high-heeled patent-leather shoes. Everyone rose to greet her. They took their places and the auction began. One of the men drew three vertical lines on the blackboard and wrote “as the woman dictated. In the first column:
“800”
This was the number of garments to make. The woman listed the types of fabric and the quality of the articles. A businessman from Sant’ Antimo went over to the window, turning his back to the rest of us, and offered his prices and times:
“Forty euros apiece in two months.”
His proposal was written on the board:
“800/40/2”
The other businessmen didn’t look worried. He hadn’t dared enter the realm of the impossible, which evidently was to their liking. But not to the buyers’. So the bidding continued.



“The auctions the big Italian brands hold in this area are strange. No one wins the contract and no one loses. The game consists in entering or not entering the race. Someone throws out an offer, stating his time and price. If his conditions are accepted, he won’t be the only winner, however. His offer is like a head start the others can try to follow. When the brokers accept a bid, the other contractors decide if they want in; whoever agrees gets the fabric. It’s sent directly to the port of Naples, where the contractors pick it up.

But only one of them will be paid: the one who delivers first, and with top-quality merchandise. The other players are free to keep the fabric, but they don’t get a cent. The fashion houses make so much money that material isn’t a loss worth considering. If a contractor takes advantage of the system to have free fabric but repeatedlly “fails to deliver, he’s excluded from future auctions. In this way the brokers are guaranteed speed: if someone falls behind, someone else will take his place. There’s no relief from the rhythms of high fashion.
To the joy of the woman behind the desk, another hand went up. A well-dressed contractor, elegant.
“Twenty euros in twenty-five days.”
In the end the bid was accepted. Nine of the twenty contractors signed on as well. But not Xian. He wouldn’t have been able to coordinate quality and speed in such a short time and at such low prices. When the auction was over, the woman wrote up a list of the contractors’ names and phone numbers and the addresses of their factories. The winner “invited everyone to his house for lunch.

His factory was on the ground floor, he and his wife lived on the second, his son on the third. “I’m applying for a permit to add another floor. My other son is getting married,” he declared proudly. As we climbed the stairs, he continued to tell us about his family, which, like his villa, was under construction.
“Don’t ever put men in charge of the female workers, it only causes problems. I’ve got two sons, and both of them married employees. Put the fags in charge. Make the fags manage the shifts and inspect the work, like in the old days …”
The workers, men and women, came up to toast the new contract. They faced a grueling schedule: first shift from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with an hour’s break to eat, “second shift from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. The women were wearing makeup and earrings, and aprons to protect their clothes from the glue, dust, and machine grease. Like Superman, who takes off his shirt and reveals his blue costume underneath, they were ready to go out to dinner as soon as they removed their aprons.

The men were sloppier, in sweatshirts and work pants. After the toast one of the guests took the owner aside, along with the others who had agreed to the auction price. They weren’t hiding, but simply respecting the ancient custom of not discussing money at table. Xian explained to me in great detail that the guest—the very image of a bank teller—was discussing interest rates. But he was not from a bank. Italian brands pay only when the work is completed. Or rather, only after it has “been accepted.

Everything—salaries, production costs, even shipping—must be paid in advance by the manufacturers, so the clans loan money to the factories in their territories. The Di Lauros in Arzano, the Verdes in Sant’ Antimo, the Cennamos in Crispano, and so on. The Camorra offers low rates, 2 to 4 percent. No one should have an easier time obtaining bank credit than these companies, who produce for the Italian fashion world, for the market of markets. But they’re phantom operations, and bank directors don’t meet with ghosts.

Camorra liquidity is also the only way for factory employees to obtain a mortgage. Thus in towns where more than 40 percent of the residents support themselves by moonlighting, six out of ten families still manage to buy a home. Even the contractors who “don’t satisfy the requirements of the designer labels manage to find a buyer. They sell the garments to the clans to be put on the fake-goods market. All the runway fashions, all the glitz for the most elegant premieres, comes from here. The Las Vegas towns and Casarano, Tricase, Taviano, and Melissano in Capo di Leuca, the lower Salento region, are the principal centers for black-market fashion. It all comes from here, from this hole. All merchandise has obscure origins: such is the law of capitalism. But to observe the hole, to see it in front of you, well, it causes a strange sensation. An anxious heaviness. Like the truth weighing on your stomach.