Compressing Personal Time: Ethnicity and Gender within a Chinese Niche in Italy

Italy is the southern European country with the largest Chinese population. So-called Chinese ‘new migrants’, who started arriving in Italy from the early 1980s, entered into a niche characterised by contracting businesses. These businesses performed manufacturing tasks for Italian firms producing garments and leather goods. The ‘new migrants’ have made inroads into the fashion industry, an industry that is still central to the Italian economy. This article argues that the main opportunity for the Chinese migrants in Italy has not been a vacant industry, but the crisis that the Italian fashion industry has been experiencing during the last years. Chinese migrants have helped in containing the crisis and have also made possible an expansion of the economic sector in some areas. The paper also highlights gender issues within the productive process. The competitive advantage held by the Chinese comes from their extreme flexibility, the central element of whichy is the compression of private life and childcare time. Men and women work very long hours, delegating childcare to others. This engenders a particular organisation of life and work where traditional gender roles tend to be abolished, at least in the realm of work.

Keywords

• Italy,
• Chinese,
• Garments,
• Leather Industry,
• Childcare