EXISTENTIAL DAMAGES: The Injury of Precarity Goes to Court

CAEXISTENTIAL DAMAGES: The Injury of Precarity Goesto Court

NOELLE J. MOLE

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and thathe should make his soul enjoy good in his labor.

—Ecclesiastes 2:24

Putting the soul to work: This is the new form of alienation.—Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work

As an engineer for Telecom site in Pisam, Mr. Antonio Gallo had beeninstructed to minimize the overtime of his Tuscan Maritime area staff, and had takenmeasures to follow this order (Tribunale di Pisa, sez. Lav., April 10, 2002; Meucci2006:490).1 But this provoked a union reaction and, in response, Gallo filed suit tocontest his union’s position on the matter, and “requested personal protection” fromhis employer. Following disciplinary action on the part of Telecom, who blamedhim for “creating tension” with the union, Gallo was transferred to Florence inJune 1999, being informally told that the move was to appease the National UnionCoordinating Group (OO.SS). At that time, Gallo was denied the monthly raisein salary that his colleagues had received, and he filed a suit against this action inthe Florence Tribunal. When, in January 2000, Telecom hired a new engineer forthe Tuscan Maritime branch and Gallo was stripped of his professional role, hepresented his case to the Attorney General’s office (Procura della Repubblica) afterhis repeated requests to return to Pisa were denied. In what appears to have been amechanism to make the transfer permanent, he was fired and rehired in February,

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 28, Issue 1, pp. 22–43. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2013 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01171.x

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and transferred, once again, to Florence. While Telecom took legal action to justifythe legitimacy of the transfer, Gallo filed a civil suit against his employer for a newlylabeled psychological work harassment called mobbing (il mobbing), also known as“moral harassment” (molestie morali). According to the Judge Nistico’s ruling onthe case, mobbing emerges under certain labor conditions when “the subject in theweakest position is conditioned by or harassed by the dominant-positioned subject.”Citing Article 2087 of Italy’s Civil Code, which holds employers responsible forsafeguarding workers physical and moral integrity and their “moral personhood,”he reflected further on the deeper cause of this type of abuse:

This obligation belongs to the Civil Code insofar as it is inspired by a sharedcriteria for humanist work (umanesimo del lavoro). Despite the current examplesthat indicate the contrary, [ . . . ] in which the worker assumes the role of“human capital” or “human resource” as are the expressions in the dominantcorporate subculture, [the worker] is an endowed subject [ . . . ] with hispersonality and his dignity. . . . The law, in fact, does not only protectthe worker’s psychological integrity, but the worker’s moral personhood(personalita morale). [Tribunale di Pisa, sez. Lav., April 10 2002]

The judge awarded Gallo 80,000 Euro in total damages, including injury tothe plaintiff’s professionalism (il danno alla professionalita) and, existential damages(danni esistenziali) the latter being a form of damage that has risen in frequencyalmost exclusively for Italy’s new mobbing cases. According to legal historianMario Meucci, existential damages are the mode of compensation correspondingto limits placed on workers’ “right to develop human personhood” (svologimento

della personalita umana; see Meucci 2006:294); and restitution for abrogation oftheir rights, namely: “to not be unjustly fired, to not be demoted or degradedprofessionally, to not be forced to work in conditions without security, to notbe mortified or harassed unjustifiably” (Meucci 2006:287). To sum up this case,Gallo’s claim to existential harm was legitimated based on: illegitimate transfersmeant to appease the union and provoke long-term unease by “scapegoating” aworker; Gallo being fired and rehired, a sloppy and malicious reorganizationalmaneuver; and the prolonged timeframe of these events, further evidence of theabusive nature of Telecom’s actions.

How does a form of relatively new work abuse, which includes seeminglycommonplace work practices, come to be judicially recognized as causing existentialinjury? Let me begin with the rise of mobbing, defined as psychological or emotionalharassment entailing the marginalization of a single worker by another individual

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or group of either same-level colleagues or superiors. It emerged as a way ofdefining workplace harassment in Italy and Europe in the late 1990s, and wasbroadly viewed as psychological and emotional abuse of the worker. Italians glossit as “moral harassment” (molestia morale), Germans call it “mobbing,” Austrians“pesten,” French “moral harassment” (harcelement moral), and North Americans“emotional abuse” or “work bullying.” On the basis of work by occupationalpsychologists and mobbing experts Heinz Leymann (1990) and Harold Ege (1996,2001, a, b), mobbing may include attacks directed at the target’s communicationnetworks, social relations, image, professional level and tasks, and well-being andhealth (Gargani et al. 2005:12). In the European Parliament Resolution A5–0283of 2001, it was said that 12 million people, or 8 percent of EU workers, werevictims of mobbing. The resolution recognized grave effects on workers’ health, itspredominance in “high tension” jobs and among women, and encouraged memberstates to take action to prevent, educate, and join in the “struggle against mobbing”(la lotta contro il mobbing). Italian cases are reported as most prevalent in the publicsector (Rapaggi 2001:142) and, a close second, in the large firms and in the serviceindustry (Greco 2009:34). In the mid-2000s, the term circulated widely in Italy: inscholarly literatures in occupational psychology and legal studies, on the news, ingovernment and EU documents, even in cinema (Comencini 2004). Hundreds ofmobbing clinics and hotlines opened, and there emerged a new professional classof mobbing specialists and experts who offered legal assistance and psychiatrichelp to mobbing victims. In 2003, Italy’s Worker’s Compensation Authority(INAIL) codified an occupational illness caused by mobbing. In Padua, whereI conducted fieldwork, people who identify as having been mobbed experiencea range of psychological and somatic symptoms, ranging from hair and toothloss to emotional distress and sleeplessness (because of having been harassed bycoworkers or superiors) as well as anxiety and depression (Fattorini and Gilioli2006; Mole 2010). Mobbing expert Harald Ege (2001) lists the following agentsas possible mobbers: “single person, a company, a corporate group, a group, adepartment, a superior, a colleague, an inferior” (2001:30); in his six stages ofmobbing culminating in the final stage of “exclusion from work,” the third isdefined by the victim’s “psychosomatic symptoms”; the fifth is “serious aggravationof the victim’s psychophysical health” (2001:22).

The institutional apparatus around mobbing (clinics, diagnoses, films, plays,legal cases) exploded in the late 1990s and 2000s during a massive economicoverhaul when Italy instituted a series of labor policies designed to reduce laborprotections and safeguards, and render the labor market more semipermanent,

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casualized, and privatized—conditions of labor Italians have called precarious (pre-

cario; see Castel 2003; Ferrera and Gualmini 2004; Mole 2010; Yanagisako 2000,2002), a term now understood globally (Allison 2012a, b; Weston 2012).2 Thenotion of precarity counters the employer-oriented “flexible” economy from theperspective of the worker who must adapt to a variety of risks, demands, and inse-curities. Mobbing’s tie to precarity is anything but coincidental. What was definedby occupational psychologists as mobbing (Ege 1996, 2001; Leymann 1990) hadan uncanny resemblance to Italy’s intensifying neoliberal labor conditions inso-far as both entail ambiguity, unpredictability, organizational malfunctions, rapidlyfluctuating work responsibilities, solitary labor, and higher rates of job transfer.As I show, the term mobbing can sometimes refer to not direct aggression againstworkers but isolation, idleness, or boredom. One can see this in Gallo’s case:harassment ranged from social exclusion to accusations of lack of productivity,abruptly reassigned work responsibilities, job transfers, and being assigned to anisolated or shabby office space. A battle over a 60-mile transfer and losing some ofhis primary work responsibilities counted as a judiciable infraction of an employ-ment contract. This was also made possible because mobbing is a loosely definedlegal category without an always clear aggressor and, in part, because Gallo’s em-ployer provided him with rather open-ended safeguards. According to the courts,existential damages compensate for workers’ most profound investment and “[safe-guard] the socio-relational profile of the individual that is protected in all of hisactivity and expressive manifestations of personhood” (Tribunale di Agrigento, sez.Lav., February 1, 2005, Judge Gatto; Meucci 2006:509).

The connection between the precarious labor regime and mobbing has beenmade explicit in legal documents like the European Parliament Resolution A5–0283 of 2001 which states that “the precarity of employment constitutes a principlecause for increasing the frequency of this phenomenon [of mobbing]” as well asthe “loss of employment security.” In turn, and especially within national media(Comencini 2004; Ege 2001), mobbing has come to represent the cruelest stakes ofprecarious labor regimes in Italy. Mobbing, therefore, names the resulting duressof the prevailing insecure work regime that led to the decay of social relationsin the public and private sector. What I am proposing, then, is that these actsof everyday psychological terror, both the violence itself and actors’ sensitizedperceptions of being victimized by it, result from the exacerbation of fear andaggression about losing stable work, which is highly valued and tied to psychophys-ical well-being and prosperity in Italy. These massive socioeconomic structuralchanges wrought through precarity—as Italians call it “precarrizazione”—meant

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that worker–citizens were increasingly devalued, anxious, vigilant, and uncertain;social relations became fraught, ratcheting up fears about the likelihood of one’sown persecution as well as the capacity to lash out against another. Mobbing,by contrast, is insidious, “often the violence is not visible, but opportunisticallyhidden” (Ege 2001:34).

There are several historical antecedents that occasioned the mobbing boom or,put differently, the national mobbing panic, some of which are particular to Italy.3

Italy’s highly protectionist labor laws have made it difficult to fire workers withlong-term and safeguarded contracts. As such, occupational psychologists and manymanagers and corporate executives I spoke with explained that mobbing played acircuitous role in reducing labor: make the workplace hellish to compel workersto quit (Ege 2001).4 Certainly a downsizing stratagem is a reasonable cause formobbing’s emergence, given Italian legal barriers to dismissals, as well as increasingglobal pressures to grow Italy’s economy and cut labor costs.5 However, we mustalso approach this as a more complex epistemological phenomenon owing at leastsome of its national visibility to what Ian Hacking (1999a, b) would call a “loopingeffect”: mobbing shapes and brings into being the very practice it names and, inturn, slowly but progressively changes the definition of mobbing itself. Matchedwith the structural incitement of hostility and vigilance among workers, mobbing,a newly available and highly visible idiom of distress, became the cornerstone of itsown rise to prominence in Italy.

Mobbing, ultimately, spans from vicious bullying and overt scapegoatingto more passive actions without a formal instigator such as social exclusion andisolation. It is fair then, to suggest that mobbing emerges and thrives under thefollowing conditions: rules and regulations are unclear and changeable; hierarchiesare rigid yet only partially visible; underhanded practices thrive; hostile acts,especially toward outcasts, are acceptable; and social actors deeply identify withand desire acceptance from colleagues and employers. In this sense, at least in part,mobbing is an official category for deeply rooted social conditions and culturalpractices within Italy (Gilmour 2011; Herzfeld 2009; Krause 2004; Yanagisako2002). In the context of the Roman housing eviction crisis, Michael Herzfeldilluminates how illegal practices such as bribery and, more broadly, the “tacitagreement not to interfere” can actually represent signs of civility (2009:233).Erik Jones (2009) suggests that Silvio Berlusconi’s long-term popularity, despitehis serial legal infractions ranging from underage prostitution to tax evasion, stemfrom his ability to be perceived as a savvy dealmaker. Both examples share aparticular ethos: rules may be broken, are even expected to be broken, in favor

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of those who can navigate their opportunistic advancement over weaker subjectsunskilled in “the art of getting by” (arrangiarsi; Edwards 2005). This, together witha politically divergent and historically fraught labor movement, also accounts fortensions between workers as well as a loss of class solidarity that harkens back to theearly 20th century (Blim 1990; Ginsborg 2003; Kertzer 1980; Muehlebach 2012).I am not purporting the existence of unchanging subjects or cultural values in Italy.Rather, I am highlighting the deep-rooted nature of particular sensibilities, ethicalrelations, and practices that favor the decay of class consciousness, clandestinehostility and schemes, self-serving complicity, and victimization—all dimensionsof mobbing from the alternative perspectives of the aggressor, witness, and target.

Not only does the form of harm and violence but also this unusual legalcategory bear the mark of a particular Italian lineage. Given deep Catholic andMarxist influences on Italian culture, politics, and worker movements, it is hardlysurprising that certain forms of labor—and exclusion from labor—might be figuredas amoral and soul breaking (Esposito 2008; Gilmour 2011; Kertzer 1980). Italyis a place with deep structural and cultural precedents for recognizing and beingconcerned with workers’ well-being and suffering; this interest has occupied groupsacross the political spectrum, from Fascists to Communists as well as the CatholicChurch (Blim 1990; Horn 1994; Muehlebach 2012; Vercellone 1996).6 Despitecertain political shortcomings that I explore in greater detail below, the judicialaward of existential damages nonetheless stands as a powerful reminder that latecapitalism harnesses and violates souls in unprecedented ways.

However, it remains puzzling why existential damages have been awardedat precisely the moment when laborers have been devalued and commanded toadapt to the very same employment conditions deemed injurious within theselegal cases. How can practices created by precarity be normalized and legallychallenged at the same time? What is at stake when the judicial branch of thestate defines a new class of damages that result from legislative and policy actions?To be sure, we must look beyond the misleading appearance of a coordinatedexecutive, legislative, and judicial state (Abrams 1988; Mitchell 1999; Sharmaand Gupta 2006). Naming and awarding existential damages, I argue, ultimatelydisplaces the locus of agency from the cause of economic conditions to their effects:from the politically orchestrated conditions of labor to the intensely disorderedsocial relations between workers, and between workers and employers, incitedwithin precarious labor regimes. So, although it may sometimes provide a way forworkers to garner compensation for a complex kind of psychic injury, a damageaward ultimately shifts the onus of the sufferer’s turmoil onto socially disordered

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actors, rather than labor policy and practice. Furthermore, with this attemptto compensate for the conditions of labor it has simultaneously intensified, theItalian state can appear moral, protective, and benevolent to citizens; it can appearas a coherent entity capable of controlling violence and providing retribution forharm.7 Obscured are the tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies within Italy’suncoordinated governing apparatus and how workers’ ongoing “existential” injuryhas been enacted and maintained. Awards for existential damages as the outcome ofmobbing, an often inchoate set of injurious practices and claims, mean that mobbingand, occasionally, individual mobbers—not the organization of precarious labor—become the nameable and injurious aggressors in Italy’s existentially vexed workregime. No matter how similar they seem at times, mobbing is classifiable andjudicially actionable in ways neoliberal labor regimes are not—it can be taken tocourt.

LEGAL ORIGINS

Compensation for damage to workers is based in a particular right protectedunder Article 2087 of Italy’s Civil Code, which calls for the employer’s duty toprotect the “physical integrity and the moral personhood” of workers. To be sure,existential damages are awarded more infrequently than biological or psychologicaldamages (Meucci 2006). Still, on a rather basic level, Italy’s judicial structureand the existing rights of workers made existential harm thinkable. In the 1980s, acritical ruling led to a series of changes in the reach of “biological damage” that wouldordinarily be claimed “not only in the strict sense of pecuniary damage, but for allof the damages that hinder the self-actualizing activities of human beings” (CorteCostituzionale 14 July 1986 n. 184; see also Buffone 2005), thereby institutingthe category of “moral” damage. The notion of “moral damage” in the realmof worker’s compensation referred to an intangible loss, and paralleled similarcodifications of “prejudice physiologique” in France, and “pain and suffering” in theUnited States (Buffone 2005; Lo Giudice 2004). Moral damage amounts to whatItalian legal scholars have called “spiritual suffering” and thus it is not necessarythat a subject suffers physically or psychologically, which requires evidence ofpsychological pathology, to demonstrate moral damage (Amato et al. 2002:112).Moral and existential damages are forms of nonpecuniary damage, which Italy’sUnited Sections court defined as “altering the life habits [of injured persons] andthe relational assets belonging to them, upsetting the quotidian and depriving themof the occasion to express and actualize their personalities to the external world”(Sez. Unite sent. N. 6572 [2006]; Serrao 2005:14). In this sense, both moral

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and existential damages name a loss of human potentiality in one’s career and life(Amato et al. 2002:128). However, moral damages, unlike existential damages,must somehow involve criminal actions, behaviors, or events, which materiallyconstitute an offense and must also involve suffering (Meucci 2006:264, 295). Thevictim awarded existential damages need not prove the victim’s suffering (althoughit may still involve suffering) as the distinction rests on the victim’s “forced removalof unremunerated activity which is the source of fulfillment and well-being to thevictim” (Meucci 2006:287).

The first significant case to award existential damages was in the Tribunal ofTorino in 1995, which was appealed to the Italian Supreme Court. But this was acase of child neglect which represented a violation of the son’s “fundamental humanrights and relational life” (Cassation, sent. N. 7713, June 7, 2000). Donatella HuCheng sued Francesco Cappelletto for negligence of their biological son, DanieleHu Cheng. The Italian Supreme Court ruled that the father’s absence constituted aform of “existential damage” with respect to the son, and represented a fundamentalinjury to the child’s well-being and growth (Meucci 2006:294). Following this case,however, existential damages have been awarded for mobbing and professionaldemotion for parental neglect or lack of “familial solidarity” (Meucci 2006:294).This case helped shape labor law insofar as biological, psychological, and moraldamages did not fully account for obstacles or injury to a person self-realization;existential damages would “fill an entire area of private damage and compensationclaims” (Meucci 2006:286).

In 2003, two of Italy’s high courts (Cassazione, sent. 8827–8828 [2003]and Costituzionale sent. N. 203 [2003]) issued what have become known as the“twin” (gemelle) sentences dividing nonpecuniary damages into three categories:biological, moral, and constitutional (di valori costituzionali; see Musi 2008: 22).Thus, existential damages would remain differentiated from biological damage(the latter based on medical evidence), as well as moral damages. The problem,according to Italian legal theorist Emanuela Musi, was that this new ruling renderedexistential damages a catch-all category for any kind of nonpecuniary personaldamage, opening up a way to recognize injury for what she chidingly referred to asthe “over-stuffed inbox, delayed phone connection, bad haircut, lost baggage, andstress” (2008:22). Put similarly, attorney Luigi Modaffari (2010) likens existentialdamages to the constitutionally nonexistent “right to happiness.”

Judicial clarification was, in short, widely demanded. In 2006, the ItalianSupreme Court further distinguished between moral and existential damages asthe latter was “not merely emotional and interior but objectively certifiable from

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prejudices” (Sez. Unite sent. N. 6572 [2006]). Existential damages compensatedfor restrictions to “workers’ right to liberally express one’s personality at work”as would be demonstrable through “de-qualification, isolation and forced inactivity(inoperosita)” (Modaffari 2010). Thus, the courts would require the worker to showdiscriminatory practices that caused her or him unjust harm. Although existentialdamages have been defined in numerous ways, these definitions all describe aform of immaterial loss: of selfhood, future possibilities, relational ties. Giventhe context of labor precarity and marketization in Italy, it is particularly crucialthat existential damages recognize workers’ forced inactivity as injurious; in thisregard, Paolo Cendon’s definition of the concept as “the forced termination of anunpaid activity which is the source of pleasure and wellbeing for the damaged” is ofparticular relevance (Cassaz. Sent. N. 4712, February 25, 2008; see also Modaffari2010). Existential damage is an injury born not only of work’s harshest extremes,but of work’s absence.

THE IMMATERIAL WOUNDS OF IMMATERIAL LABOR

In teasing out the transcendental and extrasensory quality of governed subjects,the shift in scholarly inquiry has been toward recognition of how surveillance andcontrol might surreptitiously become a more totalizing, and thus existential meansto control human life (Das 2006; Hardt 1999; Muehlebach 2007, 2011). Interestedin the “growing emphasis on the role of compassion and benevolence in politicallife,” Miriam Tiktin (2006) examines the social and political complexities of aFrench law granting extended stay to illegal immigrants in the event of seriousillness. Illness becomes a means for extended stay; thus, the choice to treat or cureillness becomes, paradoxically, a conduit for deportation. Such “regimes of care” areoften paradoxical and may produce violence and harm, even if compassion, somaticand spiritual, may be involved—as compassion becomes a “discretionary power”(Ticktin 2011:119). A similarly uneven regime, Italy’s courts validate ethicalrelations that value and safeguard workers’ integrity, well-being, and fulfillmentby awarding existential damages. The judiciary appears to take workers’ self-fulfillment and relational life seriously while, in reality, only a tiny fraction ofcases result in compensation and for a select few capable of navigating Italy’shighly bureaucratic and time-consuming judicial system. Moreover, the very actof suing for mobbing, which is a precondition for workers’ ability to declare theirexistential injury, often results in the further aggravation, conflict, social isolation,and psychophysical harm for the victim (Ege 2001; Meucci 2006).

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On a similar note, Andrea Muehlebach (2009) shows us how the neoliberalstate can appear just and benevolent by examining how volunteer labor has beensummoned in service of the increasingly elusive welfare state. Drawing fromCarl Schmitt’s notion of complexio oppositorum (complex of opposites), Muehlebachillustrates how Italian neoliberalism contains within it its own opposites: “Themarket neoliberal, in other words, is accompanied by what one might call a moralneoliberal” (2009:499). Muehlebach’s theoretical insights further elucidate whyItaly’s judicial branch, mostly operating under a right-wing Berlusconi governmentduring this period, appears to recognize and compensate for the same grave humanand moral effects of neoliberal labor that also concern radical Leftist theorists.Let me be clear: I am not proposing that Italy’s judicial branch has been directlyinfluenced by radical Leftist theory. Rather, I trace this theory to map out the mostardent and highly articulated interest in this kind of suffering: the human effects ofprecarity have become a more diffuse political concern within Italy on either end ofthe political spectrum, which is a familiar pattern in Italian labor history (Kertzer1980; Vercellone 1996).

This new legal form of injury is also part of a more profound shift in late-20th-century labor regimes. Existential damages emerged because of not onlyprecarious labor regimes, but also their immediate historical precedent: imma-terial labor regimes characterized by workers’ intensive cognitive and affectiveinvestment in the process of production, in the age of information and global-ized employment relations (Harvey 1989; Hardt 1999; Jain 2006; Muehlebachand Shoshan 2012). Immaterial labor refers to production—the decline in actualmaterial goods and sale of services—as well as experiences, affect, fantasy, andlabor requiring more than the physicality and strength of the body (Berlant 2007;Hochschild 1983). Existential damages would not be thinkable unless workers wereinvesting existentially in labor.

According to theorists of the Italian Autonomist movement (a neo-Marxistmovement that is grandchild to Italy’s workerism movement [Smith 2009]), late-20th-century systems of production radically intensify the demands on workers,8

a position also shared by New Left theorists such as Maurizio Lazzarato. Lazzaratosuggests that immaterial labor has produced “a kind of ‘intellectual worker’ whois him or herself an entrepreneur” (1996:135);9 or, as Michael Hardt argues,immaterial labor yields intangible products, such as “a feeling of ease, well-being,satisfaction, excitement or passion” (1999:96).10 Christian Marazzi argues thatsuch a system, because of a collapse of the “symbolic order” (2007:14), resultsin “existential malaise”: “The new machine that commands live labor and makes

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the worker produce, is no longer a physically identifiable and specifically situatedtool, but tends to be located within the worker herself, in her brain and in hersoul” (2007:29–30). The line between the worker–subject and the work dissolve:ontologically, the subject is what she does.

Autonomist leader Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009) uses the term cognitive labor,which relies on workers’ investment in affect and language. For Berardi, thedivision between the body and soul also parallels Fordist and post-Fordist modes ofproduction: “Industrial factories used the body, forcing it to leave the soul outsidethe assembly line, so that the worker looked like a soulless body. The immaterialfactory asks instead to place our very souls at its disposal: intelligence, sensibility,creativity and language” (Berardi 2009:116). Following this logic, contemporaryemployment conditions have far greater potential to harm workers who are nolonger is split between bodily subjection and mental constraints—workers arethoroughly subjected.11

Because work is likened to vitality, mobbing’s capacity to threaten and endthe employment relationship allows it to be positioned as deadly and dangerous: iflabor regimes harnessed workers’ souls as part of their employment, then mobbingdestroyed their souls as part of their employment loss. Mobbing became the sym-bolic site at which late capitalist labor was visible at its worst: the worker–subjectbetrayed and harmed despite her totalizing, soul-filled investment. Consider, forinstance, the words of Italy’s mobbing pioneer Harald Ege, who likens mobbingto a “war at work,” and warns potential victims: “Be courageous and determined!. . . Your job is in play, what earns you a living and lets you live!” (2002b:51). Inaddition to being imagined as gravely endangering the wellness and health of thevictim, as one concerned teacher put it: “Mobbing is capable of stealing your soul”(Servedio 2010). A career pediatrician, after having won a case of mobbing againstthe hospital that enforced his abrupt exclusion from weekly meetings and isolationto a corridor desk, reported: “I gave my body and soul to the hospital” (Craighero2008). If work itself shifts toward requiring more of the full person to execute it,then the full autonomy of workers, their status as persons, is also at stake. Whenlabor regimes became soul burdening, mobbing became the vehicle of erasure fornot just employment, but personhood.

THE STAKES OF LABOR

For workers identifying as victims of mobbing who visited mobbing clinicsaround Padua, the primary objectives involved mediating the termination or rein-tegration of employment, referrals for medical or psychiatric assistance and, when

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possible, plotting juridical recourse. Although the following mobbing case did notinvolve existential damages, I include it here as an example of a case that emergesin a context of hostility and uncertainty, and relates to particular kinds of totalizinginvestment on the part of the laborer. In spring 2005, I met Mina Zubero, whowas seeking help from mobbing counselor Fiore Montiglio, who ran a clinic spe-cializing in women and gender issues. Mina was an Egyptian woman in her fortieswho had come to Italy over 15 years ago, and had, for many years, worked suc-cessfully at the hotel reception desk until a new manager, Bruno Sgarone, arrivedin 2000. Bruno would criticize Mina on a daily basis and frequently referred toher in extremely racist and sexualized ways, such as “the dirty Tunisian whore” (lasporca troia tunisiana) and sometimes, Mina told me, “that black one” (quella nera).Although both Fiore and Mina recognized elements of sexual harassment and racialdiscrimination in these vicious comments, as well as potential bases for a lawsuit,the ultimate goal here was to bring a civil suit on the grounds of mobbing.12 Minatold us about an incident in which she was asked to explain certain aspects ofher bookkeeping to Bruno and another male superior, and was subject to theirpersecutory and humiliating accusations. They reminded her, in a way designed todegrade her, that “it takes a good head to manage finances.” She left early and thenext day, Mina went to the hospital having an acute anxiety attack, was prescribedantidepressants, and given two months’ sick leave. In turn, the hotel charged Minawith leaving work premises without permission, accused her of dishonest financialmanagement, and filed a brief stating that Mina “already suffered from nervous andemotional disturbances.” The issue of financial management was a fraught one inthat Mina herself had admitted to receiving small kickbacks from local establish-ments for her endorsement of hotel clients, a cash portion of which she shared withfellow employees, without a share for the hotel. Once Mina returned to work, shewas given hardly anything to do. Bruno had hired men in their twenties to workat reception who would systematically criticize her, even, she told me, record andtime her visits to the bathroom. Her passwords to the hotel computer were deacti-vated; suddenly and nearly totally deprived of her previous work responsibilities,she no longer had access to any digital information whatsoever. It was then that shebegan seeking counseling from mobbing clinics.

In July 2005, I was with Fiore during her meeting with new hotel directorLuca Palta, who replaced Bruno after he died suddenly in December 2004, todiscuss Mina’s case. The director entered the office with shining white teeth, animpeccably tailored monogrammed suit, and his lawyer. He began by describinghow Bruno had come to the hotel with the intention to eliminate employees,

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pausing, he reflected, in an instructive tone: “A hotel doesn’t sell a product. Ratherit offers a very particular service.” Luca’s narrative moved very abruptly betweenthe hotel’s downsizing and its relationship with the global economic market. Fioresternly reminded him that there were other “modalities” one could use to makesuch employment changes. When pressed again, Luca repeated angrily: “We don’tsell screws or armchairs! We have services.” He marshaled the challenges of capitaland labor as if that alone could explain the exclusion and harsh treatment of certainworkers. Indeed, the manager’s remarks only make sense when the followinghas been naturalized: new forms of work demand particular kinds of mental andaffective labor, and morally unworthy subjects are to be sacrificed if they shirk onthis deal.

Fiore then asked Luca about the undocumented commissions that Mina earnedfrom recommendations for restaurants, stores, and car rentals. Measuring the valueof labor in entirely market terms, Luca replied: “I’m happy if my employees makea commission. It comes back to my hotel and I can avoid having to raise salaries.It’s an indirect return.” But such returns, he exhorted, could not be toleratedbecause they were not “transparent” financial transactions. Luca reported thatBruno himself had told him that it was “time to clean things up [fare pulizia]” at thehotel. Referring to Mina, he added: “That woman cut us out.” Hearing her indexedas a gendered subject, Fiore retorted that Mina had simply transgressed a field ofeconomic relations he viewed as reserved for men. Luca mobilized the hotel’s maindefense in Mina’s case as a matter of fiscal responsibility: “Bruno blocked this flowto her. We admit he did this in a very harsh way. Naturally he was rule-abiding,but harsh. . . . So Mina rebelled against this.” The lawyer agreed: “Mina called itabusive in order to do a bit of personal shopping.” The defense, in short, was thatshe had to mobilize a mobbing claim as retaliation for losing her informal earnings,a position evacuating the moral underpinnings of the claim and portraying Minaas a self-interested trickster. This line of reasoning positions mobbing grievancesas an instrumentalist and classed strategy designed for material gain and carriedout by deceptive agents. For Luca, Mina was a neoliberal subject: calculating,rational, self-determined. Although the filing of mobbing-related grievances as anact of resistance may certainly be part of Mina’s motivation, I would suggest thatthese everyday abuses of power to which she was subject stem from the hostilescapegoating of weakly positioned subjects as well as workers’ fear of the end of afamiliar and protected employment regime.

In turn, Luca saw the case as a predictable economic liability, saying, “Withall these legal cases, I’ll have to commit to some form of damage. She says it’s

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mobbing, but in my opinion, mobbing is just trendy [va di moda].” Fiore glaredback at him, speaking fiercely: “There was mobbing. And how!” He replied flatly,shrugging, “Mobbing isn’t done.” Luca’s final statement revealed how the legal andepistemological framework of mobbing as a precarious form of political engagementcould be recast and devalued. “Employees,” Luca continued, “want compensationand it’s hard to have them understand that justice doesn’t exist. They are used to atribal justice: worker’s compensation.” Marshaling the notion of “tribal” justice toliken occupational injury to a primitive form of justice, he frames Mina’s accusationof mobbing as an inferior and lowly co-optation of power; but more so, it is a termladen with gendered and racialized imaginaries of that which is backward andinferior, paralleling how Bruno had positioned Mina. Additionally, the notion of“tribal” casts the notion of collective workers’ rights and welfare state protectionsas traditional and antiquated, and privileges the neoliberal order, relations betweenan autonomous subject and the market, as modern and superior. Yet while Luca’sposition clung to the discourse of neoliberal progress, Fiore viewed Mina as havinginvested and lost the most significant part of herself in this ordeal; for Fiore thenotion of mobbing crystallized this anguish, and she defended Mina accordingly.

PRECARITY’S JUDICIAL FOIL

In 2003, a Sardinian woman named Angela Fideli became the subject of a casein which labor was recognized as literally soul depleting (A. N. Fideli v. Comune

di Loiri Porto San Paolo; Meucci 2007:494). In his opinion, Judge Ponassi awardedmoral and existential damages, stating that Fideli had been the victim of “subjectivemoral damage for the disturbance of the transient soul” (al turbamento dell’animo

transeunte), which is best understood as an ineffable kind of psychic interior harm:mental anguish, heartbreak, soul damage. Fideli worked as a police officer (vigile

urbano) for the town beginning in 1996. Yet she professed that the relationshipwith her superior, in addition to the town mayor, had deteriorated, that shefaced “illegitimate disciplinary sanctions, refusals of her requests for mobility”and, eventually, was stripped of her responsibilities and “ghettoized below herprofessional and human profile.” The township mandated that Fideli no longercarry her weapon, as her “anxious personality” (personalita non serena) would puther or the public at risk, and confined her to administrative police activity. Shewas also punished for acts she viewed as abiding by the rules, such as issuing afine to a man leaving his car running to buy a newspaper, but that her employersdeemed “foolish” and subsequently used as grounds for her demotion. The judge alsodetailed that the office in which Fideli was “systematically” isolated and confined was

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“a small room underneath a stairwell to which no other employee had ever beenassigned.” Finally, Fideli was scolded for failing to properly address the mayor,using formal grammatical address. In addition to the “excessive” nature of thisreprimand, the judge found her linguistic defiance appropriate because he viewedformal address as “a character conflict in which the objectively weaker person issubjected to the authority of the other.” During the first round of disagreements atwork, she was diagnosed with depression, which led to further economic penaltiesand a salary reduction. She filed her first charge of mobbing against the municipalityin December 1999, a case that was eventually dismissed. However, in her 2003appeal of her case, the judge found evidence of mobbing, which he defined as a“persecutory strategy in an environment in which the plaintiff was subordinatedto a series of behaviors and practices which . . . damaged, marginalized, anddiscriminated against her, until it provoked damage to her health” and also to her“moral personhood” (personalita morale).

Fideli navigated unpredictable work conditions and forms of psychologicaldiscipline by her superiors. For example, she followed customary regulations inissuing a parking fine, yet was punished for being “foolish.” Thus, abiding by theregulations, which might, in one scenario, allow Angela to be recognized as agood worker actually construed her as rigid—compliance, in other words, didnot prevent sanction. The familiar logic of rule following was undermined, andthe resulting condition summoned workers to informally determine what wasdemanded of them. Her depression was also a liability, giving the town cause tostrip her of her weapon. Finally, it was Fideli’s enforced lack of productivity, notexcessive productivity, that she and the judge found most heinous: her reducedresponsibilities and isolation.

These conditions were enough to allow for a juridical and monetary recogni-tion of mobbing and existential damage. A threat to Fideli’s inherent value couldnot emerge unless work, with both its life fulfillment potential and its mundane toil,was recognized as crucial to human existence. What was remarkable about her casewas the recognition of the strained relationships and day-to-day hardships, even thesymbolic power struggle in linguistic address, as injurious; these conditions are thehallmarks of late capitalist production. Under this labor regime, workers like Fidelimust become self-responsible and risk managing, capable of affectively negotiatingthe everyday social antagonism of work; yet the very onus to negotiate work inthis manner is deemed harmful and ethically suspect. Italy’s newly precarious workregime produced a social upheaval from which mobbing took form as an effect andthen, paradoxically, became primarily cited as the cause of moral disruption. In

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the end, mobbing—something social and individualized—became the legal culpritrather than Italy’s increasingly normalized precarious labor regime. This may seemparadoxical, and I have argued that mobbing and precarity can be quite similar toone another. But mobbing can still serve as the social and judicial foil to condi-tions that are increasingly being normalized—social actors and institutions are fullycapable of simultaneous resistance and desensitization.

Taken together, the affective toil, the strained relationships, day-to-day hard-ships and negotiation of hierarchical relationships count as legal infractions, eventhough they also constitute what many—perhaps the majority of—workers mightencounter within day-to-day neoliberal work regimes. Provided it can pass as mob-bing, even the seemingly banal suffering of precarity can become thinkable and, forsome, judicially actionable. That the individual failings of workers and employersare recast as the cause of deep human suffering becomes a moral regulation, arather contradictory affective calibration. Citizens are invited to disdain some ofthe very same conditions to which they must adapt. Under individualizing laborregimes, they are petitioned to see one another as the ideal soldiers of neoliberalregimes, self-interested and calculating—such personal qualities are exacerbatedthrough precarity but reframed as if they were inherent qualities of all workers.

Which brings us back to the question of materiality in the fuller sense: ofwhat things can and do take tangible form, as well as what matters and counts.Existential damages have been called a legal mode of compensation for damageto “the right to develop human personhood” (svologimento della personalita umana;Meucci 2006:294). Although existential damages, on one level, bind up the woundsof late capitalism, awarding them is necessarily an exclusionary process: onlyparticular cases of mobbing are recognized as deserving, and only for individualsubjects capable of managing an uneven political apparatus. With mobbing, onlycertain things count: the tangible loss of the computer, the silence of lost greetings,the degraded office space, the quantifiable award. Gallo’s transfer, Fideli’s shabbyoffice, and Mina’s digital exclusion and humiliation all show us workers navigatingconditions characteristic of late modern work. Existential damages marked theineffable loss and the ethical boundaries of the employment relationship, even asthey become that which defines the limits of normal labor.

PRECARITY’S DISORIENTED SUBJECTS

In line with Italy’s current wave of labor theory, Jean Baudrillard theorized adark and totalizing vision of late modern labor regimes: “You are not surrenderedto machines, you are integrated in the systems, along with your childhood, your

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habits, your human relations, your unconscious drives, even your rejection ofwork” (Toscano 2007:71). The category of existential damages bears the trace ofthis dark and totalizing vision of capitalism; in turn, mobbing becomes a means ofarticulating the moral excesses of late capitalism. By exploring what it means toaward existential damages in Italy, we scrutinize the boundaries of what is acceptableand unacceptable, moral and amoral, just and unjust for workers subject to insecureeconomic conditions. We might also consider how the alienated subject of economicindustrialism has given way to the disoriented subject of precarity, made so byopposing political objectives and labor arrangements that call for investment butalso refusal, disdain but also submission. We find deep ambivalence regarding apolitical and economic assemblage that requires both the hyperinvestment of itssubjects and their regret for its consequences.

In a scene from the 2004 film Mobbing: I Like to Work, the protagonist pleadswith her boss: “It’s just that I don’t have anything to do. I don’t do anything. Andnot working tires me greatly, much more than working. I like to work” (Comencini2004). Mobbing, then, is not just the violence of labor but of its absence: labor’slack can be more dehumanizing than labor itself. This is made possible only by aneconomic regime that sutures subjectivity profoundly to employment. Mobbingrepresents the strange void of a society in which subjects are lured to identifywork as the culmination of the self, then are stripped of the possibility of thisactualization.

ABSTRACTPsychological workplace harassment, called “mobbing,” can include vicious bullyingbut also practices normative within neoliberal labor regimes. It has become an urgentproblem in Italy and led to the creation of a judicial category: “existential damages.”Why acknowledge workers’ existential injury during a period marked by the precipitousloss of their safeguards and value? Awarding existential damages displaces the locus ofagency from the cause of economic conditions to their effects: from labor policy and normsto the disordered social relations among workers. Obscured are frictions within Italy’suncoordinated political apparatus and how workers’ injury is enacted and maintained.[labor, law, injury, Italy, state, existential, suffering, neoliberalism, precarity]

NOTESAcknowledgments. I am grateful for the attentive readership and insights on all or portion of

this essay from Leo Coleman, Natasha Zaretsky, Joao Biehl, Carol Greenhouse, Carolyn Rouse, LisaDavis, Peter Locke, Andrea Muehlebach, George Laufenberg, Mark Robinson, and Lochlain Jain. Ialso benefit greatly from having presented some of this material at the departments of anthropology

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at the University of Chicago and Stanford University. My deep appreciation goes to Anne Allison andCharles Piot for their sharp insights and encouragement, as well as my three anonymous reviewers.

1. The official court case refers to the plaintiff as simply “Gallo,” but I adopt the pseudonymAntonio Gallo.

2. Anne Allison (2012a) shows how the notion of a class of insecure youth laborers, the “precariat,”has been taken up as a political and social category in what she calls “post-corporate” Japan.

3. By mobbing panic, I refer to the proliferation of actual and perceived mobbing cases andaccusations, as well as its professionalization (university courses, mobbing counselors, legalexperts on mobbing) and institutionalization.

4. Long-term contracts, “contratto a tempo indeterminate,” are part of Article 18 of Italy’s CivilCode and required for corporations with more than 14 employees. Once a worker has sucha contract, there are many social, economic, and legal barriers to dismissal. Unemployed andunderemployed workers greatly desire these contracts, and they are considered an essentialbuilding block for financial stability—even according to middle-class sensibilities, for havinga family.

5. Mobbing-specialized counselors, lawyers, and doctors tend to be affiliated with the moreprolabor Leftist parties while, during the 2000s, the pro-Berlusconi right-wing citizens sawmobbing as a natural outcome of a “too rigid” and “overly protectionist” economy.

6. The papal encyclicals—such as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum “Rights and Duties of Capitaland Labour,” Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra(1961)—all highlight the toil and suffering of workers. I owe this valuable insight to one ofmy reviewers.

7. I mean “appearance” of the state in a very literal way: the consumed entity that may erroneouslyappear whole to a citizenry when it is, in reality, a contradictory assemblage of actions,institutions, guidelines, policies, and individuals. Moreover, I am also noting a pattern, ascharted by Ticktin (2011) and Muehlebach (2012), of how the image of a state can beorchestrated to appear caring and humane to its citizenry and the world.

8. Other theorists include Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, and Paolo Virno. Autonomist Marxism,also known as operaismo, dates to the 1960s workers’ movements; those lead by Franco Berardirefer to this movement as “compositionism,” while others call it Workers’ Autonomy (post-autonomia operaismo; Berardi 2009:33).

9. A history of immaterial theory draws from Marx and other theorists of the early 20th century,including Becker (1964), Bourdieu (1986), Deleuze and Guattari (1984), and Somart (1927);I credit this insightful genealogy of the immaterial to Fortunati (2007) and Dowling andcolleagues (2007).

10. This, of course, belongs to a much longer theoretical tradition of examining how workersinvest emotionally and affectively in economic arrangements (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2007;Hochschild 1983; Mazzarella 2009).

11. Berardi also draws a parallel between the height of Fordist production and existentialistphilosophy. Both are concerned with alienation, the belief that manual labor objectified andcommodified what was “essentially human” (Berardi 2009:92). He positions existentialismwithin capitalism’s history as lending cultural recognition to workers’ estrangement butcriticizes existentialism’s desire for a kind of labor that enabled self-realization.

12. The public support (social and economic) surrounding mobbing has become attractive, legallyand personally, for sexual harassment cases in Italy. I have written on the erasure of sexualand gendered violence in this process and the way that mobbing, understood primarily aspsychological harassment, is undergirded by assumptions of naturalized male desire and amasculinized citizen body in Italy (Yanagisako 2000, 2002).

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