Expo 2015 in Milan closed its gates on October 31. While the event has been portrayed as a ‘business card’ for Milan, the whole of Italy, and PM Matteo Renzi’s government, protests against it have taken place in the city for years, led by the No Expo Movement.

The activism in the city was also portrayed by the Italian multimedia photojournalist Matteo Congregalli in a piece with a clear title, Milan Burning.

Following the events of 1st May 2015, the No Expo Movement has been discredited by the mainstream media and the political debate. This media-political operation managed to silence the debate on corruption and on the event’s impact on the city.

Christian Elia, co-editor of the online magazine Q Code Mag wrote with his fellow co-editor Angelo Miotto an editorial critical of this mainstream media narrative.

Elia explains: “In my view, the events of May worked in a way very close to oblivion. Nobody is keeping us on the corruption trials for the highest levels of Expo’s management and in the mainstream media in these months there has been a lack of an investigative approach in terms of costs and gains of the event, as well as of benefits and wastefulness for the city in the long term”.

Beyond the mainstream media, it is possible to find exceptions, like the work of Expo Leaks, an online data-investigative journalism platform focused on detecting corruption and wrongdoings, co-founded by freelance journalist Lorenzo Bagnoli and open to the civic society’s contribution.

One of the most troubling work-related features seen during Expo 2015 has been represented by Milan’s prefecture and police headquarters controlling over 70,000 workers and the denial of 700 working badges.

Roberto Maggioni, journalist of Radio Popolare (People’s Radio) and author, of the collective Off Topic of the book Expopolis explains this context: “These police controls in Italy are unprecedented. The exclusion of 700 workers from Expo is not based on convictions, but simply on police information”.

A possible reason for this unprecedented operation can be possibly found in the international profile of Expo.

Expo 2015 has hosted many world leaders in the public eye of the storm for human rights violations in their countries, like Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin.

Elia says: “In a very heated moment for international politics, for an event which is meant to act as a country’s ‘business card’, any discording voice can ruin the scenario. The other issue is represented by the fact that there is a whole cultural area that is currently considered as troubling and this is putting in discussion how Italy deals with dissent”.

Is Expo 2015 setting somehow new rules and troubling conditions for workers?

The Expo model

Maggioni explains the scenario of job-related scandals at Expo : “ Some job-related scandals have ended up in the press since Expo’s opening. It all started with the Belgium Pavilion’s workers who left their job as they were left unpaid. Afterwards, workers who passed Manpower’ selections chose not to work at Expo because they were offered a job position and wage different from the ones they were hired for and not because they were bamboccioni (lazy young people), as the mainstream media reported. The most recent scandal concerns the Italian Pavilion, where 100 workers did not get their wage of June 2015”.

In terms of the Pavilions’ working organisation, Maggioni says: “The majority of the Expo S.p.a direct workers is managed by Manpower, while each foreign country’s Pavilion chose freely the working agency to hire staff. The unions denounced this choice because it led to a ‘war’ between working agencies to offer workers contracts at the lowest price”.

“The confederate unions have decided to work inside Expo to defend workers’ interests. The No Expo criticism on this front is focused on the fact that for the first time in Italy, voluntary work has been inserted within a union’s agreement. This choice could represent a precedent for future big events, like the Jubilee in Rome or potentially the Olympics”.

Another element of concern has been represented by the complications in obtaining information from the site, caused on one hand by the choice to refuse press badges to some journalists and on the other by the fact that many workers had to sign confidential disclosure agreements.

On this front, Maggioni said: “The Order of Journalists [the organisation of which Italian journalists must be members , to work in the profession] had to intervene in front of the denial of press badges”.

The Expo euphoria is over, but it will be far more complicated for Milan and the country to deal with the Expo legacy. The event has exposed to the whole world the deep corruption problem of the country and has launched a new model where voluntary work will have legitimacy. In conclusion, as Elia underlines dissent is fundamental in every healthy democracy, and the current path that Italian authorities are following on this front is troubling.

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Milan and the Expo Legacy