Office workers with a truck driver contract. It may seem surreal, but it really happens and not in who knows what murky undergrowth of dishonest companies, but in the Local Health Authority of Taranto. A distortion practiced and tolerated for years in a public body which should be an example of compliance with the rules, guarantee of congruence between the contractual provisions and the tasks actually performed by the workers.
Fit Cisl knows something about this and has been working for some time, even on institutional tables, to rescue 54 workers supplied to the local health authority by various companies from a situation of substantial precariousness, including the controversial production and work cooperative Tre Fiammelle of Foggia, recipient of an anti-mafia ban in 2023 by the prefect Maurizio Valiante. Measure motivated by «underlying contiguity» of company representatives with some «top exponents of the Foggia mafia».
At the moment, the person entrusted with the supply of personnel, as Fit Cisl explains, “is the National Services Consortium of Bologna, within which there are over two hundred companies”. But that is not all. «Among these, they carry out the service for the Local Health Authority of Taranto, the Tre Fiammelle cooperativethe Lecce-based Sfl and the Perugia-based Servizi associati, the only one capable of acquiring regional authorization for the management of the external warehouse”.
The 54 workers are therefore divided between these three companies. To be precise, all the operators work under the national collective agreement «Goods transport and logistics» and a good part of them, probably to plug the ASL staffing gaps, have been assigned to carry out office work. Of the 54 employees, about ten work in the external logistics platform, that is, a warehouse based in Massafra where large-sized materials are stored and kept, while all the others are located within hospital facilities. About ten are employed in the pharmacy, two employees are in the administrative management of the health company, four in the Asset Management Area, six in the Protocol Office, two in offices in Grottaglie, the same number, again in the office, in Martina Franca and Castellaneta. «These are workers belonging to categories that have already been subject to internalisation – points out the Fit Cisl union – i.e. computer scientists and workers in the single booking centre. During the last electoral campaign there was a strong desire expressed by the governor of Puglia, Emiliano, to internalize these 54 people, but they were left out due to the particular dynamics underlying the relationships between politics and the local economy. In essence we find ourselves faced with the paradox – remarks Fit Cisl – of having a certain number of workers who have a transport contract, who carry out tasks that have very little to do with logistics and handling”.
The union negotiations aimed at bringing all this staff into compliance have been going on for about 14 years, i.e. since 2010, but to date they have not been able to find a solution, despite the many attempts made in the negotiating delegations and the various general managers who succeeded until the manager Gregorio Colacicco who currently manages the fate of the Taranto Local Health Authority. The union, where the Transport and Logistics contract was considered an obstacle to insourcing, had proposed to recruit the 54 temporary workers, as was intended to be done for the IT workers. Instead, both categories of workers today find themselves working side by side in the same offices. Some without proper contractual coverage, others by normal ASL employees.
