The man who gave Satnam work is the same one who, when the machine tore off the Indian worker’s arm and crushed his legs, thought that the only thing to do was not to rescue him and take him to hospital, but that of abandoning the man, what was left of him, now reduced to a mass of muscles and bones torn to pieces by the steel monster.
Abandon in the strictest sense of the term. Not by taking him to a hospital, not by trying – perhaps with empirical tools to stop the bleeding -, but by throwing him in front of the house that Satnam shared with his wife, who was the first and perhaps the only one to try to help her husband.
Now someone says that the agricultural entrepreneur for whom Satnam worked also called for help and only then moved away from the greenhouses where the victim, together with other compatriots, had been busy preparing the land for the cultivation of watermelons since the morning. He would have done it before fleeing, overwhelmed by horror at what had happened. It may have happened that way, but that phone call asking for help didn’t solve anything, it certainly didn’t extend the life of the Indian worker.
Now everyone screams in horror, asks for interventions, says they were easy prophets of doom. The fact is that Satnam is dead and no one prevented him, knowing that the Pontine countryside (fat land, where all the crops take root and the greenhouses are now part of the landscape, occupying portions of it that are kilometers and kilometers long) has become a land without rules, at least at work. In the area everyone knew and knows that agriculture would not continue without the laborers enlisted in the ranks of immigrants, with those of the Indian community (especially the Bangladeshis) guaranteeing hard, incessant work, without raising their voices. And in recent years many young people who have arrived in Italy on boats from sub-Saharan Africa also work in the fields and greenhouses, paid a few euros an hour, but which allows them to live and also support their families at home.
But it is not the salary that should push us to consider what they do and for how long they do it, it is the working conditions which are inhumane especially if, in full heat, you have to stay in the greenhouses for eight to ten hours, bent over and dripping with sweat. They are, it is said, the jobs that Italians no longer want to do. Yet young black people do them, even when, if Muslims, they face the very difficult test of fasting during Ramadan. Satnam was not the first victim of work in the Pontine countryside (and other places where immigrants work, often with sub-zero protection, hostages of the ”corporals” who make and break their lives as they please) and the hope is that a painful and offensive chapter has closed in a country that claims to feel civilized.
Deaths in the workplace are a plague, but this time every limit was exceeded, because there was no consideration for the tragedy that had befallen a man who perhaps – will there ever be a counter-proof – if rescued in time could have maybe be saved.
The tragedy of events like those in Latina is that they fall into a criminal habit, just a page in a book that seems to have no end.
The tragic end of Satnam was echoed, quite rightly, in the Italian media, but it was not the main news on the news or in the newspapers. Yesterday, in Montreal, a worker died in an accident at work and the national news opened with this news.
