VITERBO – «Arci Solidarietà Viterbo, committed for years to the promotion of the rights of migrants, refugees and refugees, expresses its solidarity in the fight against gangmastering and labor exploitation – declares Sergio Giovagnoli, president of Arci Solidarietà Viterbo – to the family of Satnam Singh, an Indian laborer who, after a serious accident which occurred on a farm in the Agro Pontino, lost an arm and died in hospital due to the serious delays caused to the criminal behavior of his master who, instead of helping him, simply dumped him in front of the house together with his severed arm and his desperate wife”.
«A barbaric behavior, aggravated in these hours by the shocking declarations of the father of the owner of the company who intends to shift the responsibility for the incident onto Satnam’s shoulders, and is worried about the consequences for his company.
Given the many cases of companies that take advantage of the vulnerability and blackmail of foreign people who need to work and redeem their condition as people without a guaranteed legal status, incidents of this kind of brutality, despite not being on the agenda, represent however, the tip of an iceberg under which there is a large mass of illegality and exploitation, with very explicit forms of racism that allow many unscrupulous bosses to treat foreign workers as if they were still in the cotton fields of Alabama .
We express solidarity with the Indian community of the Agro Pontino who cyclically mourn for brothers who lose their lives while working, return home on bicycles, hang themselves in the greenhouses because they can no longer bear the inhuman workloads, while they suffer the blackmail of work, they are forced to accept low wages and poor security, they are forced to take drugs to withstand the heavy workloads as the activist and scholar Marco Omizzolo has denounced several times in many of his speeches and publications.
We express solidarity with trade unionists and activists who seek to support the struggles of these workers subjugated by trafficking and gang-mastering, sometimes even ethnic, phenomena.
Solidarity with the police and the institutions when they commit seriously and with determination to eradicate a human phenomenon which, as Falcone said for the mafia, “like all human things had a beginning and must have an end”.
Solidarity with honest entrepreneurs who themselves remain victims of the terrible reputation that affects agriculture in general, when this should be supported as the primary sector, not only from a purely economic point of view, but also in promoting the valorization of the social quality of the product and the environmental impact of crops.
We support the rights of all workers and citizens – concludes Giovagnoli –, regardless of the color of their skin, the language they speak and the place where they work. The Agro Pontino is a particular concentration with a considerable presence of foreign workers but it is not an isolated case and no territory is free from the risks of exploitation even without reaching the horror of trampling on human life. Solidarity in the memory of Satnam also means opposing any form of exploitation in our territories.”
