Latina, June 23, 2024 – Five in the afternoon. Sun besieging beaded faces. Piazza della Libertà, with its rationalist plan fringed with edges and marbles, delivers an incandescent proposal: “Immediately an amnesty for all illegal workers.” A reclamation of the third millennium: the one to sweep away gangmastering. There horrible death of Satnam Singhwith his arm torn off by an agricultural machine, dumped in front of the house with the severed limb in the vegetable box (and his wife begging for help), promotes an impressive reaction.
From the parade in horizontal lines of Sikh turbans and Flai Cgil boaters, the face of Singh Amar Jit emerges, 37 years old, in Italy for twenty, the only one in a blue jacket: “Giorgia Meloni is a strong woman. Regularize those who work illegally. It’s a situation that has been going on for years. The regulars get 6 euros an hour, the irregulars 3 to 4″, not counting the bribes to the corporals. “To these kids – continues the spokesperson of the march – I tell them to learn Italian and, if they are treated badly, to go by the unions and the carabinieri. Satnam was a good boy. He didn’t deserve to die.” The last thrust is for the employer accused of manslaughter and failure to provide aid: “In Italy healthcare is free. Why no hospital?”
Singh Boota is 44 years old and lives in Circeo, after being promoted in a shipyard. “But I’m here to demonstrate anyway. Because anyone who earns less than five euros an hour and is a victim of gangmasters lives the life of a slave.” He continues: “The corporals are also Indian, true, as well as Bangla, Moroccan or Italian. Nationality doesn’t matter. Illegal work can only be stopped by regularising.” Lap Eroot, 48 years old, collects vegetables: “Courgettes especially, but also turnips and salad. The work is there, but the houses are expensive. There are smart employers who help, others who exploit. And the weaker you are, the more you are exploited.”
Singh Marisin Derpak is 32 years old, has been in Italy for six years, is legal – like almost all the protesters who march for his compatriots without documents or rights: “To us Indians – he explains – Work is not scary, even the hardest work. But we cannot stay six in a house and have no prospects of family reunification. This isn’t life,” she says, holding a call for mobilization in her hand. “I get paid 4 euros an hour, even if they are not always given to me. It’s not fair: if you work you have to be paid”, confesses Jagdeep Singh, an illegal immigrant who doesn’t speak Italian and has to be translated. His friend-translator Kumar also talks about crazy rhythms: “I work from 5 in the morning until the evening, 12 or 1pm hours a day. I earn 4 euros and 30, 3.60 or 5.50 per hour. It’s not enough to pay for the house, taxes and send money to India.”
They are in the square the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein, the leader of the Italian Left Nicola Fratoianni and the former president of the Chamber Laura Boldrini. Before speaking to journalists they want to listen to the voices from the stage, which is actually little more than a van but has powerful audio. Many left-wing voices and the right-wing one mayor of Latina Matilde Celentano. “I’m putting my face to it,” says the FdI exponent. But when he adds “the land license of corporals does not belong to us”, he gets a lot of boos. The sociologist Marco Omizzolo recalls: “Here there are employers who claim to be called bosses”. And he recalls stories of workers fed with “the meal prepared for dogs and pigs”. Hardeep Kaur, secretary of the Flai Cgil Frosinone-Latina, sees the Agro Pontino as the beginning of a national recovery to eliminate the Bossi-Fini law: “No more slaves. Today we have many ghosts, many men and women working in the countryside in all of Italy without rights”, he says first in Italian then in Punjabi: “We are at the side of healthy companies”, against “the blackmail of the gangmasters”. And it seems like the manifesto of a possible Italy.
