Another death on the tracks, less than a hundred kilometers and less than a year after the Brandizzo massacre. Yesterday morning it happened in Meina, on the Piedmont shore of Lake Maggiore, in the province of Novara, in the Vicolo Pozzo area, where a 56-year-old worker lost his life, crushed by machinery while he was working on a railway construction site.
As in Brandizzo, the worker was part of a contractor that is carrying out work on behalf of Rfi. Unlike Brandizzo, on the Milan-Domodossola line, traffic had already been interrupted since June for work to adapt the tracks to modern freight trains.
His name was Carlo Maletta and he was a surveyor from Mantello, in the province of Sondrio. The construction site is located along the route that connects Meina and Arona on the line to Milan. According to the most reliable reconstruction of the dynamics, the man was hit by a moving vehicle that came out of the tunnel near which an intervention is taking place to lower the level of the tracks to allow freight trains to pass through the tunnel itself.
The works were entrusted by RFI to a Milanese company, Luigi Notari spa, which subcontracted this part of the interventions to a group of companies led by Quadrio Gaetano Costruzioni spa of Morbegno in the province of Sondrio.
“Let’s transform the pain into that daily commitment that we exercise through demonstrations, strikes and in the recent referendum campaign: because you cannot die at work – denounces the Cgil -. It is not a civil society in which we continue to register deaths, accidents and occupational diseases: it is necessary that the indignation is transformed into a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone (workers, businesses and institutions) for the respect of the rules aimed at preventing what are improperly called accidental deaths”, concludes the note from Cgil Novara.
The death comes two days after the national assembly of delegates and workers of the entire railway maintenance sector that Fillea Cgil, together with Cgil, had already planned for July 5 in Vercelli, with Alessandro Genovesi and Maurizio Landini. Fillea Cgil has been denouncing for months how Rfi has not respected its post-Brandizzo commitments, which were supposed to guarantee protections for contract and subcontract workers.
“We want to relaunch the reasons for a major dispute, in such an important sector, maintenance is increasingly the mirror of a certain business model, of a culture of profit that fuels haste in work, excess loads, decreased attention to health and safety, less importance to the knowledge of those who work – writes Fillea Cgil -. A model that, in addition to being unfair, does not even reward the most serious, structured companies, attentive to the quality of products and processes”, concludes Fillea Cgil.
