A moment of the operation of the Carabinieri of the Livorno command against gangmastering, 29 April 2024. The military carried out a precautionary custody measure in prison against 10 people seriously suspected, in various capacities and in collaboration with each other, of the crime of illicit intermediation and exploitation of the work of 67 non-EU citizens hosted in the Cas of Piombino, employed for the harvesting of vegetables and olives and for cleaning vineyards in the provinces of Livorno and Grosseto
They toiled for over ten hours a day, often barefoot, in the vineyards or picking olives and vegetables. Without rest breaks or compliance with safety regulations. And with starvation hourly wages: from 3 to 9 euros, but in at least one case just 97 cents, paid months late and sometimes never, and in any case “well below the 10.56 euros envisaged by the collective bargaining agreement”. Thus, 67 asylum seekers and beneficiaries of humanitarian protection of Pakistani or Bangladeshi nationality were exploited by compatriots in Tuscany.
The investigation, which began in May 2023, closed in February. Finally, motivating it with the risk of repetition of the crime, at the request of the Livorno prosecutor’s office the investigating judge ordered the execution of a precautionary custody order in prison against ten suspects, all Pakistani and aged between 30 and 56 years , residents between the provinces of Siena and Grosseto (two of them, however, managed to avoid arrest because in the meantime they had gone abroad). “Applause” for the Carabinieri’s investigations comes from the Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, who reiterates “the Meloni government’s commitment to combating the exploitation of workers in the agricultural sector”.
The suspects are six owners of as many individual companies supplying work and services in the agricultural sector, and four of their compatriots who helped them in the work of recruiting workers. The crimes hypothesized by the investigators are either those of illicit intermediation and labor exploitation.
The investigation by the Livorno prosecutor’s office was entrusted to the Carabinieri of Piombino, with the support of the Labor Inspectorate. The investigators began investigating after becoming curious about the excessive coming and going of vans in front of the Cas “Le Caravelle” in Riotorto, a former tourist village near the sea now used as a reception centre. By taking the license plates and following the vehicles, and then moving on to telephone and environmental interceptions, the soldiers of the Radiomobile and the operational unit reconstructed the network of corporals who recruited the refugees, taking advantage of their “serious state of need” – as explained by the provincial commander of the Piercarmine Sica Corps – to exploit them as laborers on farms in the Livorno or Grosseto areas. The investigation, code-named “Barefoot – says Giorgio Poggetto, commander of the operational unit of the Carabinieri of Piombino – we called it that because it summarizes the working conditions of the refugees”. In the investigation documents, an intercepted conversation stands out in which one of the two interlocutors reveals «the concern for the harvesting of vegetables in the fields after heavy rains» and the other, cynically, replies: «We send our people barefoot , so there is no problem of them getting stuck with their shoes.”
For the Flai Cgil union, this latest case «is the cross-section of a suffering primary economy, despite the continuous efforts to restore legality in the sector» and a step is urgently needed «in the preventive contrast, establishing the territorial sections of quality agricultural work ».
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