Satnam he was thirty-one years old. He had arrived fromIndia in Italyand precisely inAgro pontine, three years ago. She worked for four euros an hour in the fieldswithout a regular contract and maybe even without residency permit. With him his wife and a lot misery: the one left in the heart of Asia, the one found here in Europe where it had practically become one slave.
A few days ago he was crushed by machinery plastic wrap who severed a arm and mutilated them legsand provoked a head trauma. The owners who had hired him took him and dumped him in front of the house, leaving him on the doorstep and the cut art in a tomato box. As if it were one goods that too, the fruit of hard work bitterultra-underpaid and which doesn’t give you any rights but, on the contrary, if you get hurt or die no one there knows you or has ever seen you.
Interviewed by national news, the owner of the farm he pronounced these words with a seraphism that provokes a mixture of disgust and horror: «My son had said to worker not to approach the vehicle, but the worker did his own thing. A lightness, unfortunately.” So, dear Satnam, it’s your fault. Obviously you were a masochist and wanted to die.
Or perhaps, more likely, you were so exhaustedwith the arrival of the summer heat, and so devoid of any minimum protection and guarantee in the matter of safetythat even the most careful prudence for one’s life slips away between the reels of these monsters mechanics driven by the unconsciousness of those who seek only the profit at a very low cost and nothing more.
It is up to us and, therefore, we must, because al agricultural work the words “are synonymous”gangmaster” And “neoslavery” In fields. Just scroll through the news of past years to realize how many labourers they collapsed under the Southern sun, struck by heart attackafter bending their backs to pick vegetables for more than eight hours, paid even less than the pittance given to Satnam.
In this story, however, there is one aggravating in the flagrante delicto of the crimes that will be established by the judiciary: give it exploitation of labor tohiring without an employment contract until’manslaughter for not having adequately helped the thirty-one-year-old who lost his arm and was left dying on the doorstep of his house, more than two hours after the accident. A time that was perhaps among the premises for the fatal course.
But the worst aggravating circumstance is the total indifference towards the life, of the existence of a human being. Her work is worth four euros arm when they are attached to the body and are no longer worth anything when an agricultural machine cuts one off and thus becomes, in addition to being useless at work, also a dangerous witness to the criminal organization of the labour in the agricultural sectors.
Such is the value of one modern slavea few steps from our cities where the summer solstice is celebrated, where we go on holiday, where the lives of others flow, albeit amidst a thousand hardships, with more luck than that of migrants (and also of many Italians) who are forced not to menial jobs, but tohumiliation of workat the depersonalization complete with themselves. Treated with the cold indifference of those who consider them different from themselves and treat them as subhumans.
We cannot speak of an “employer” where the work is something other than itself. The right words must be used, especially if they offend and outrage the supporters of the business world and, at this juncture, of a gangmaster which everyone verbally condemns and against which governments have always done very little, as well as regional administrations.
For this reason the word “master” is more current than ever, even if there is an attempt to make it obsolete, entrusting it to the memories of a nineteenth-twentieth century past, oblivioning it in the rigorous narrative of Western modernity cloaked in liberalism and the well-being that would derive from it. Entrepreneur it sounds better, sure, but it doesn’t protect you from being employed in companies where you then come exploited.
Master gives you an idea of what these really are corporals which create all the conditions to go well beyond the concept of “accident” or “death at work”. The young Indian did not have an accident and did not even die at work. He was put in the position of coming to a very bad end, and the fact that he did so cannot be attributed to imprudence or incompetence. If it happened to him, it could happen to anyone else.
It is not fatality, but a real conjuncture of facts, of circumstances which in their extreme point of synthesis lead to the worst. Whoever, even indirectly, is responsible for this anti-work, inhumane, anti-union and illegal policy, does not become but is already from the start the living prerequisite of a fury towards workers which operates in the exclusive sense of profit at the highest levels.
That very cynical cruelty that led the owners to load Satnam’s body onto a pickup truck and abandon him and his severed arm at the door of the house is part of a system of candies which must be investigated in its complexity, precisely because it is not a question of isolated cases, of fatalities, but of a regime of exploitation vulgar that grows in the shadow of illegality, immorality, before everyone’s eyes.
In the agricultural plains, in the evening, i migrants they walk or return on rickety bicycles towards the neighborhoods dormitory. Sometimes, or rather often, they go to the underbridges where they sleep in the open, where thehygiene is absent, where moral degradation adds to the physical and mental one. The desperation of these people is so great that the paltry pay they receive is greater than the tragedy of their lives.
Consider four euros an hour and think if your life were worth even less than that… They fight against all this labor unions, both confederal and grassroots. They fight voluntary associations secular and religious. Communities are fighting in solidarity who do not remain indifferent to the harassment of gangmasters, to the insensitivity on which they feed in the name of profiting from the lost lives of other living beings. But it Statethe Regionsthe local administrations where am I?
If Satnam had been called Federicoif he had had skin whiteif he had perhaps been originally from Rome or Naples, he would not have been so completely left at the mercy of his own atrocious suffering, thrown away like a broken puppet, an unusable toy that one gets rid of even with a certain amount of anger and annoyance.
If it had been Italian even the corporal masters would have had a few more hesitations. But he was a immigrantand perhaps without a regular residence permit: therefore blackmailable infinitely for a fault that has saddled him with a world in which the law of profit supervises all the others.
In this Italy of ours that spends in weapons more than you spend on healthcarewhich invests in great works more than it does for the social deseasewhich protects profits and large financial income rather than the world of Work and of exploitation, the amount of the so-called “unobserved” economy is approximately 208 billion euros. Of these, around five billion are the bloody and bitter fruit of gangmaster.
If we read the data ofCGIL Observatory (data that stop at 2018), we verify that there are around half a million workers subjected to the regime slavery of agro-mafias in the South of the country. Of the total number of those employed in the agricultural sector, those who are placed in a permanent irregular regime amount to approximately 39% of the workers.
Nearly forty percent of those who curve their backs in fieldstherefore, he does it without a shred of contract in hand, without any guarantee and protection on his employment relationship, on his health and on life. Between these,
Satnam and his wife. Out of a million agricultural workers, those hired regularly are just 28% (less than three hundred thousand); many others are employed with non-union wages or with informal relationships.
The geography of the agri-food sector is a dark forest that really leads to a hell of ultra-underpaid services, to a world where the Law is against the backdrop of a society steeped in malfeasanceof ruthless dehumanization of relationships, of absolute disregard for any form of empathy.
The pompous declamation of excellence food of our Italy, even between one football match and another, while television advertisements glorify the products of the earth, should first of all deal with a multiplicity of causes that determine the tragic life first and the horrible death then of women and men whose only fault is being born in nations made poor by centuries and centuries of European and Western conquests.
Behind every vegetable that we buy at the supermarket can hide this world of the living who, hunched over the rows of plants, seem like the shadows of a death that awaits them with every step they take.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
