Pierpaolo Bodini, 18 years old, was killed, crushed by an agricultural vehicle in the fields of the Lodi area. In the same hours, in Sesto Calende, in the province of Varese, a nineteen-year-old suffered the same injury: he survived, with fractures to his pelvis and femur. The next day, in Cividale Mantovano, Mirko Schirolli, 35 years old, died when he was sucked into a machine. In the background is the case of Satnam Singh, with elements of criminal cruelty so glaring that they would stir anyone’s indignation. Giorgia Meloni also intervened on this point: “These are inhumane acts that do not belong to the Italian people, and I hope that this barbarity will be harshly punished“.
The Prime Minister’s statement, with an aftertaste of patriotic propaganda on the Italians good peoplereveals the further drama behind these tragedies: the violence at work it is not an emergency, it is a structural and crystallized phenomenon, towards which indignation is not enough. And punishment, if it arrives, does not resuscitate anyone: safety requires prevention, not propaganda.
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Fewer inspections, more precariousness: the world of work is not safe
In a few days we will no longer talk about Satnam Singh: there will be other news, other facts to comment on, more anger to direct towards the injustices of the world. Of course, the case of a exploited worker, in black, amputated by a machine, deprived of any kind of help and abandoned in agony without an arm, seems to condense every wrong, stimulate deep and just indignation, but also the search for reassurance: “they do not belong to the Italian people”, guarantees Meloni . And instead, the choice of recent governments to invest less and less in belongs to the Italian people safety at work: according to the reports of the National Labor Inspectorate, in the last eight years the annual total of inspections and assessments has more than halved, going from 221,476 in 2014 to 100,192 in 2022. Already in the 2016 report, presenting the overall data of inspections and assessments, the inspectors consoled themselves by defining the data as “particularly positive if we consider the physiological decrease in supervisory staff which has been affecting the territorial offices for some time“.
To this must be added an increasingly precarious working landscape: really, under the threat of dismissal (and without any more effective and dissuasive sanctions), do workers have the strength to demand their rights and demand the right protections?
Invisible Labor: How Anti-Immigration Propaganda Promotes Exploitation
To the structural violence of the law of the strongest, which imposes itself on the labor market, especially when those who should control do not have the means to do so, is added another crystallized violence.
An entire segment of the population in Italy must accept working conditions bordering on slaveryoften in the black: foreign workers, even those in possession of a residence permit, must hold on to their employment, however humiliating it may be, to maintain the right to stay in the country or to avoid being reported and repatriated, if the right they didn’t get it.
This violence is confirmed, almost unconsciously reaffirmed, by the government’s declarations in the last few hours, with the much-ballyhooed granting by the Interior Ministry of the residence permit to Satnam Singh’s widow: if a legal title had been guaranteed earlier, to her and her husband, they would not have been gods invisible, forced to suffer the exploitation of unscrupulous people. Perhaps Satnam Singh would still be alive, one less number in the deadly tally of workplace accidents.
If the aid denied (indeed, prevented) to a dying worker is a barbarism that does not belong to the Italian people, the choices regarding immigration of the last decades. They are policies that respond to a short-sighted, emergency and repressive logic, which has favored and favors the exploitation of both foreigners and Italians: the former, invisible and blackmailed, are prey to the exploiters, the latter are victims of the involuntary unfair competition of the workforce low-cost foreign.
Born in 1992 in the province of Milan. She graduated in law with a thesis on Danilo Dolci and the right to work, thanks to which she won the Angiolino Acquisti Culture of Peace award and the Matteotti award. She is now a research fellow in labor law. She is the author of the books Strong Power. Current affairs of nonviolence (effequ, 2019) and Arguing is diabolical. Rhetoric and fallacies in communication (effequ, 2022).
