Even the President of the Province of Latina, Gerardo Stefanelli, yesterday took part in the demonstration organized in the Pontine capital by the Indian Community in Lazio association for the labourer, a victim of work.
“There are hundreds of migrant and Italian workers who support the agri-food production of our Province, which only now appears to be pervaded by the plague of exploitation and illegality, while the gangmaster – Stefanelli underlines – it exists latently before everyone’s eyes. In 2015 it was denounced by thousands of Indian workers right here, where today, in addition to them, the institutions are also gathered as a sign of condolence and a firm denunciation of a reality that can no longer be accepted.
Undoubtedly, Satnam’s death sparked public outrage, even today bringing hundreds of people to the streets who want to denounce such inhumane treatment. The escalation of violence and brutality from the failure to help, from the seizure of phones to the horror of the arm hidden in the box and then abandoned are some of the crudest details of a story of oppression, lack of humanity and absence of guarantee and rights that makes Satnam Singh the symbol of many silent deaths.
From this square – continues the President of the Province – the fight against labor exploitation in agriculture and gangmastering arises, with the drama of a population that feels forgotten because, once again, something in the institutions has not worked since 2016, when for the first time gangmastering was limited with law 199. A law which for the first time equated the corporal with the user of exploited labour, speaking of serious injuries to human dignity and introducing a sanctioning system and precautionary measures for companies guilty of this crime.
From that experimental protocol against gangmastering, tools to strengthen the enforcement procedures were missing, – according to Stefanelli – the intensification of controls and a support network for migrant flows, abandoned to themselves and penalized by a policy of hatred that has made us lose sight of the human component. It is necessary to give a clear signal to a widespread culture that still sees work as oppression and exploitation and not as a tool for claiming one’s dignity. We need welfare policies for migrants arriving in our territories and a firm crackdown on exploitation and gangmastering, made up of stringent controls, certain penalties and the writing of a new culture of migrant work, made up of rights, protection and security”.
