An Indian worker died in Italy after being abandoned on the street without any medical care: he had injured himself with an agricultural machine that had severed his arm and lacerated his legs. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that Satnam Singh, one of thousands of Indian immigrants who work in the fields in Italy, was the victim of “inhuman acts”. Singh worked in a greenhouse in the Pontine Marshes, in the province of Latina. He died on June 19 in a hospital in Rome.
The BBC cites Italian media according to which Antonello Lovato, the owner of the company Singh worked for, abandoned the man and his wife on the street, near their home. Singh’s arm was placed in a fruit box. Emergency doctors reached Singh just an hour and a half later. Airlifted to a hospital in Rome, he died within a few hours. Lovato is under investigation for manslaughter and manslaughter. Singh, 31, had been living and working in Italy without proper documents for about two years.
The Flai-Cgil union (Federation of Agro-Industry Workers) demonstrated on June 23 in Latina, the city where Singh lived, to protest against his death. Maurizio Landini, general secretary of the CGIL, declared immediately after the incident: “We are faced with a situation of real slavery. The death of a worker – an undocumented worker – is of unprecedented gravity.”
The Italian media talk about “caporali,” people hired by local farmers to find low-cost laborers. The caporali keep a portion of the money for themselves, and with the money given to the farm laborers they get them to pay for transportation to the fields, water, and food. According to Istat, in 2018, almost a quarter of the agricultural workforce in Italy was in this situation. And the system also affects the service and construction sectors. In 2016, an Italian woman died of a heart attack while working, twelve hours a day, to pick and select grapes. These workers receive very low wages, live in huts, hovels, or shanty towns without access to education or health care.
According to a CNN report, “for every three hundred kilo box of tomatoes harvested by the workers, the owner of the land gives five euros to the corporal who gives three to the worker. Migrants are deducted five euros a day for transport and sometimes another five for meals.” The National Institute for Insurance on Accidents at Work (Inail) declared that in the first four months of 2024 in Italy there were four more fatal accidents at work than in the same period of the previous year, reaching 268.
Most Sikh migrants work in the Italian dairy sector, or in fruit or olive picking. A few years ago Balbir Singh, another Sikh Indian migrant from Punjab, described his conditions of slavery in the livestock farming sector in Latina. He had told the media that he worked 13 hours a day, including Sundays, without holidays or rest. He was paid less than 50 cents an hour, writes the AFP news agency. The minimum wage for agricultural workers is around ten euros per hour. Singh was freed by a police operation on 17 March 2017 after an appeal launched on Facebook and WhatsApp to local Indian community leaders and an Italian activist for the protection of workers’ rights. ◆ gim
