Every month he received 700 euros illegally, but a part of it was forced to return it to the corporal to pay the rent of a house shared with other labourers. Then, from one day to the next, he was replaced with a boy who earned less than three euros an hour to work in the fields. And since then he has been living in a shelter. Noon of Italy? No, this story is set in Pordenone, in the deep North. And it is one of the many stories of desperation and illegality that Flai-Cgil, through the Placido Rizzotto Observatory, has collected in its report Agromafie e corporalato.
Now in its sixth edition, the workbook of the laborers’ union this year counted 230,000 irregular presences in the Italian camps. It means that more than one out of four laborers in our country still works illegally. And this despite the fact that since 2016 Italy has had a law to combat illegal hiring – the 199 – which apparently remains largely unapplied. Of these 230,000 workers, 55,000 are women and the majority are foreigners. Non-regular subordinate agricultural work is rooted in Puglia, Sicily, Campania, Calabria and Lazio with rates of over 40%, but in the Centre-North the percentages are now between 20 and 30 percent.
In addition to alarming numbers, the birth of a illegal hiring 2.0 also emerges from the 2022 edition of the Flai-Cgil report. New industrial illegal hiring, they call it: because it no longer concerns only workers in the fields, but goes back along the agri-food chain, taking the form of illegal contracting and subcontracting in many of the services linked to agriculture. At the center of the system there are often false cooperatives, or Srls registered in the name of nominees. The story that has recently involved the family members of deputy Aboubakar Soumahoro teaches us in this sense.
The castle of subcontracting allows customers to make use of labor at very low costs, in some cases more than 40% less, but with very heavy working hours and rhythms. In fact, the scam takes the form of massive evasion of VAT, IRAP and INPS contributions by the pseudo-contractors.