A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI, #209 - SLAVES (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In Melonia Felix, the discovery of four burned bodies of laborers in a 
car-three Pakistanis and one Afghan-in Amendolara, Calabria, reminds us 
of the existence of migrant laborers who, in this case, worked in the 
Metaponto countryside picking strawberries, lemons, and vegetables. 
These laborers, if any, were born in Italy and are white, and no longer 
want to do this work. --- The paltry wages, brutal working conditions, 
and exploitation by the Mafia and the 'Ndrangheta make it impossible.
They fuel exploitation among the migrants themselves and push young 
Italians, with EU passports, to embark on the path of emigration, which 
is more lucrative and offers greater rights. Left to toil under the sun 
and rain are migrants, many of them deliberately undocumented, 
desperately seeking a
residence permit. Blackmailed because of their irregular status, they 
accept more than others: starvation wages and inhumane working 
conditions, living in makeshift accommodations, veritable shantytowns 
that spring up on the edges of the fields. Their homes, some built with 
funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), remain 
empty and vandalized while awaiting assignment.
We know many of these places, in the so-called "transformed zone" (from 
Pachino to Palma di Montechiaro and Vittoria), in the Rosarno plain, in 
the Metaponto area, in the countryside around Naples, in the Pontine 
Marshes and throughout the province of Latina, in the Foggia area, in 
the Murge, and even further up the peninsula, on the farms of Emilia and 
the Po Valley, in Monferrato tending the vineyards, and in Trentino 
picking apples.
The members of this low-wage, rights-free industrial reserve army are 
the perverse fruit of the Bossi-Fini law and the migrant management 
system that consigns the vast majority of them to permanent 
clandestinity, tying residency permit renewal to the maintenance of 
regular, legal employment. Alongside them are those employed in the 
management of intensive stables and chicken coops, with the tale of a 
"natural propensity" among migrants from India and Bangladesh to live in 
symbiosis with sheep.
Then there are those employed in industry: just take a stroll around 
Monfalcone to discover that a large portion of the construction workers 
come from India and Bangladesh. These people, many of whom are Muslim, 
are denied the right to a mosque, and municipalities run by the Northern 
League are scrupulous and concerned about denying both the building 
permits required to build a mosque and granting the rezoning of 
abandoned warehouses or properties purchased with considerable financial 
effort by the communities. These are thousands of people who remain 
completely unknown to statistics, anonymous, unregistered, and 
overpriced for being unable or unwilling to integrate, when in reality 
they have no chance of doing so because they are denied the facilities. 
The bureaucratic management of local governments, especially but not 
exclusively those run by the Northern League, prevents them from doing 
so, hindering their formation as communities.
We watched with horror but without amazement, on May 9, 2026, as Bakari 
Sako, a 35-year-old farm worker from Mali, was attacked and killed by a 
gang of 15-year-old layabouts in Taranto. We accepted that Satnam Singh, 
a 31-year-old Indian farm worker, was abandoned by his employer in Borgo 
Santa Maria (Latina) on June 17, 2024, in front of his house, with his 
severed arm, crushed by a farm machine, in a crate to bleed to death. We 
recall that in the collapse of a supermarket attic in Florence, most of 
the workers killed were undocumented migrants, and we could continue 
citing other well-known and lesser-known events. We also knew that the 
laborers and migrants are managed by Kapos, often recruited from among 
themselves, building a hierarchy of exploitation governed by poverty, 
lack of rights, and the exploitation of one man by another. We knew all 
this, but what recently happened in Milan defied all imagination.

The multinational management of day labor and gangmastering

Milan, 2022, site of the former Tiro a Segno shooting range in Piazzale 
Accursio (Cagnola district): Lombardy Governor Fontana, Mayor Sala, 
Councilor Letizia Moratti, and the US Ambassador are launching 
construction of the new US Consulate, designed by SHOP Architects. The 
complex will span over 40,000 square meters and will integrate the 
historic 1905 Palazzina Liberty building. The project has a budget of 
$351 million. The construction company in charge of the project is 
Caddell Construction Company, LLC, a US construction giant headquartered 
in Alabama and under the auspices of the US Department of State's Bureau 
of Overseas Buildings Operations. The Turkish manager, Ulas Demir, is 
the trustee in Italy. The Milan prosecutor's office states that Caddell 
Construction "employed a workforce ranging from 311 to 394 for the year 
2025, of which 388 were employed in December, 316 of whom were Indian. 
As of February 2026, the Caddell branch office reported 261 workers for 
the construction of the new consulate."
An investigation conducted by the Labor Protection Unit, which reports 
to the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office, reveals that for years, near 
the center of Milan, there has been a location where the majority of the 
labor used is hired abroad using blackmail and mafia-like practices.
The workers are recruited in their home country, India, by unscrupulous 
intermediaries. These intermediaries promise decent wages, exploiting 
their needy status. To leave, all workers are required to pay a fee of 
approximately EUR5,000 (500,000 rupees) to obtain a work visa and secure 
employment. To pay this "pizzo," the workers and their families go into 
heavy debt. Once they arrive in Italy, the workers discover the promises 
were false; the debt becomes a chain, as the "construction foreman" 
withholds a large portion of their (already meager) wages under the 
pretext of providing room and board, and with the threat of dismissal. 
As a result, many workers remain undocumented.
Exploitation becomes more pervasive and economically burdensome on 
construction sites, where workers "are forced to work grueling shifts, 
without safety, and under the constant threat of dismissal." They are 
then forced to return to their home countries, pursuant to the 
Bossi-Fini law, unless they are subjected to degrading and underpaid 
working conditions. They are unable to even rebel, because they are 
subject to blackmail and control, transformed into slaves, and 
effectively paid EUR2 an hour.
Reconstructing the facts inevitably raises some questions: how was it 
possible, given such a massive number of exploited workers, that what 
was happening could have escaped the attention of labor and immigration 
regulators for nearly four years? It might be said that it was difficult 
to resolve, considering that everything was done to prevent unions from 
entering the construction site to inspect working conditions. Some 
argue, however, that the fact that the contractor and the successful 
bidder were non-Italian and non-European hindered inspections and controls.
It is worth remembering, however, that the construction project involves 
a consulate: the use of anonymous labor, employed and then dispersed to 
their countries of origin, serves to erase the workers' memory of the 
project's characteristics once the work is completed, given the certain 
confidentiality requirements that must be maintained regarding the 
construction features and installed systems. However, this requirement 
cannot justify the exploitation and enslavement of the labor force. At 
the same time, the very structural characteristics of the project to be 
completed do not justify the client's ignorance of what was happening.
Consequently, despite the fact that the judiciary has ordered the 
immediate administration of the company and that it must now regularize 
its workers, monitor its workplaces, and equip itself with 
organizational tools to prevent a repetition of the serious exploitation 
it is accused of, its managers must be investigated for the crimes under 
Article 603-bis of the Criminal Code (and the related liability under 
Legislative Decree 231/2001 against the company). This includes not only 
those operating in the company, such as Ulas Demir, arrested while 
fleeing to Turkey, but also those of Caddell Construction Company, LLC, 
and the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations of the United States 
Department of State, as they could not have been unaware, even though 
there is no possibility of this occurring.
The ties that unite the United States and Italy do not justify or permit 
a foreign country, however important an ally, to violate our country's 
existing laws: what is at stake is the sovereignty so dear to the 
current government, yet so despised and vilified.

GC

https://www.ucadi.org/2026/06/27/s-c-h-i-a-v-i/
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