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 aresidence 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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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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