Trial for gangmastering in Latina: testimonies on the conditions of exploitation on the farm

The testimonies that emerged in the Chamber shed light on the dramatic details of the recruitment, retracing the route from India to Croatia and then to Italy with the request for thousands of euros per stage, up to the mechanism of on-the-spot starvation payments. A model of criminal enterprise that considers workers not as people, but as arms to be squeezed and blackmailed". Thus the CGIL Frosinone-Latina and that of Rome and Lazio in the aftermath of the hearing held yesterday in the Pontine court in the context of the judicial proceedings on gangmastering and labor exploitation, arising from the investigation parallel to that on the death of Satnam Singh, the Indian laborer left dying on the street in June 2024 with a severed arm after an accident on the farm where he worked.

The trial for gangmastering, in which agricultural entrepreneurs Antonello Lovato and also his father Renzo are accused, intends to shed light on the conditions of exploitation within the Borgo Santa Maria farm where Satnam's workplace accident occurred. In yesterday's hearing, Soni Soni, widow of Satnam Singh, was heard as a key witness and civil party. The woman denounced in the courtroom exhausting shifts (8-9 hours a day for picking vegetables), unpaid Sunday shifts in case of illness and, finally, cash wages stuck at around 5.50 - 6 euros per hour.

"While the murder of Satnam Singh led to a 16-year sentence in the first instance" for Antonello Lovato, "this procedural chapter specifically focuses on the crime of labor exploitation and gangmastering. An aberrant phenomenon - underlines the CGIL - which does not represent an isolated episode, but a systemic plague on which full light must be shed and which must find exemplary sanctioning responses in the courtrooms".