Honor for man who shed light on Italy ‘modern slavery’
ROME: It was a passion for football that made Cameroonian Yvan Sagnet want to pursue his studies in Turin, home to Italy’s most famous club, Juventus. But once settled in the northern city, the telecoms graduate found himself driven by another cause: Protecting migrant workers from ruthless exploitation in the farm fields of the country’s south, often at the hands of organized crime.
Now 31, Sagnet is soon to be named a Knight of Italy’s Order of Merit in recognition of his work in exposing what many have described as a modern form of slavery. “People talk about poverty and misery in Africa but, here, in southern Italy, in the heart of Europe, I have seen human beings stripped of every last scrap of dignity,” the activist and writer told AFP in an interview.
Sagnet first arrived in Turin a decade ago. It was only by chance that, in 2011, he discovered “caporalato”, a notoriously exploitative system under which farm owners recruit fruit pickers and other seasonal workers through an intermediary. A failed exam meant the student was no longer entitled to a maintenance grant. “I had to make some money and so, on the advice of a friend, I went off to pick some tomatoes,” he recalled. His trip saw him end up in Nardo, on the heel of the Italian boot, where he had heard a farm was looking for day workers.
16-hour days
“At the place there was a tented village with 800 workers living with only five showers and unimaginable hygiene conditions,” he said. “There were Tunisians, without doubt the biggest group, but also Moroccans, Angolans, people from Burkina Faso, Mali... I was the only Cameroonian.” Under caporalato arrangements, now outlawed but still widespread, the employers, who are the real beneficiaries of workers’ labour, avoid both payroll taxes and responsibility for the workers being paid illegally low wages.
The intermediaries, meanwhile, can claim to be paying them correctly while making deductions for services, ranging from transporting them to farms to providing bottles of water while they toil under the broiling sun of the Italian south. The involvement of criminal gangs in the system means Sagnet’s efforts on behalf of his fellow Africans mean his life remains under threat. In a 2015 report, Italian trade unions estimated the number of mainly African workers labouring under caporalato conditions at between 300,000 and 400,000. Sagnet’s experience of the system involved spending a week waiting for work before he met one of the gangmasters who oil the wheels of the illicit scheme. — AFP