Agriculture, over 400 thousand illegal workers paid 2.5 Euros per hour – Il Sole 24 Ore

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This article was published on February 23, 2016 at 13:11.

More than twelve hours of work in the fields for a salary of 25-30 euro per day, which means less than 2 euro and 50 per hour. It is the situation in which they work in Italy 400 thousand workers exploited by illegal hiring, foreign 80% of cases.

This is what emerges from a study by The European House-Ambrosetti Flai Cgil data relating to 2015, presented at the conference in Assosomm-Italian association of employment agencies “Activate work. The potential of the work in administration in agriculture ” ‘. Over 80 Italian agricultural districts where you practice illegal hiring seen in 33 cases working conditions “indecent” and in 22 cases the working conditions “severely exploited” and deprive the state coffers some 600 million euro annually.

At the pay of those who work under corporals, equal to half of what established by national contracts, also, they must be subtracted the cost of transportation, about 5 Euros, the purchase of water and food, the rent of accommodation and possibly the purchase of medicines. In fact 74% of workers employed under corporals is ill and there is noise in the beginning of the season we had not come forward. The cases of diseases are mostly curable with a simple antibiotic therapy but become chronic in the absence of a doctor to turn to and of money for the purchase of medicines. Compounding the situation helps then the work overload, exposure to the elements, the lack of access to running water, which affects 64% of workers, and sanitation, which covers 62%. Only in the summer of 2015 the study estimated that the victims of the illegal hiring were at least 10.

The agri-food sector in Italy produces 32 billion of value added tax (2%) and employs 905,000 people (3.7% of total), but it is still hostage to “labor organization that has been handed down for centuries and that brings with it a very high rate of irregularities.” All this has a cost to the state in lost tax revenue of 600 million a year. More generally, the agricultural sector has an incidence of the underground economy amounted, in 2015, to 15.4% of value added, ie 5.1 billion euro, and is the only one for which the underground economy is represented exclusively by irregular work. The irregularity rate for agricultural workers is the only one to have grown up going from 18.5% in 2000 to 22.3% in 2013 (the same period has declined from 9.1% to 8.9% for industry and from 15.5% to 13.6% for services).

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