This case has shocked Italy - three Afghans and a Pakistani were found burned outside a gas station near the town of Amendolara in the south of the country.
"After this tragedy, after this murder, society must wake up", the leader of Italy's largest trade union CGIL Maurizio Landini appealed to participants in a protest rally. About 3,000 people gathered in the square of Amendolara in Calabria, shocked by what happened last week in broad daylight.
Because of unpaid wages
The story is horrifying, writes ARD correspondent Anna Giordano. Two men waited at a gas station for a car carrying five foreigners who were helping to harvest the crops in the fields, doused them with gasoline and threw a lighter inside while keeping the doors closed from the outside. They then fled.
The farm workers were burned alive, with only one 35-year-old man from Afghanistan surviving. He and his colleagues worked in the fields every day, but had not been paid for a month. They asked their bosses to pay them, and then the dispute escalated - it was the middlemen between the farmers and the seasonal workers, known as corporals in Italy, who set their car on fire. Their exact motive is still being investigated, the German publication adds.
Systemic exploitation of seasonal workers in Italy
The Calabrian case is just the tip of the iceberg, says Fabio Ciconte, president of the Italian environmental and human rights organization "Terra". According to him, "caporalato" is a criminal system in Italy for illegal mediation and labor exploitation, against which the Italian authorities and unions are trying to actively fight. "This system has been operating in Italy for decades," says Ciconte.
Farmers need a huge number of workers who have to pick oranges, tangerines, avocados, tomatoes and strawberries. "And this is where the corporals come into play", explains the human rights activist, quoted by ARD.
They act as an agency, offering farmers cheap labor and profiting from it by exploiting the workers, who are mostly migrants: "Because they pay them pitiful wages and force them to live in miserable housing: all over Italy we have ghettos in which thousands of people live like this."
The current case in Calabria confirms this. The seasonal workers who were set on fire lived in a small two-room apartment - a total of 10 people slept there on mattresses, for which each of them paid 500 euros in monthly rent, Italian media reported.
The food industry mechanism is to blame
Since 2016, stricter laws have been in force in Italy, but Ciconte claims that they are also being skillfully circumvented. For example, employment contracts specify far fewer working days than people actually work. Or they include salaries, of which the workers ultimately only see a small part. In addition, massive field inspections are not carried out.
"All this is part of a mechanism of the agricultural and food industry, in which food is both too expensive and costs too little," says Ciconte. What does he mean? Although the prices in supermarkets are very high, which is why many people cannot afford them, in the end there is too little left for farmers.
For years, this working model has been criticized by the Italian antitrust authority, which has launched an investigation into the matter. It accuses the large supermarket chains of using their market power to put pressure on producers. This is also why the criminal system of seasonal workers continues to exist, the ARD correspondent also writes in her article.
Author: Anna Giordano ARD