The darker side of our country's production system
An investigative book on the system fed by blackmailed foreign workers, trapped in precariousness with visas obtained through corruption
A Chinese tailor ends up in hospital for demanding the money he was owed. A 26-year-old Bengali boy dies twenty minutes after the start of his first shift. An Indian farmer bleeds to death in the Latina countryside. These are not isolated cases. They belong to a system that feeds on blackmailed foreign workers, trapped in a precarious residence permit, in a visa obtained by bribery or in clandestinity: the same condition that governments claim to want to fight and that instead production chains use as a resource. Because an invisible worker has no rights. He does not protest. He does not leave.
The mechanism works. And it extends. Today it is also affecting Italians. In the logistics sector, workers pass from one company to another, within a chain of contracts and changes of company guise that produces pirate contracts and guarantees the large groups that move goods savings on labour costs, along with tax evasion. In the security sector, over two hundred hours of overtime per month are accumulated to keep the salary together. Labour costs go down. Margins grow. Someone always pays the bill, as long as they stay out of the field.
This is the system we have documented in Made in Italia Exploitation (People STORIE, 150 pages, 16 euros): a book-investigation - with a preface by Tito Boeri - on the less visible side of the production system in Italia, where the need for companies to reduce costs, within a labour market that shows all its limits, ends up taking its toll above all on the worker. In the sectors recounted, it is precisely here that corporals and increasingly structured criminal organisations become the instrument through which that cut becomes deeper: they squeeze wages, cancel protection, and make the workforce even more blackmailable. Exploitation is the starting point. Violence, up to and including enslavement, the point of arrival.
They are not just numbers. They are stories, names, concrete lives. The first structured surveys take place in Milan between 2021 and 2023. From 2024, this system will become more evident: part of the Made in Italy that the country exports to the world is based on the work of the last. Home deliveries cost little because there are those who pedal ten hours a day for three euros an hour. The clothes of the big fashion houses are made in the workshops at a derisory price and resold in the boutiques for ten times more. The products that fill the supermarket shelves come from the fields through labours that, according to investigations, in some cases require the support of opium. And alongside the exploitation there is almost always a second layer of illegality: tax evasion, disappearing contributions, unpaid VAT.
The book traverses stories from different parts of the production system. Then it broadens its gaze: it tells of international corruption linked to entry visas, the opaque market that feeds the system from outside. Some stories have accompanied the authors for months. Others came directly to them: someone read the articles in the newspaper and asked for help. From there, reporting was no longer an accessory choice.
