Moroccan workers are among migrants recruited through false job promises and pushed into debt before reaching Italy, a report published Monday said.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said brokers approach workers in Morocco, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh with promises of legal employment under Italy’s Decreto Flussi, the quota system for non-European Union workers.
Many pay thousands of euros in recruitment fees. Some arrive to find sponsors have disappeared or never intended to employ them, leaving workers unable to regularize their status or repay their debts.
The report described Italy’s “agromafia” as an organized-crime ecosystem generating an estimated €25 billion annually through labor exploitation, food counterfeiting, price fixing, land theft, misuse of public funds and extortion.
Its main labor mechanism is caporalato, a system in which illegal intermediaries control access to jobs, transport, housing and documents. Workers may pay inflated prices for travel and accommodation, while employers underreport their hours, depriving them of pensions and benefits.
The report followed the deaths of four migrant farmworkers in Calabria in June. The workers, three Afghans and one Pakistani, were burned to death in a car after an alleged dispute over unpaid wages. Two intermediaries were arrested on aggravated murder charges.
Italy criminalized labor exploitation and illegal intermediation in 2016, but enforcement remains limited. About 2,000 labor inspectors oversee 1.1 million farms.
The initiative urged the EU to recognize agromafia as a distinct organized-crime threat and expand scrutiny across food supply chains throughout Europe, including subcontractors, recruitment networks, transport, and worker accommodation.
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