Italy: Funds unlocked to offer alternative accommodation for migrant laborers

Rome: The Farm Laborers Union in Caserta, southern Italy, hopes to be able to utilize EU funds for municiple projects to build alternative housing for farm laborers. The funds will help dismantle the shacks and ghettos in which many migrants live while working in Italian fields, and hopefully end exploitation.

The FLAI-CGIL union in Caserta, an acronym that stands for laborers in the agro-industry business, and the CGIL union of Caserta (Italy’s largest union), is pleased that it might be able to tap into funds from Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR in Italian) to use to build better housing for migrant farm laborers in the area. The funds originate from the EU and are to help areas across Europe recover in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

Some of the funds are due to be assigned to cities that presented projects to fight illegal labor in the agricultural fields and ghettos by building better alternative lodgings.

Among them, the municipality of Castel Volturno, in the area of Caserta, in the southern region of Campania. Castel Volturno is not far from Naples and is an area that is largely deprived, and where many migrants live, so as to be near the fields all around the region.

The unlocking of the PNRR funds followed a meeting of the National Committee for the Prevention and Fight against undeclared work dedicated to “Finding measures to foster legal work for foreign workers in the agriculture sector by contrasting the illegal settlements and the promotion of active policy actions.”

Tammaro della Corte, Secretary General of FLAI CGIL Caserta, talked about institutions sending an important message following “a worrying lack of action.” The union’s response, said della Corte was to try and mobilize at multiple to which we responded as a union organization by constant mobilization at all levels. Della Corte added that the fund were needed to try and counter the fragility of laborers, who played an important role in the “value chain of food production.”

“It’s quite clear that taking action on the housing emergency by getting rid of the ghettos and makeshift living quarters, as a consequence will have a positive effect against exploitation and the denial of rights for field labourers,” concluded della Corte.

Sonia Oliviero, Secretary General of CGIL in Caserta, underscored that “the only municipality in the area of Caserta to win the tender was Castel Volturno.”

Oliviero said that other municipalities had participated in the tender, but the reasons for their lack of success had not yet been made public.

Knowing this, said the union official, made it all the more important that the authorities in Castel Volturno work hard to turn things around and use the funds to put in place measures to combat exploitation at work and also in the field of accommodation.

Oliviero said they would be working with the prefect’s office in Caserta to coordinate activities from all representative entities in the region.