Punjabi farmworker Satnam Singh suffered critical injuries in an accident on an Italian farm — and then his boss left him to die. The shocking case showed how Italian agriculture treats migrant workers’ lives as the cheapest of commodities.

June 19 was time for mourning as Italy’s agromafia claimed its latest victim. Thirty-one-year-old migrant Satnam Singh died in a Roman hospital, two days after his arm was cut off and his legs were fractured in a tragic accident. He had been operating an agricultural machine in a farm near Latina, a rural province fifty miles south of Rome where criminal networks systematically exploit the labor of thousands of migrants from Punjab, India. He and his wife Sony had both worked in the area without contract since 2021, planting melons for just €4 per hour. Their boss’s subsequent actions helped ensure that when Satnam was injured, he didn’t get medical attention.

At the time of the accident, Satnam had already been working for twelve hours. When the machine mutilated his body, the Italian padrone (literally “owner,” as employers in the area like to be called, a term reminiscent of feudal dependence) prevented everybody on the farm from calling an ambulance and confiscated their phones. Instead, the boss drove the unconscious Satnam and his desperately crying wife in his van for miles, dumped them in the back of their house along with the pieces of Satnam’s severed arm in a fruit box, and ran away — rather than taking them immediately to the hospital, which could have saved Satnam’s life. Had he brought them to the emergency room, the boss would have had to face up to the legal consequences of employing the workers without a contract and without protections.

The inhumanity of his actions prompted widespread horror. It turned public debate back to the issue of caporalato (gang mastering), a practice that affects almost all migrant workers in Italian agriculture, as has been well-documented for many years by researchers and activists in Latina and beyond. The current discourse focused on “fighting the plague of caporalato,” promoted by politicians of the present and past governments, was reiterated during the strikes organized by the Italian General Confederation of Labor, the Italian Confederation of Trade Unions, and the Italian Labor Union in Latina over the last week in support of Satnam Singh and all exploited workers. The mayor of Latina — a member of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party, invited to speak on stage in both demonstrations — insisted that “caporalato is a form of slavery that does not belong to our culture, our city, and our nation: as such, it needs to be eradicated.” She took up a familiar apologetic trope of Italians being brava gente, “good people.”

But the exclusive emphasis on caporalato can be misleading. It wrongly suggests that the problem of labor exploitation affects only undocumented migrants and is mainly the deed of a few evil employers and their greedy and ruthless middlemen, or “caporali,” who often belong to the same ethnic group as the migrants. Yet there is a more complex story hiding behind the issue of caporalato in the Italian labor market. It is a problem of the whole legal, political, and cultural framework, which makes turning to caporalialmost an inevitable choice for both employers and migrants.

Keeping Migrant Labor Vulnerable, Divided, and Exploitable

In Italy, an increasingly selective immigration policy, fueled by political propaganda over “ethnic substitution” and fear of foreigners, demands the impossible from non–European Union (EU) immigrants who aim to work and settle in the country. Such demands do not actually stop migration but do keep those who arrive and stay in Italy vulnerable and exploitable, giving disproportionate power to employers and middlemen. The latter have learned to turn the flaws of the Italian legislation to their own profit, developing a business that thrives on the exploitation and outright defrauding of thousands of men and women from Punjab and beyond.

To begin with, the Italian state requires prospective labor migrants to be sponsored by an employer. Upon arrival, it ties their acquisition of a residence permit (and, with that, legal status) to the stipulation of a formal work contract with a sponsoring employer. Applicants pay an initial fee ranging from €10,000 to €20,000 to the caporali who arrange the agreement and share the money with the local employers.

Migrants will often see caporali as facilitators and helpers and not as traffickers — as shown by the neutral word “agent” that is used to refer to them. These “agents” are seen as providers of a service whose price, like that of any other service, depends on the laws of supply and demand. It thus also varies over time: if, fifteen years ago, €5,000 would be enough to reach Southern Europe (which made Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece accessible also to the poorer and less educated Punjabis who were employed here mostly as unskilled laborers, unlike the United States and the UK), now the fee has at least tripled. Since socioeconomic conditions in Punjab continue to worsen, the desire to migrate is still growing despite the high costs, even if this means taking out loans or selling assets to get moving. This debt, in turn, heavily burdens migrants as well as their left-behind families — casting doubt on the celebrated role of transnational remittances for the development of migrants’ communities of origin.

Once Punjabi migrants reach Italy, their promised work contract is often not issued by the sponsoring employer, or more money is demanded of them (usually between €5,000–15,000) to transform the visa into an actual work permit. After the nine-month work visa expires, if migrants haven’t managed to obtain a regular contract, their status automatically becomes “irregular” (which according to the 2002 Bossi-Fini Law is punishable as a criminal offense and can lead to their expulsion from the country). They enter into a limbo of absolute dependence on and subordination to their exploiters. Burdened by the debts they made with moneylenders and banks to pay the agents and caporali, and with no legal ways to apply independently for a permit from within the country, they are forced to accept any and all conditions to stay in Italy and pay back their loans. Their vulnerability — aggravated by language barriers, their isolation in the countryside, the lack of state support for integration, the ignorance of their rights, and an opaque, incomprehensibly slow, and complicated bureaucracy — prevents them from denouncing their exploiters out of fear of violent retaliation, losing their only source of income, facing legal consequences, or being expelled.

Thus the padroni and caporali’s chance to exploit and abuse migrant workers is entailed within the law itself. It is indirectly supported by political and cultural campaigns aimed at the criminalization and securitization of immigration rather than at the protection of migrants’ human and labor rights. Labeling Satnam’s employer a monster (though he may well be one) is an easy way out: blaming the individual bad apples always turns attention away from the structural forces that allow them to exert their power to begin with.

Satnam’s death is not an accident due to a worker’s “distraction” while operating a machine or even the cruelty of his employer. It is the result of a legal, political, and cultural system that violates fundamental human rights, forcing migrants to work under extremely exploitative conditions, reducing them to a disposable resource to be extracted and thrown away when exhausted. In today’s Italy, there are systemic intersecting forces that entrench, mutilate, and break migrant workers, leaving them to die, as the machine and its owner did to Satnam’s body.

As a PhD researcher studying the Punjabi community in the province of Latina, in the three years preceding the incident I have interviewed hundreds of men and women in the same position as Satnam and Sony: overworked, underpaid, exploited, discriminated against, undocumented. I listened to them telling their stories of abuse — raising their complaints but also resigned enough to call this situation “normal.”

For this reason, it is not only deep sorrow for Satnam’s death that moves me to write but also rage, shame, and the urge to speak out against the innumerable injustices I have observed. It is for Jagdish, aged thirty-six, who broke his finger at work and was told by his boss to lie at the hospital, saying that it happened at home, if he wanted to get his job back once it healed. It is for Balvir, forty-eight, who was crushed under a load of potatoes at work and dumped by the owner at home at midnight, whereupon his wife and ten-year-old daughter took him to the hospital, driving through the dark Pontine fields. It is for Pardeep, twenty-eight, who — leaving his wife and kids behind — paid €16,000 to come to Italy and now only wants to go back to India as soon as possible, since “people here only want to use you and take your money.” He works ten hours per day harvesting watermelons for €2 per hour; now his visa is ending, and the employer demanded he pay a €5,000 fee to issue him a job contract that will get him regularized. It is for Daljeet, forty-five, who broke her back working in a mushroom plantation ten years ago and, after daring to report it, is still waiting for compensation. It is for my friend Sandeep, twenty-five, who works thirteen hours per day picking zucchini, the only guy in the team without a contract, the hardest working, the kindest; his boss yesterday “joked” that if he gets hurt like Satnam, he’ll have his coworkers dump him in the canal nearby. But this is not a joke.

Overworked, Underpaid, Undocumented

Punjab has over the last century been afflicted by repeated economic, political, environmental, and social crises following the postindependence partition of India and the liberalization of its economy, which have pushed increasing numbers of Punjabis to emigrate. As a recent study conducted by Punjabi Agricultural University found, a massive 74 percent of all emigration from Punjab between 1990 and 2022 occurred just in the last six years of that period. Today Punjab ranks second among Indian states for its emigration rate. The Latina province south of Rome — a key hub of agricultural production in central-southern Italy — became the most popular destination for Punjabi migrants (seven out of Italy’s top ten municipalities for the number of registered Indian residents are in Latina province, according to public statistics agency Istat).

The specific attraction of Latina lies in its large demand for labor in the agricultural sector and in the presence of an established Punjabi community since the 1980s. In order to maximize profits and keep production costs low enough to be competitive on the EU market, the prosperous agrifood sector in the area (as first reported by sociologist Marco Omizzolo, one of its earliest and fiercest critics) relies on an international human trafficking network to provide an ever-renewable force of seasonal migrant laborers to exploit in the fields. This network involves Italian employers and professionals, Italian and foreign caporali and middlemen, and sometimes corrupt officials in public institutions.

Many Punjabi laborers perform heavy manual jobs, picking and packing fruits and vegetables for twelve to fourteen hours per day or more, six or seven days a week, without any protection or insurance. For this, they receive payments well below livable standards. They are recruited via a WhatsApp group through a message sent the previous evening, indicating the time and place where they should commute the next morning, which is to be reached by cycling long and dangerous distances on the highways. Those with no residence permit, like Satnam and Sony, work without contracts. Those who do get a contract usually have it for no more than a few months, and thus remain exposed to the whims of the employers. These conditions put them in a condition of structural precarity: not only can employers pay them lower salaries and keep them subordinate with the threat of not issuing them a new contract — which would jeopardize their legal residence — but writing only seasonal and short-term contracts exempts employers from guaranteeing workers’ access to welfare benefits, such as paid or sick leave, which none of them ever receive. Indeed, many are not even aware that they are entitled to payment when sick or on leave: when the harvesting season is over and their contract expires, they are simply told, “From tomorrow, you’re free” — a “freedom” meaning they will get no work nor money.

In the paycheck, the hours of work recorded are always considerably less than those actually performed, so the employer can save taxes while workers get less pension contributions or unemployment subsidies. The payment is often at piece rate, although the contracts formally indicate a monthly salary in line with the wage negotiated in the CCNL — the Collective National Labor Contract. This demand to produce more to earn more often results in workers’ self-exploitation — and sometimes even in the consumption of drugs, such as opiates and methamphetamines (with the connivance of corrupt doctors and pharmacies), to alleviate the pain of excessive work and push their bodies beyond the limits of fatigue.

This is how an ever-larger reserve army of disposable and exploitable migrant labor is formed. Its soldiers are forced to comply with any order, no matter how harmful for themselves and others. Its constant availability nullifies the efforts of other workers and trade unions to negotiate higher salaries and better work conditions, preventing them from uniting in the struggle for their rights. This extractive capitalist system has such divisive power that solidarity is thwarted even among workers of the same village of origin. Everyone fears the next person and their supposed “envy”: the other becomes a competitor, an enemy, an obstacle to their own survival. Upsettingly, we hear that Satnam’s colleagues hesitated to testify out of fear of losing their own jobs. How desperate must they be to continue wanting this job even now that they know that if they got hurt, they would be left to die in their own blood — and later blamed for their own death?

The suicides of Punjabi agricultural workers, overwhelmed by debts and despair — like the infamous case of twenty-five-year-old Joban Singh, who took his own life in 2020 — point to the devastating consequences of this criminal system of exploitation and trafficking. That suicide, and today’s death, concerns all of us. It involves us when we uncritically consume the cheap food produced through the systemic exploitation and abuse of men and women that remain invisible and oppressed. It involves us in an Italy that systematically fails to protect its most vulnerable workers from the multiple forces that strangle, divide, and eventually kill them. Italy is a state whose constitution proclaims it “a democratic republic, founded on labor.” But it disregards the same workers whose caregiving and whose labor in the fields reproduce life itself.

Annamaria Laudini is an anthropologist and PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Photo: Jacobin