Reports of the “brutal” treatment of migrants employed on farms throughout Italy, as well as the death of a flower picker in temperatures as high as 40°C , have shocked the country The Guardian reports.
While the country has been experiencing heatwaves nonstop since the middle of June, tens of thousands of migrants have been going to the fields to harvest tomatoes and other crops. According to the Italian Meteorological Society, during the previous 30 years, from 1994 to 2023, the average summer temperature in Italy between June and August has increased by 1.5C.
The extreme heat has created a new and deadly risk for low-wage workers who toil outside in the scorching sun to gather fruits and vegetables.
Extreme summer heat combined with a heavy workload is believed to have been the cause of death for Dalvir Singh, a worker on a flower farm. On August 16, the 54-year-old was discovered dead in a field close to Latina, a city in central Italy. According to coworkers who talked with the Guardian, he was a “kind man who always worked hard” and had never been ill.
Though friends said Singh had intended to return home within the next few years, he was still sending regular remittances to his family in Punjab, in northern India, as he was finding it harder and harder to work in the fields every day as he grew older. Currently, his son and son-in-law are attempting to return his body to India.
A Billion Euros Industry Produced by Migrant Labor
The number of workers who have perished or been injured in Italy this summer as a result of the intense heat is unknown. However, the nation is thought to have experienced more than 12,000 of the highest number of fatalities in all of Europe as a result of the high temperatures of the previous year.
The Italian health and safety agency has previously stated that heat-related workplace accidents are almost never considered as such; instead, they are typically classified as fainting, falls, or other similar incidents.
The majority of people toiling in the fields during the summer months are migrants, primarily from sub-Saharan Africa and India. Even though Italy’s food industry generates billions of euros in revenue, harvesting jobs are often associated with low wages, long hours, and limited employment rights.
According to unions, many workers are employed by criminal gangs who recruit new members and retain a portion of their pay, and they reside in ghettos and abandoned buildings. It is not uncommon for gangs to force laborers to work in extreme heat; many of them put in shifts that last between ten and fourteen hours a day, according to activists in Italy.
“When extreme heat is correlated with criminal activities in agriculture, it is clear that the tragedies we have been [predicting] for so long are actually occurring,” says Fabio Ciconte, the director of the food and farming NGO Terra.
Too Warm to Work in
August saw record-breaking heatwaves across Europe and the rest of the world for the second year in a row. According to climate scientists, 2024 is expected to be the hottest year on record due to the extreme heat. A data released earlier this year by the European Trade Union Conference (ETUC), excessive heat is becoming a major cause of workplace injuries and fatalities in the European Union.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) provided estimates that the ETUC used to report that, in 2020, working in extreme heat caused 67 deaths and 80,800 injuries related to heat exposure at work. Since 2000, the number of heat-related deaths in the EU has increased by 42 percent.
Working in extremely hot conditions can be excruciating. Ivan Ivanov, Political Secretary for Agriculture at the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Union (EFFAT), told InfoMigrants that some workers “pay for it with their lives.”
“Migrant workers are forced to work for as much as 14-16 hours a day in the heat without proper breaks or rehydration because employers don’t have occupational health and safety regulations in place or because their wages are tied to the kilos of fruits and vegetables that they can harvest,” Ivanov said.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), exposure factors like occupation and age can have an impact on an individual’s susceptibility to heat-related injury or death.
The International Labor Organization referred to heat stress as the “invisible killer” in a report titled “Heat at Work” that was published in July. The report called for the urgent need to strengthen heat stress prevention strategies, integrate occupational safety and health (OSH) into public health plans, and ensure worker protection in all excessive heat conditions.