The general secretary of Fillea Cgil Sicilia: “The real challenge on construction sites is to defeat the opaque relations of the mafia”.
Crotone – “The mafias do not penetrate from the outside but are systems that exercise widespread social control, capable of having a stable impact on the territory”. He said it Giovanni Pistoriogeneral secretary of Fillea Cgil Sicilyat the initiative “Legality and Safety – Protocols of legality, prevention, safe work”, which was held yesterday in Crotone. An appointment of high profile which saw the participation of representatives of the Governmentfrom the Prefecturesthe Judiciary, the anti-mafia investigative forces, the trade union organizations and the employers’ associations.
And on this occasion Pistorio explained: “To understand this interpenetration, we must note the territorial rooting of the mafia organizations that, in construction sitesoften translates into the ability to influence access to Workto the executing companies, to supplies, to subcontracting and even to the conception, financing of the work and professional training. Hence the need for mafia to invest and operate in formally legal sectors such as construction”.
The general secretary of Fillea Cgil Sicilia added: “Mafias feed and reproduce because they research social consensuseven before obedience. They build relationships, generate expectations of protection and advantage: they must be recognizable but not visible. And in the world of construction contracts this consensus can translate into informal “mediations”: who works? Who enters worksite? Who supplies materials? Who provides labor? Who gets a subcontract?”.
Not only that. “In building the supply system draws on approximately 94,8% of needs near the construction site, interconnecting with 80% of all economic sectors. This means that vulnerability does not only concern large companies contractorbut above all the local economic ecosystem that revolves around the work in the immediately surrounding space”.
Pistorio continued: “Then there is an even deeper passage that concerns us all. In many contexts there is a progressive lowering of costs morale of collusion. This means that the relationship with mafia power stops appearing as an exception and becomes normalized practice, almost socially tolerable. And this is the most delicate point: the mafia does not thrive only where the State is absent, but where the economic elites accept forms of informal regulation. Concrete structures of a power whose threads are pulled by entrepreneurs, professionals, politicians and clans: the “mafia bourgeoisie”, capable of building government systems that go far beyond clan violence”.
The baker concluded: “The real frontier, today, is the contrast ofgray area. Because the contemporary mafia is a system of opaque relationships that feeds on complicity and normalization. And on construction sites this challenge is decisive: transparency of supplies, control and traceability of labor, electronic badge of construction site”.
