Exploitation of work is the heavy accusation with which the prosecutor placed a 46-year-old road haulage contractor, owner of a cooperative, under house arrest. According to the findings of the investigations, the man allegedly exploited five drivers employed by the company, taking advantage of their state of need. The way this exploitation was conducted was gruesome. The drivers, in fact, were forced to drive for many hours beyond the limits set by the regulations, even reaching twenty consecutive, while the owner devised various stratagems to evade or circumvent the controls. In one case, for example, a report of theft of the tachograph records was filed, without explaining in detail the circumstances of the incident and making the investigators think that the report was only used to cover up other shady plots. But not only. Because the obligation to drive was coupled with the disarming conditions of the vehicles with which the drivers had to travel.
Conditions so inefficient that often the drivers themselves had pointed them out, however, only obtaining a complete response from the imposition to continue the journey anyway and thus exposing the employees to situations of grave danger.
The wages of the drivers have not been quantified, but the police have pointed out that they were obviously not adequate to the provisions of the collective agreements, but that on the contrary they were decidedly “disproportionate to the quantity and quality of the work performed”. In other words, a few pennies for so much effort and so many risks.
Finally, the police also found during the investigations some false DURC (single document of contributory regularity) that the owner of the cooperative always handed over to clients in order to certify the company’s contribution regularity.