«We welcome with great appreciation the signing, today in the Prefecture, of the Memorandum of Understanding for health and safety in the workplace and the fight against irregular work. It is an act of collective responsibility that gives the territory a concrete, shared and structured tool to deal with two emergencies that go hand in hand: accidents at work and undeclared work.”
Thus Vitaliano Papillo, Regional Commissioner CISAL Calabria and Provincial Secretary CISAL Vibo Valentia, comments on the signing of the protocol promoted by the Prefecture of Vibo Valentia, led by the Prefect Anna Aurora Colosimo, in the presence of the institutions, the police forces, the inspection bodies, the employers’ associations and the trade unions.
«We thank Prefect Colosimo – continues Papillo – for having kept alive, with method and determination, a path started last July and today finally crystallized in an operational agreement. His institutional sensitivity and the attention he has dedicated since his inauguration to the issues of legality in the Vibo area find a further, concrete expression today. The establishment of the Provincial Workplace Safety Observatory at the Prefecture represents, in our opinion, the real leap in quality: a permanent table, on a quarterly basis, where institutions, supervisory bodies, employers and trade unions will finally be able to read the data together, avoid overlaps and direct actions where they are really needed”.
The CISAL Regional Commissioner places emphasis on the most exposed sectors. «The Vibo area can no longer afford gray areas. Agri-food, construction, commerce, tourism and services are the sectors where irregular work and, too often, exploitation is most prevalent. We are talking about gangmastering, denied rights, starvation wages, conditions that humiliate the person even before the worker. Fighting these plagues means defending those who work honestly, but also healthy businesses that respect the rules and which are penalized every day by unfair competition from the underground economy.”
Papillo then recalls a passage of the protocol that CISAL considers strategic: the monitoring of so-called near misses, near-accidents. «These are alarm bells that today almost always remain invisible. Censusing them, analyzing them and using them as a prevention lever, also thanks to INAIL’s CONDIVIDO platform, can save lives. Security is not measured only when tragedy occurs: it is built much earlier, in the weak signals that we too often ignore.”
«Safe work and dignified work – concludes Papillo – are the foundations of any serious development project for Calabria. CISAL is there, with its wealth of experience and its willingness to collaborate loyally with the Prefecture, with the inspection bodies, with the employers’ associations and with the other trade unions. From today we have an additional tool: our task is to make it live, not leave it on paper.”