Why Mondialpol was commissioned
After the Servizi Fiduciari cooperative, Mondialpol also ends up in the police station with accusations of illegal hiring and exploitation of its employees
Fortunately there are those who watch over those who watch over. Because, once again, the accusations are heavy: illegal hiring and exploitation of workers. And so the Mondialpol company, one of the best-known companies in private security services, was placed under an emergency decree by the Milan prosecutor Paolo Storari, in the investigation conducted by the Gdf's economic and financial police unit. The story has several similarities with the recent one that overwhelmed the Servizi Fiduciari cooperative (Sicuritalia group), which also ended up under receivership.
THE ACCUSATIONS OF THE PROSECUTORS
The employees, according to the accusation theorem, would have been paid just over 5 euros gross per hour and threatened with transfer if they did not accept the conditions. The investigations by the Milan prosecutor's office that led to the judicial control of Mondialpol – reads a press release signed by the prosecutor Marcello Viola -, "are bringing to light phenomena of illicit intermediation and labor exploitation, carried out through an assiduous exploitation of employees perpetrated, taking advantage of their state of need, by an important company that has paid its staff salaries well below the poverty line, disproportionate to the quantity and quality of the work performed”.
FIVE EUROS AN HOUR
We still read that “wages below the poverty line were paid to the workers. In particular, the "lookout 2 Mondialpol" contractually registers its employees at level D of the national contract, providing for an hourly wage of 5.3 euros, which, multiplied by the number of working hours, brings the monthly salary to 930 euros. which is certainly not proportionate to either the quality or quantity of the work performed in order to guarantee a free and dignified existence". Net of tax and social security withholdings, the net salary would be around 650 euros per month.
The customers served in the three-year period 2019-2021 were: Intesa Sanpaolo, Poste Italiane, Mondialpol service, Sicuritalia, Btv, Iper Montebello, Gruppo Iva Banco Desio, Fidelitas network, Fidelitas, Lidl, Kuwait petroleum.
WHAT THE UNIONS SAY ABOUT THE SECURITALIA CASE
As anticipated, the Mondialpol case is not the first in the private security sector. A few weeks ago that of Sicuritalia Servizi Fiduciari emerged. “The working conditions, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say exploitation, perpetrated by the cooperative had been under everyone's eyes for years – they say about it from USB -. Certainly, they were under ours that for a long time we have been promoting hundreds of legal actions to have the insufficiency of the remuneration applied by the cooperative to its employees recognized."
"The mechanism aimed at exploiting cheap labor was known to everyone, even to clients – often public – who over the years have been able to benefit from low-cost services", the union denounced.
“The cooperative system, where the social purpose now seems to be that of ensuring large profits for the real owners and certainly not for the members, – USB's lunge – has always been at the center of our discussion. Cooperatives, at least the majority, are just corporate constructions that hide (not too much) the will to derogate from the already disastrous collective bargaining to impoverish the workers even more.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/perche-mondialpol-e-stata-commissariata/ on Wed, 19 Jul 2023 09:59:11 +0000.