Softlab Workers Stage Protest for Rights and Back Pay in Caserta

After last Friday's sit-in in Naples outside the Campania Region headquarters in Via Santa Lucia, the Caserta workers of the Softlab company have started from today, and it should go on for the whole week, a sit-in in front of the Prefecture of Caserta with the representatives of the Caserta secretariats of the metalworkers' unions Fiom-Cgil, Fim-Cisl, Uilm, and Failms, to keep the focus on a dispute that has been dragging on for years; the employees, who on Friday presented a letter to the president of the Region De Luca urging him to intervene in the dispute, are asking for certainty about the future and the payment of various back payments, including salaries and unemployment benefits owed by the company. For March 15th, a demonstration has been called to take place in Caserta and perhaps as early as tomorrow, flyers will be distributed in the city to ask for the participation of the citizens, political forces, and elected parliamentarians in the area. The approximately 200 Softlab workers are all former employees of the American multinational Jabil, which has its plant in the industrial area of Marcianise. The unions have long been talking about a 'phantom reindustrialization' - since the former Jabil employees who ended up in Softlab have continued to receive unemployment benefits as was the case before in Jabil, without starting any concrete productive activity. For the secretary of Fiom-Cgil of Caserta Francesco Percuoco, 'having noted the entrepreneurial unreliability of Softlab's ownership, there is no time to waste, all the institutions involved, Mimit and the Campania Region, must work on a solution that restores dignity to the territory and to the workers involved'.