Soumayla Sacko was motivated by a strong sense of social justice and standing up for workers’ rights. His engagement as a trade unionist over the last two years was also the product of the working conditions he and his fellow farm laborers faced. Hiring in the fields is seasonal, depending on the crops, which means many of the workers here in Calabria will move to Foggia for tomato-picking season, or even a northern province like Cuneo. The farm laborers have to work from dawn till dusk — twelve hours a day. They earn around €2.50 or €3 an hour, which means even if they work the entire length of the day, their pay is often no more than €25 or €27.

Faced with these conditions, the USB began a campaign to inform the workers about their union rights. Migrants make up a large proportion of all the laborers working in the fields, and so the union also addressed them in other languages like French, English, and Bambara, which was Soumayla’s own language, as a migrant from Mali.

Soumayla was one of those who worked all day, every day without ever having the minimum necessary to live on and asked what could be done to change this. The answer was to organize, in a union concerned with both the working and living conditions of the workers. This latter was indeed a central concern: Soumayla like so many other seasonal laborers lived in a tendopoli (a city of tents and shacks). Indeed, it was while he and some of his coworkers were collecting discarded pieces of aluminium from a long-abandoned blast furnace in San Calogero, in order to continue building the tendopoli, that he was shot dead on June 2.