I have been a reader of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, online and offline, for a very long time. I always thought it had some reputation and an ability to report news in a quite balanced way. My personal view, obviously.

Yesterday night I come across this dicussion on FriendFeed. (Sorry, it’s in Italian)

Here’s what happened. Paola Caruso has been working at Corriere della Sera for seven years with several temp contracts. Honestly temp contract is not the right word to describe the type of contract Paola has been working with. It is quite difficult to explain to a non Italian reader which is the sense and scope, if any, of these kind of contracts.

Anyway, back to the story.

After sever years of hard work one of her colleagues resigns and she finally thinks it’s her turn to land the job. Guess what. It did not happen. The job was assigned to a fresh school of journalism graduate. If you live in Italy you will quickly guess why: friend of a friend, possibly a very important friend.

For this reason Paola decided to voluntary stop of eating and drinking.

Corriere della Sera is a private company and their can hire who they want. No discussion on this, even if, at least internally, they should justify those choices with someone who has been working seven years with, as I read, good performances.

The most absurd thing here is that the company seems to have used a temp contract for seven years to avoid the hiring of a full time employee. This is where we should investigate and ask for clarifications to Corriere della Sera.

This is a very common issue in Italy and we can’t stand with this anymore.

For the time being I will personally stop buying the newspaper and I have just deleted the application from my iPhone and my iPad. I will also stop reading the online version. Not much, I agree.

Dear Mr Ferruccio de Bortoli, editor in chief, would you please explain us what’s happening and why?

[Update]

I have received some personal messages on this with some criticism on what I wrote and I think they deserve an answer.

It’s quite clear that we do not know what criteria Corriere della Sera’s has used in hiring someone in place of Paola. The fact that she has not been hired in the first place does not automatically mean that someone else has been pushed to that position. That’s not the point I was making here.

The main point is that in Italy we have a labour law that is killing this country or, to be less dramatic, not applied as it was supposed to be.

This is why I think we cannot accept what’s happened to Paola, her being just one of those 20% of the working force in Italy in the very same situation.

And this is why I would like to read an explanation from Corriere della Sera.