Ispettori del lavoro e sfruttamento lavorativo: una questione di vulnerabilità?

The definition of labour exploitation encompasses those situations of imbalance in the exchange of benefits between work and wages, which harm the rights of the weaker party, who in an employment relationship is to be considered the worker. This phenomenon can manifest itself in different forms, located on a continuum of which one extreme is characterised by real forms of abuse and slavery, while the other by relatively less serious forms of exploitation, which do not constitute a criminal offence. This paper focuses on the cases at the beginning of this continuum, in the grey area between criminal offences and labour law violations. It analyses how labour inspectors in three EU countries with different national frameworks on labour exploitation (notably Italy and the Netherlands) deal with cases that cannot be easily placed in one of two categories (severe or non-severe). The analysis of these borderline cases, which involve a high degree of interpretative uncer- tainty for inspectors, provides a better understanding of how they use their discretion in practice. Semi-structured interviews were conduct- ed with 15 labour inspectors in Italy and 15 labour inspectors in the Netherlands using the vignette method, a useful tool for international comparisons in different contexts. The results show that the character- istics of exploited and exploiters play a role. In particular, where these adhere to the respondents’ ideal of a victim, then the case is consid- ered “serious”. Again, these characteristics seem to contribute to the decision whether to prosecute the case criminally or through labour law proceedings.