ITALY: Social Insecurity

For the ordinary Italian worker, whose weekly salary all goes for rent and pasta, the only hope for retirement is a pension —meager at best and by no means automatic. If he is privately employed, his fate is in the hands of a monstrous, Kafkaesque government bureau whose paper-shuffling overhead is so high that a man whose employer has paid in $15,000 on his behalf over a 30-year period will receive only $3,000 of it when he retires. The one Italian worker in eight who is a government employee fares somewhat better: provided he works nearly 20 years, he is eligible for an average pension of $30 a month.

Last week, as Rome basked in bright autumn sunshine, the plight of Italy’s pensioners was dramatized in a way that stung the conscience of the nation. Emerging from his office onto the bustling Via Nazionale, mustachioed Leopoldo de Virgilio, 40, head of the Ministry of Defense personnel section, headed home for his midday siesta. As he reached the corner of Via Napoli, a heavy-set man confronted him and asked: “May I have two minutes of your time?” Recognizing Laborer Galvino Lepori, 53, De Virgilio replied in annoyance: “I have nothing to say that you don’t know already.” At that, Lepori pulled a tiny Beretta 6.35-mm. pistol from the right pocket of his jacket and fired six times. Only one bullet missed, and De Virgilio died on the way to the hospital.

Later, in Rome’s Queen of Heaven jail, Lepori told his story: a onetime member of Italy’s proud carabinieri, he had been released from a mental hospital during World War II to fight in the Italian army. After the war, the Defense Ministry gave him a job chopping wood and raking leaves in his native Sardinia. Last year, still suffering from his old mental illness, Lepori decided to retire—only to discover that he had not been on the ministry’s permanent rolls and, after 15 years as a “temporary laborer,” was not entitled to a pension. He argued his case tnrough the ministry right up to De Virgilio, who had no recourse except to give him a final no. Then, as Rome’s Il Messagero said, in the tormented mind of Galvino Lepori “our complex, cold bureaucracy took on flesh and blood in the form of De Virgilio.”

At week’s end, while Lepori dumbly awaited judgment, other Defense Ministry personnel officers were checking their records to see whether De Virgilio had worked the statutory 19 years, six months and one day. If not, his wife and children, like Lepori, will have no legal right to a pension.