EUROPEAN VOICE

Vol. 12 No. 27 : 13 July 2006

Lettori seek good European

A Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice will decide on 18 July on whether to endorse the Advocate General's recommendation to impose daily fines of over €250,000 on Italy for its longstanding discrimination against foreign lecturers or 'lettori' working in Italian universities.

Despite this, or even because of this, the administration of the University of Pisa has suspended the undersigned and 12 other colleagues for five days with consequent loss of pay. Our 'crime' was to refuse to fill in electronic registers designating us as technicians. Italian staff are exonerated from these new measures.

We lodged an appeal against this blatant discrimination - only to find that we were disciplined again even though the legality of the first disciplinary decision is being challenged in the courts. This is a clear-cut case of mobbing, where the intention of the authorities is to exploit the fact that legal proceedings in Italy are painfully slow and they can sack people and hang them out to dry as they did with colleagues at Verona University a number of years ago.

The Berlusconi government failed to bring the universities to heel - we hope Prodi will do so and prove himself to be as good a European in Rome as he was in Brussels.

Peter Mark Eaton

Livorno

Italy