Naples Superintendency is in serious technical and organizational difficulties: CGIL's complaint

The union Funzione Pubblica CGIL of Campania has written a long letter to the Ministry of Cultural Heritage (addressed to Minister Dario Franceschini, Secretary General Salvatore Nastasi, Director of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape Federica Galloni, and Superintendent Teresa Elena Cinquantaquattro, as well as to the national CGIL and all workers) to denounce the serious situation of the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of the Naples Metropolitan Area. The Superintendency, reads the document signed by regional secretary Rosa Anna Ferreri, is experiencing “enormous technical and organizational difficulties”: the concern, the union points out, “is that in the absence of clear technical and organizational provisions, the very role of the Superintendency, to which delicate and complex tasks of protecting the cultural and landscape heritage of a province, that of Naples, to which as many as 91 municipalities with about 2 million inhabitants over an extension of about 1,200 square kilometers, are entrusted, is at serious risk. A densely populated territory where important economic activities are concentrated and (at the same time) rich in historical and artistic and landscape testimonies that need the utmost attention from the institutions in charge, on pain of their irreversible damage if not their total destruction.”

“The men and women workers,” the letter continues, “denounce that the current management of the Superintendency and the delays that are accumulating in the reorganization of the Ministry at headquarters risk thwarting all the efforts, hard and intense work that they perform daily with professionalism and dedication, as required and due to every state employee. The men and women workers have expressed all their discomfort in carrying out their duties and, although they are aware that the current structure of the Superintendency does not depend exclusively on the Director but also on dysfunctions determined at headquarters, they express their willingness to cooperate for the best effectiveness of the work although they do not feel assisted and supported by the Directorate.”

Staffing shortages are serious: “the planned staffing level at this headquarters is 89, but at present there are only 60 employees in this Administration, with the prospect that as of this year it will be reduced by an additional 10, losing technical and support professionals. Landscape protection represents the heaviest burden in the metropolitan city of Naples due to the number of files that municipalities send to the Superintendency, with reduced deadlines that cannot be met, as the technical staff in charge turns out to be only 6 units, the so reduced number of technical officers results in theimpossibility on the part of the latter to be able to carry out the functions related to the figure of the person in charge of the proceedings in relation to the numerous territorial areas assigned since the very number of practices turns out not to be proportional to the working capacity of a single worker who is in any case obliged by civil and criminal responsibilities.”

“The volume of workloads,” the missive continues, “has reached such a burden as to make it humanly impossible to carry out the work activity in the timeframe imposed by law, causing the same considerable psychophysical stress, the lack of the minimum services to ensure the expeditious performance of the work work, such as obsolete and inadequate computer and technological supports, as well as the lack of essential Offices such as the Technical Office, the Accounts Office and the Tenders and Contracts Office, whose workload burdens the Architectural Officers, further weighs down the already unbearable workload. The Superintendency employs workers of certified and recognized professionalism in various technical operational areas, from photographers in the photographic laboratory, now in fact disused, to technical divers put in a condition of not working.”

The CGIL then described, in an annex, all the various organizational and structural deficiencies of the Naples Superintendency. To the aforementioned gaps in staffing, which particularly concern the architectural officials (6 units for 91 municipalities, which means “about 1,000 files per year per official,” the text reads, “not to mention the time to be spent on carrying out daily mail, warnings, technical tables, information relations with the General Management and appeals to the TAR to which officials are obliged to respond in place of the Litigation Office, which is currently lacking units work units”), are added, we learn from the text, the lack of the Tenders Office, Contracts Office, Accounting Office, Purchasing Office and Technical Secretariat, the lack of a suitable number of staff to assist technical staff, the inadequate training of staff in IT services and G system.I.A.D.A., the fact that, in relation to the protection of the submerged archaeological heritage, no direct checks, monitoring and verification of reports aimed at the protection and preservation of the submerged archaeological heritage in an area with a very high concentration of structures and wrecks, the photographic office lacking instrumentation and long since discontinued the activity of photographic documentation of the actions of care, conservation and restoration of cultural heritage entrusted to the Superintendence (“thus interrupting,” the text reads, "an activity more than a hundred years old whose testimony is kept in the photographic archive that is no longer usable; the operators are asked to perform different tasks not pertinent to the professional skills acquired). And again, the difficulties of access to the headquarters of the Superintendence for the disabled considering that “the procedure of the testing of the elevator present in the Protection Sector has not yet been resolved,” the absence of enabled telephone lines with the outside (“the staff is forced to use their cell phones with private numbers for work calls to the outside”), the lack of hard disks to share folders on the server, the lack of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) with stabilizers, the insufficient security of the work locations (“unhealthy environments, non-tight fixtures, peeling plaster falling from the ceilings, electrical systems not up to standard”), the lack of a printer on the ground floor, and the absence of suitable storage facilities for materials found in the area.

Because of all this, the CGIL letter concludes, “the staff, while reaffirming its willingness to cooperate effectively within its competence, believes that a careful evaluation of what has been denounced and the start of a real reorganization that takes into account the necessary human and instrumental resources can no longer be postponed,” and therefore the union “urgently requests the activation of tables of confrontation at the various levels of bargaining and communicates as of nownow that in the absence of concrete acts aimed at resolving the issues raised, in compliance with contractual rules and on behalf of workers will be activated the procedures of the state of agitation of all staff.”

In the photo: Royal Palace, headquarters of the Superintendence of Naples. Ph. Credit Miguel Hermoso Cuesta

Naples Superintendency is in serious technical and organizational difficulties: CGIL's complaint

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