Underpaid and forced to sleep in "moldy accommodation" for a month, Gilberto Contadin, a 21-year-old Roman and recent graduate in marketing and communications from Lumsa University in Rome, went viral. He shared on TikTok how he ran away from the four-star hotel where he was supposed to work as a tour guide.
But according to Antonio Cafarelli, founder of Peter Pan, the agency that hired Contadin, things didn't go that way at all.
"I'm disappointed the young man didn't contact us when he was in Rimini. He decided to publish a video in which he said a lot of inaccurate things," Cafarelli explained to Corriere di Bologna. Peter Pan is a tourist entertainment and animation service agency owned by Servipan Italia, with offices in Rome and branches in Milan and Sicily.
"The premise is this," Cafarelli continues in the interview, "we have area managers and facility managers available to the kids. When there's a problem, nine times out of ten we manage to solve it. We help the kids settle in, also because the leaders need to be happy and cheerful for their job, so it's in our best interest to make things easier for them ."
"This boy," he continues, "stayed at the facility for an hour. It went like this: he was greeted by the head entertainer, who told him to settle into his room for a while. She told him he could take a shower while his assigned room was being prepared. At that point, he took photos of the head entertainer's room, where he was supposed to spend a few hours. He photographed the shared bathroom, not his own. Then he simply left. He shot the video at the Viserbella train station and left."
As for the salary, he confirms the 650 euros to which is added a 700 euro comfort pack (i.e. food and lodging deducted from the paycheck) but, he underlines, « we apply the national collective labor agreement, signed by five companies in the sector».
(Unioneonline)