ABSTRACT
A major producer and user of asbestos, Italy's asbestos compensation emerged in the 1980s and bloomed in the 1990s combining workers' compensation payments, social security benefits, and criminal trials to which a growing number of personal injury claims were joined. The negotiated equilibrium that kept asbestos cancers off the list of prescribed diseases was cracked only when the European Union took legislative action to tightly control asbestos exposure and eventually ban the magical mineral. German public health officials had in fact concluded that there was sufficient evidence to link asbestos exposure to lung cancer. In 1943, before losing political power and projecting Italy into a two-year civil war, the Fascist majority in Parliament voted to extend workers' compensation to asbestosis. Law banning asbestos established social security payments to the benefit of already retired or newly unemployed asbestos workers in the form of a pension multiplier. Franco Lotito's words are very useful to frame my account of asbestos compensation in Italy.
