This Europe: Lecturer's Italian job leads to a fair pay victory

More than 500 British teachers at Italian universities may soon be celebrating a famous victory after a campaign for parity with their Italian colleagues that has lasted 15 years.

Thanks to the tireless battle led by David Petrie, 51, a Scottish lecturer at the University of Verona, decades of low pay and restrictive contracts might soon be only an unhappy memory.

Mr Petrie is celebrating a victory of his own after a Bologna tribunal awarded him €19,000 (£12,800) damages plus interest. He had sued a senior Italian academic and a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Education for claiming he had told the European Parliament that Italy was "run by the Mafia".

The Italian government will soon receive a final warning from the European Commission to stop discriminating against foreign university teachers. If it ignores the warning as it has ignored earlier ones, the final sanction is a hefty fine, repeated daily or weekly for as long as the offence continues.

When Mr Petrie began teaching at Verona, foreigners were hired to teach in their mother tongue on contracts renewable for not more than five successive years, and without social security or pension rights. Mr Petrie sued, and in 1989 the Italian Constitutional Court declared the foreigner-only contracts illegitimate.

But discrimination continued, so Mr Petrie and his colleagues took the Italian authorities to the European Court of Justice. Despite filibustering that kept the case dragging on and on, the lecturers finally obtained a positive ruling.

Many foreigners, including Mr Petrie, are now on open-ended contracts. But discrimination persists. "I am paid only €1,200 per month," says Mr Petrie, "the same as I was getting 15 years ago. Meanwhile the salaries of Italian lecturers have increased by two or three times that amount. They are trying to preserve a system that keeps university posts for Italians. It's a system of clientelism that ensures the only way for recruitment is through personal connections."

Seven years ago, at a public meeting in Bologna, Mr Petrie was accused of telling a select committee of the European Parliament that Italy was "run by the Mafia". Mr Petrie denied saying anything of the sort, and sued for defamation.

His case appeared stymied when the tape recording of the committee's proceedings disappeared. But after he filed a complaint with police in Brussels, the tape – bearing no mention of the Mafia – turned up again.