wins six months' compensation

A 47-year-old woman from Ghana has won six months' wages as compensation after her Italian employer fired her for singing on the job, her labour union said yesterday.

Mirco Rota, secretary-general of the CGIL steelworkers' branch in Bergamo, northern Italy, said the woman -- a long-term employee who had lived in the country for 20 years -- was fired from a metalworking shop for "singing and bothering her colleagues."

"That's ridiculous, given that her work -- hammering metal -- meant she couldn't be heard beyond one metre," he said.

"It was a pretext that the employer came up with to sack a worker in hard economic times."