There are around seventy corporate crises under direct observation by the Ministry of Productive Activities and Made in Italy, including open disputes and situations under monitoring. 50% of the companies in difficulty are metalworking, 35% are in the chemical-textile sector and 10% concern the call centre. Situations involving almost sixty thousand workers between the tables (35 thousand) and monitoring (24 thousand).
If the latest crisis in chronological order is that of Natuzzi with the announcement of the closure of the Altamura and Santeramo factories and 479 redundancies, the difficult situations of the manufacturing industry are growing compared to last year and are the reflection of the constant reduction in industrial production.
Agreements and stabilizations
Faced with these situations of crisis and uncertainty, in several cases the ministry’s handling of the disputes has managed to stem or freeze dismissals or dismissals. According to data from Mimit itself, in the last year there have been 27 agreements or solutions to crises that have resulted in the stabilization of jobs. This is for a pool of approximately 13 thousand employees. The work of the ministry in many cases has been to look for new buyers and to propose industrial reconversion projects. Among the cases in which closure was avoided are La Perla, Diageo’s former Cinzano, Venator (chemistry), Nerviano medical sciences, Dema aeronautics, Coin itself and Sofinter of Gioia del Colle. The trends that emerge from reading the situations of the ministerial tables are of different kinds. Some are the product of events that come from afar such as the steel crisis relating to the situation of the former Ilva, others have their roots in the infinite automotive recession. If we add to these the crisis that seems to have no way out in the Sulcis mining district in Sardinia with Sideralloys Italia (formerly Alcoa), Eurallumina and Glencore, the territorial data shows that the South is once again the area that presents the greatest critical issues. Among the most complicated situations in the automotive sector, there is certainly the Acc (Automotive Cells Company) crisis which concerns the now certain abandonment of the battery gigafactory project in Termoli.
Some time ago it was sponsored by Stellantis, which then decided to invest abroad instead. The reasons for this failure to relaunch the Molise factory, which produces engines and employs two thousand people, would be caused by high energy costs, strong Chinese competition and uncertainty on the market. The risk is clearly that of a structural industrial crisis for Molise, with the risk of a definitive marginalization of the Termoli site. A crisis that seems endless also for the Stellantis industry in Basilicata with two tables on the automotive industry in San Nicola di Melfi. The first concerns Pmc, a components company for which an agreement has been closed for the complex crisis area: this will guarantee approximately 90 workers access to training and further social safety nets. The conversion route, however, seems to be the only possible route for Brose who had Stellantis as his only client and who produced a door module that will no longer be used.
Structural crises
To stay on structural crises, there are also those that concern the coal-fired power plants of Brindisi and Civitavecchia and the Priolo refinery in Sicily, part of which will be reconverted for biofuels. Returning to Sulcis, one possibility that is being discussed is that of using the workforce now on layoff for Rwm Italia, the subsidiary of the German Rheinmetall group, specialized in the design and production of weapon systems. The delay is due to the political impasse over the expansion of the Domusnovas factory. The Sardinia region at the moment did not want to decide on the environmental impact assessment, allowing the deadlines set by the TAR to expire and paving the way for the government to place it under commissionership.
