“We did it. The Abramo Customer Care dispute, which involved around 1000 workers at risk of dismissal, can be considered closed. A long and complex journey, which the Calabria Region undertook, amidst general skepticism, many months ago and which today finally leads us to our goal”. It is thus, with all the enthusiasm required, that President Occhiuto announces the success achieved at the Mimit table where he went today to define the details of an issue that has kept hundreds of operators in suspense.
“A few days ago – continues the president – the agreement on social clauses was signed which allowed the transfer of 185 workers from Crotone from the Tim Business contract to the Konecta company, guaranteeing full employment continuity and the maintenance of contractual conditions, as well as for the 90 workers at the Cosenza office, involved in the Fibercop order, also assigned to Konecta.
Today, with the new round table held at the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy, the circle is definitively closed for the remaining 700 workers, who will be hired by Konecta – the company identified by Tim for the dematerialisation project – before of Christmas”.
“We have thus achieved the objective of saving the jobs of all 1000 people involved.
This is a very important result, the result of a lot of commitment and great teamwork that the Region has been able to put in place, thanks also to the precious synergy with the government and with all the trade union organizations that have embraced the path identified a few months ago. The Calabria Region has invested 15 million euros in this project, to which are added 5 million put in by the national government to dematerialize our health records“.
“I would like to thank the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, the Chief of Staff of Palazzo Chigi, Gaetano Caputi, who was invaluable in the past months in building this path together with the Region, the Undersecretary of State with responsibility for Innovation, Alessio Butti, the structures of minister Adolfo Urso, Francesco Soro, CEO of the State Printing Institute, and Angelo Borrelli, head of the Department for Digital Transformation.
In recent months we have conceived, proposed and built an innovative project which essentially includes the reskilling of call center workers and their use in public administration digitalisation processes, starting with the dematerialisation of healthcare: we have transformed a crisis into an opportunity.
We are pioneers of a worker retraining model – highly appreciated by the Ministries of Labor and Made in Italy – which can also be considered exportable to other employment disputes throughout the country, considering the worrying crisis that call centers are currently experiencing and the growing need, however, for work in the world of digitalisation, in every area of public administration and private companies. This is a large and clearly expanding market that can absorb a lot of manpower.
From this intuition of ours, today, in the meantime, we are achieving an enormous result which culminates in the safeguarding of jobs for 1000 workers who will be able to experience a peaceful and worry-free Christmas together with their families, after months of suffering and uncertainty.
I would like to thank again the various institutional subjects who have participated with me at all the tables in recent weeks: my vice-president Filippo Pietropaolo who worked together with his general director, Tommaso Calabrò, on the agreement of the dematerialisation project with the State Printing Institute , the councilor for Labour, Giovanni Calabrese, who together with his Department and the general directors, Fortunato Varone and Maurizio Nicolai, produced several one-stop notices preparatory to this solution, the my consultants Ettore Figliolia and Alessandro Ruben, who followed key steps in this story.
I hope that this fruitful dialogue with the trade union forces can continue in the future too, so that, despite sometimes expressing positions that are legitimately different from ours, positive development and employment projects are increasingly and clearly put at the centre”, he concludes.
For Roberto Occhiuto it was the first public outing after the cardiac surgery which he underwent on 4 December last at the Campus of the “Renato Dulbecco” university hospital in Catanzaro.
The CGIL: “We thank the workers for holding on”
The meeting at MIMIT regarding the Abramo CC dispute recently concluded, in the presence of the Ministry of Labour, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Calabria Region, the Extraordinary Commissioners of Abramo CC, the Regional Confederations of CGIL, CISL and UIL , the National and Territorial Secretariats of Slc Cgil, Fistel Cisl, Uilcom Uil, Ugl Telecommunications, the clients Fibercop and Tim and the Konecta company.
In this phase, having secured the approximately 290 workers working on the Fibercop and Tim Bo Business contracts with regional “social clause” agreements, the discussion was totally focused on the perimeter intended for the digitization of health records.
This is what we read in a note released by the CGIL Calabria signed by the general secretary Gianfranco Trotta and the regional secretary of the Slc CGIL Calabria Alberto Ligato.
The State Printing Office (IPZS) confirms the assignment of the order, entrusted to it by the Calabria Region, to TIM which in turn establishes the assignment to Konecta which will work on it under subcontracting in the Calabrian offices, absorbing the entire perimeter remaining in Abramo CC and not included in the Tim Bo Business and Fibercop contracts.
Workers directly employed in operational activities will be hired starting from 31 December with permanent contracts and keeping the economic and regulatory conditions unchanged.
The staff areas will also receive a job proposal economically appropriate to their RAL to operationally carry out the digitalisation activities.
A victory for the confederal union and the CGIL which has always supported the workers in this dispute, without deluding them with imaginative and impracticable solutions, a frankness which at times has also led to “piloted” protests, but, having reached the end of this dispute it can be stated without fear of contradiction that the hybrid solution which gave priority to the application of the social clause proved to be the decisive choice.
We thank all the parties active in this dispute, national and regional, but first of all we thank the workers for having held firm especially in moments when it was not at all easy, crushed between the uncertainty of the future of work and the missed payments of the social safety net, no a dispute is brought to a positive conclusion if all the parties involved do not work in unison and in this dispute a fundamental contribution was made by the workers.
Thanks also to the Calabria Region, especially to President Occhiuto and to the councilors Calabrese and Pietropaolo for the active and not superficial commitment that they have put in place in these long months of dispute and which led to the successful outcome of this dispute. A good practice that we hope can be replicated in the future.”
Sbarra, full satisfaction with the positive outcome of the dispute
”As Cisl and Fistel Cisl we express full satisfaction for the positive closure of the Abramo dispute”. This was declared in a joint note by the general secretary of the CISL Luigi Sbarra and Alessandro Faraoni, general secretary of the Fistel Cisl, regarding the agreement signed at Mimit. ”We have always followed the dispute with the utmost attention and responsibility in representing to institutional and corporate counterparts the need to safeguard the entire perimeter of the production activity and also by providing the right information and returns to the workers, reporting and managing step by step step by step a difficult negotiation”, explain the union leaders. ”Today we can finally say that our requests have been listened to and the workers of Abramo have seen their sacrosanct right to employment recognized together with their professionalism and competence”, continue Sbarra and Faraoni. ”A strong and convinced thanks to the president of the Occhiuto Region and his staff for the commitment and sensitivity shown on a complex dispute, to Tim and Fibercop for the continuity of the orders and to Konnecta for the management of the dematerialisation part linked to the digitization of medical records”. The two secretaries also express gratitude ”to Minister Urso and to the government which accompanied the management and resolution of the negotiation and the closure of the dispute”.
”We hope”, conclude Sbarra and Faraoni, ”that this profile of collaboration between institutions and social partners will also be applied in other Regions to allow a sector such as that of call centers to breathe new air, no longer looking for a survival, but in the direction of an innovative organizational model that aims to stabilize the sector and at the same time is an active part of a strategy that looks at the digitalisation of the country”.