In 2024, the tables at the crisis unit at the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy have increased enormously: There are 105,974 workers involved in industrial crises for which discussions are currently open to the ministry. In January there were 58,026. This is the data recorded in the Collettiva.it crisis diary in the CGIL.
Added to these are 12,336 employees of small and medium-sized companies who lost their jobs, disputes which did not even reach the institutions. Overall there are 118,310 workers. The sectors most involved are the car and its supply chain, basic chemistry, the fashion system, the paper industry, energy (phase out of coal power plants). Furthermore, the tens of thousands of workers of companies in crisis who have open tables at a regional level must also be considered, for whom “there is no national mapping by the institutions”.
For the CGIL, it is “a disheartening scenario, which risks being worsened due to the transformations underway”. «The numerous disputes opened in 2024 speak of a total inability of the public to direct industrial policies in strategic and relevant sectors for the country», declares the National CGIL. «The business system is not able, on its own, to compete and respond to the challenges of the great transitions, green and digital, which from being a potential driving force for the economy risk turning into a further opportunity for impoverishment for our system productive and industrial, with the consequent growth of job insecurity”. Even when crises end positively, the employment balance is often negative, and «often the industrial activity undertaken by those who save the company in crisis ends up being technologically and strategically poorer. In short, buffer solutions, but all sharing the substantial deindustrialization and loss of quality of production. In recent days some important disputes have been added to an already dramatic picture.”
«It must be considered that the institutions (Ministry and Regions) are used to dealing only with the crisis of the industrial site of the parent company, and not of the entire production chain, which often has an equally high, or higher, number of employees compared to the direct ones: temporary and contract workers, logistics, canteens, industrial civil cleaning, mechanical maintenance workers. This situation – the CGIL further underlines – is the result of decades of lack of planning and absence of industrial policies, which have left the issue of development alone to the market, with the consequences that are there for all to see. Confirming this are the data on industrial production, which has remained at a minus for 21 months. a shock absorber dedicated to crises and employment policies that re-employ workers expelled from the production processes of companies in crisis, through their professional retraining, in activities compatible with the transition and, where this is not possible, in projects and plans of reuse to support the community, in sectors increasingly put to the test in the climate and environmental crisis we are experiencing: securing the territory from hydrogeological risk, bringing public real estate assets up to standard in an anti-seismic perspective, protecting public residential buildings , extraordinary maintenance of cities”.