The workers of the southern Petroli, a company of the Ludoil group, worried about the future of the Vibo Marina industrial sitehave written an appeal for the operational safeguarding of the area and employment levels. «We are silent interpreters of an industrious, concrete Calabria who does not surrender to Assistentialism or consoling narratives. Every day we contribute to the operation of a vital infrastructure for the entire region. In the last few days – continues the appeal – some public declarations and a certain political rhetoric seem to have anticipated, with disarming lightness, the fate of the industrial area on which the Southern Operational Site Operating Petroli insists. No longer a planning comparison, but an address already traced ».
According to the workers, “a tourist rebirth is announced as if it were a completed project, relegating the industry and royal occupation to waste of the past, to be disposed of without appeal. We speak with emphasis of ‘Reconverse, of’ new vocation for Vibo Marina, as if it were enough to change an urban destination to rewrite the identity of a territory. But behind each suggestive formula there is a substantial removal: it is not said what will happen to those who work, to those who live thanks to that nature, to those who have built, over the years, skills, stability and economic ties around an infrastructure that is not only functional, but community “.
The area at the center of the debate “is not a void to fill, nor a heritage to be canceled. It is an operating, strategic industrial garrison, which has always been subjected to rigorous environmental and safety checks. From here, over 60% of the fuel supply of the entire Calabria transit. Dismantling this network without a solid design, without employment guarantees, without a concrete alternative, means compromising the logistical function of the region, undermining the stability of thousands of jobs, between direct and induced uses, and deliberately ignoring the right to the future of hundreds of families “.
“The certain cannot be replaced with the uncertain, nor sacrifice an existing economy on the altar of a vision still to be built. The transformation of the territory, if it ever happens, cannot start with the exclusion of those who live and support it every day. In this context, what alarms us most is silence – if not the obvious annoyance – with which a part of the local politics deals with the employment theme », the workers continue.
«We wonder, with a constructive spirit but firmly: DWhere are the data, the studies, the projections that attest to the real ability of a possible tour operator to guarantee the same employment seal, the same tax stability and the level of infrastructure continuity today ensured by the industrial site? Who will be able to absorb the skills, which revolve around this logistics chain, without dispersing years of experience, investments and qualified work? Who will take charge of the enormous emptiness left by the lack of tax revenues for the region and local authorities? To this is added an element of method: the total absence of concertation The trade union organizations have been excluded from the debate, the voices of the marginalized work “.
«Like workers and workers, we feel betrayed. Deeply. Betrayed by an administration that has chosen to decide over our heads. Betrayed by political forces that preferred to pursue a convenient narrative rather than confronting reality. But we won’t stay to look. Behind this site there are not only systems and tanks. There are thousands of people, between direct and induced employment. There are families, children to maintain, community and essential local economies. We will do everything that is necessary, with determination and forcefully, so that this story is not buried in silence. We will ask for, in every location, of every choice made without comparison. Because there is no sustainable development that can be based on the silent expulsion of work. There is no credible public strategy that feeds on slogans instead of data, comparison and vision “, concludes the appeal.