By the end of April the New Alitalia will officially become one public company. And, along with nationalization, it will also come a drastic cut in the size of the company. In short, to become sustainable, Alitalia must become a very small airline. Less than half of what it is now.
The plan the government is working on is for them to be kept in service 30-40 aircraft, i.e. those currently owned by the company. To date, the fleet also includes 73 leased aircraft, which would therefore be set aside.
The most painful cuts, however, will be those at staff. In fact, we are talking about one workforce reduction in the order of 60-70%: of the current 11 employees, no more than 3 would remain.
Redundant workers and too many planes would end up in a bad company from which Alitalia could fish out already trained personnel and aircraft as needed. For the moment the unions, interested in nationalisation, have not expressed themselves on this hypothesis of plan. But it's not hard to predict that it will be a battle.
In the meantime, today the question of the question should be resolved redundancy fund, requested by the company well before the coronavirus emergency began. The directors of the company initially believed that the Cig was necessary (from April to September) for 4 thousand employees, but now this number could double, given that today, due to Covid19, there are no more than 25-30 planes traveling in the skies with the word Alitalia on the fuselage.
As for the new ownership structure, according to the latest rumors reported by the newspaper La Repubblica, the government would be thinking of one airline firmly controlled by the Ministry of Economy, maybe with one representation of employees on the Board of Directors or on a Supervisory Committee, on the Lufthansa model. The company, much smaller and lighter, would have to enter into new labor contracts and would operate on a limited number of short and medium-haul routes, in view of a possible alliance with a more important carrier (such as Lufthansa itself) to create to a new international network. All taking advantage of the problems of competition, given the serious crisis affecting the airline sector.
