“The year starts with some encouraging signs but the job emergency hasn't gone away at all. If industry doesn't restart, the country won't restart. And no one is left behind. The relaunch of the engineering industry is decisive for restoring prospects for economic and social growth to our country”. This is what Marco Bentivogli, general secretary of the FIM-Cisl, declared.
“In these years of crisis we have lost over a third of our country's industrial fabric and with it over 300 jobs in the engineering sector alone - he added - Today there are some positive signs (such as the growth in production volumes of 2,7 .XNUMX%) the crisis, as we have known it, is beginning to loosen its grip, but we are still far from a stable recovery. Unfortunately there is still a rather widespread distrust and the investments and hirings that would have been made in other phases with these data, have now slowed down”.
Bentivogli recalls that “as of today, many industrial companies with still ongoing crises (Alcoa, Ilva, etc.) are dealing with reduced social safety nets. We have repeatedly pointed out that moving to "flex-security" which is still open, first required the operation of the new security made up of new social shock absorbers and active policies and then thinking about flex. The opposite has happened and the new tools and Anpal are not yet operational. I hope it is clear to everyone that without overcoming the fragmentation of policies and services produced by the monster of Title V of the Constitution, the mission will be impossible. We need to focus on active policies to safeguard and increase employment, especially that of young people, relaunching the apprenticeship tool and working seriously on school-work alternation. At the same time, we need to know that there are workers who are losing mobility in areas of the country where industrial desertification, such as Sardinia and the south of the country, leaves no other job opportunities in other sectors and only pushes a new wave of migration".
For this reason it is necessary "to work to restore, in our country, a suitable habitat for the creation of a new corporate culture, interrupting the flight from the company abroad or the income - continues Bentivogli - then it is necessary to resolve the industrial crises still pending leaving no one behind, and push, as done with the National Industry 4.0 Plan, further investments in organizational and technological innovation and training. The metalworking industry, with the continuation of the slight recovery of the last part of the year, recorded in 2016 an overall growth in production volumes of around 2,7%, with significant dynamics, however, only in some sectors. A better performance than other European countries but still too timid and unable to recover the drop of more than 25% that has been recorded since the beginning of the 2008 crisis”.
For this reason, “renewing the metalworkers' contract represented a decisive basis for opening a new political phase in which to focus on a country capable of modernizing itself starting from the functioning of the state, the banks and training. We don't deal with work by exclusively focusing our attention, as has been done so far in the debate on exodus workers, art.18 and the labor market and now vouchers. There is much more to do for real work emergencies”, concludes Bentivogli.
SECTORS
The engineering sector accounts for over 51% of the industrial sectors affected by crisis situations, as evidenced by the disputes opened with the Ministry of Economic Development, and involves significant segments of our industrial and technological apparatus:
