Eugenio Calearo Ciman, president of the Young Entrepreneurs of the Veneto, is one of two candidates for the national guide of young industrialists. Graduated in Sociological Sciences in Padua, master in Business Administration, sits on the board of directors of Calearo Antenne Spa (800 employees, of which more than 200 in Italy, world leader in the production of antennas for supercars): he will challenge Riccardo Di Stefano from Palermo on 26 June.
«I don't agree – observes Eugenio Calearo Ciman – with those who speak of this crisis as an opportunity, it is disrespectful towards the over 34 people who died. It is certainly an opportunity to reflect on the direction that our industrial system will want to take in the years to come. We pay for a gap in terms of enhancing young people's skills: too often we don't have the courage to empower a generation that would have a lot to offer, being, among other things, the one that on average was trained more than those that preceded it" .
Even before the economic shock caused by Covid-19, Italy was dangerously flattening out on welfare-type economic formulas, however, in the post-pandemic, there is also a risk for industrialists to limit themselves to an interlocutory relationship with politics on the emergency scheme "aid and subsidies" (or even requests for direct intervention by the State in the capital of companies).
«What strongly differentiates the welfare formulas proposed during this last legislature and the measures designed to support businesses in this phase is the extraordinary nature of the moment we are experiencing. We have always opposed tools such as basic income, which discourages the search for regular employment and instead favors undeclared work. Of course we are not that hypocritical to use two weights and two measures when State support concerns the company, but we are talking about an exceptional moment in our history, which we hope will never happen again. Someone even criticized President Bonomi in this phase, insinuating that for us industrialists when the money is for the workers it is "helicopter money", while if the money is for companies then it becomes "fundamental injections of liquidity into the system". If you were to run out of gas in the middle of the desert, and a good Samaritan offered you the choice of a dose of water to survive where you are, or enough gas to get you to the next gas station, what would you choose? We need investments that allow Italian industry to regain competitiveness, we need infrastructural works that have been postponed or considered as ambitious hypotheses for too long, we need PA payments to businesses to be unblocked».
Well before the lockdown the Veneto production system, and more generally that of North East, presented some peculiarities compared to the trends of the rest of the country: the extreme case is that of province of Vicenza, where at the end of 2019 there were 110 vacant jobs available for every 100 unemployed.
«For some time, Confindustria has been reporting the availability of tens of thousands of jobs in Italian factories, but at the same time denouncing the difficulty in finding personnel with the skills, but also the will, to fill these positions. Vicenza is an extreme but symptomatic example of mismatch between the training offered by the school system and the skills required by industry. An enormous potential is represented by the ITS, technical training schools managed by foundations in which companies and local confindustria also participate. The employment rate of graduates is staggering, often exceeding 90% in the first six months after graduation. In Italy these institutes produce 8.000 graduates a year. In Germany there are 800.000 graduates. Another important proposal concerns women: the female employment rate in Italy is equal to 49%, while the male one is 68%, almost 20 percentage points which derive in part from the historical shortcomings of the welfare system, which delegates part of its services to families. A reduction of the tax wedge for women under 35 would make this segment of the population more competitive in terms of labor costs, or at least would allow them to play on equal terms with their male colleagues».
Always remaining in the Northeast: an economic fabric where the governance arrangements largely coincide with the composition of the family nucleus, made up of small exporting multinationals, artisans who work "hooked" into the supply chain, little trust in the state and an incompressible desire to govern themselves, at least for matters affecting the "schei". However, the sentiment of industrialists, exemplified by the data arriving from Vicenza according to the latest surveys, has sunk to historic lows, never seen so much pessimism hovering among the Triveneto warehouses.
«The thing that has hurt the industry the most in this period of crisis has been the uncertainty. Uncertainty as to who could continue to work and who could not, uncertainty as to which principals were necessary and which superfluous (remember the circulars from the Ministry of Health which invited not to use masks), even as to the time at which the Premier would give his conference press. Now the distrust remains strong, also because, as long as they were able, the companies have advanced layoffs to their collaborators, but now, for many, liquidity is starting to run out".
On this front, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has "played" the card of the States General to pool the requests and proposals of the intermediate bodies. However, there were many doubts about the degree of involvement of entrepreneurs in the planning phase of the restart.
«I hope that the States General really serve to find concrete solutions and not just to reassure the European neighbors that they are looking for these solutions. Phase two brought an initial sigh of relief to the companies, which in part restarted, even if the relief did not last long, because it was soon realized that it is the question that is missing. The shifts in fiscal deadlines are good, the dialogue with Europe for funds for recovery is good".
In the popular imagination, the Venetians work a lot, complain more and weigh little in the matters that matter. According to many observers, the idea of an aspiring leader of young entrepreneurs who comes from the "deep North" could draw attention, hopefully within a debate that is no longer ideological, to the future of the Northeast.
«I think that the perception of the weight of the Veneto as a driving region is increasingly marked, in which there are solid and avant-garde companies, excellence at a global level. The theme remains of a territory that struggles to be attractive for ambitious young people who have a life plan that goes beyond just professional growth, and struggle to find our Region under some points of view. This is true in Veneto as well as throughout the Northeast, including Emilia-Romagna. We are witnessing a drain on talent leaving the territories, we should work even more strongly and in concert with neighboring regions to increase the attractiveness of our system".
The President Luca Zaia he is the standard bearer of the movement for greater autonomy of the Regions. He does so starting from a principle of fairness: autonomy serves to give more impetus, resources and responsibilities to the regions of the North and not to marginalize or remove resources from the South.
«There are areas in which some Regions have demonstrated greater management efficiency than others and for which they are asking for greater management autonomy on specific matters. Two themes cannot be overlooked, however, when it comes to differentiated autonomy: maintaining the balance between disbursements between the State and the Regions and the hidden costs of the transition. In the first case we are talking about the certainty that the existing balances inherent in the disbursements that the State makes to the Regions will not be messed up, which must not under any circumstances go to harm the finances of the Regions that are not promoters of this change ".
The "elephant in the living room" of our country system always remains productivity, evidently in the public but also in the private sector where heavy inefficiencies are still to be expected on the technological side. Covid-19 has literally swept away the usual setting of time and way of working, especially in the office. Smart working, online meetings, flexible hours: the younger generations are waiting to understand how far under 40 industrialists are willing to go to make work more "modern".
«The emergency has imposed a forced transition to teleworking, more than smart working, allowing, even within a tragic situation, to experiment with new ways of organizing time and socializing. Precisely because young people are more predisposed to technological innovation, Young Entrepreneurs will be able to capitalize on the "enclosure" experience we have experienced, identifying more flexible collaboration formulas, which allow collaborators to better manage their private and working lives, but also to come into contact with talents who are not available to move to the territory where a company is located, but to collaborate remotely».
Environment: the Po Valley is one of the places that has paid the most for the capillary industrialization of the North. If the crisis also becomes a lock pick to implement some "crazy" ideas on environmental sustainability, there will be a need for "visionaries", on the Silicon Valley model, even in viale dell'Astronomia.
«If it is true that the Po Valley is one of the most polluted areas in Europe, also due to its geographical conformation, it is also true that over the years technologies have evolved so as to have less impact on the environment. We must always bear in mind that sustainability is like a three-legged stool: one leg represents environmental sustainability, another social sustainability, and the third financial sustainability. Any project that does not take all three of these aspects into consideration, or that is particularly unbalanced towards one of these three aspects, is destined, like our imaginary stool, to fail. We cannot afford to lose further competitiveness to ideologies that do not take into account all aspects of sustainability, favoring, for example, the environmental one and completely neglecting the social and economic development of a territory».
