Sky Italy puts pen to paper “a broad plan of upskilling, reskilling, insourcing and voluntary exits”. The broadcaster controlled by the US group Comcast presented to the unions the piano of efficiency which provides for 800 positions an incentivized voluntary exodus or a professional reconversion towards activities that will be re-internalised. These "exoduses" add to the 400 job positions already provided for in the agreement signed with the social partners in 2021. Both the unions (Slc-Cgil, Fistel-Cisl and Uilcom-Uil) and the company gave the news after the meeting between them and the managing director of Sky Italia, Andrea Duilio who introduced them to the 2024-2025 plan.
Voluntary exits or reconversion: the Sky Italia plan
The goal is to resolve the criticality in time as happened in the past by focusing on training to retrain the staff. “In Sky for several years, starting from the negotiation in advance, we have managed to govern a non-traumatic management of many critical situations, starting above all from the concept of retraining workers in the face of a phase of profound technological change. The reskilling plan aims to equip the company with the skills necessary to be competitive in a market that is growing mainly in streaming and in which competition is increasingly with international media players that have streamlined corporate structures and business models and data driven”, explains the issuer.
Union alarm
The expansion to another 800 employees "was necessary in the light of the impacts on the business generated by the changes in the macroeconomic scenario in the last year", explains a note. But according to the unions, this reorganization represents an element that could become "disruptive" if the tools put in place "were not used effectively". And then they warn: "we will negotiate every single situation, with particular attention to the re-internalisation and reskilling processes of all the personnel involved, to verify that it is actually a concrete path, and not a simple attempt to buy some time before more drastic solutions. Now the whole phase of confrontation has begun between the unions and the company to implement the plan in practice. And only by the success or otherwise of the path of professional retraining it will be understood how many of these 800 workers will change jobs and how many will have to leave the company.
The crisis of pay TV
On the other hand, as happened yesterday on the telcos for Vodafone and yours layoff plan, the sector is facing a “structural crisis, exacerbated by the entry into the field of streaming platforms, whose economies of scale, combined with economic strength and the almost total absence of labor costs in our country, are putting a strain on the existence of traditional broadcasters", underline the workers' representatives. It is a crisis "which, in the absence of a regulatory intervention capable of rebalancing the competitive advantage snatched from streaming platforms, risks bringing the entire sector to its knees, at least judging by the increasingly unbalanced trend in advertising revenues - he concludes the note — in favor of the OTTs”.
