The affirmation that Italy, after Germany, is the second manufacturing country in Europe always amazes television listeners or newspaper readers, perhaps because companies that do not reach the final consumer directly with advertised consumer goods lack fully visible. Only when Alcoa of Portovesme, Ilva of Taranto or Fiat of Mirafiori rise to the fore of the mass media does it focus on the fact that we are still producers of steel, aluminum or automobiles, indeed that most of the country's industry revolves around these productions, whose disappearance would endanger not only the jobs of those directly involved but the fate of other tens of thousands of workers in manufacturing companies who strike "iron", as they used to say in the past.
The truth is that we no longer feel, or no longer want, to be a country that has its pivot in the manufacturing sector, in factories, exposed to the crisis and international competition, making it difficult to assess whether the relevance of industry can still be the engine of the recovery and dynamism of the Italian economy. There is now a widespread and erroneous belief that the production of material goods is destined to move elsewhere, leaving to more advanced countries such as Italy a planning, management and control role (the arms in Asian and Eastern European countries and the mind here), while it is necessary to grow in sectors other than traditional industries and in particular in those sectors which appear to be more innovative and dynamic, such as telecommunications and information technology, the luxury and design industry, entertainment or leisure, art tourism and well-being, as well as in the service and credit sectors. It is the solution, for example, that the square in the Tamburi district of Taranto would like with the reconversion of the Taranto area for tourism and mussel farming, retracing the history of the iron and steel area of Bagnoli with its destination as a tourist port, hotel residences and shopping malls (sic!).
As a lady shouted into the microphones of a recent television broadcast, referring to Ilva: "I have an unemployed husband and son, but I would never want them to go to work in that factory". The factory, for those who do not work there, is considered a place that makes one think of fatigue, boredom, depression, a harmful environment, dirty overalls, an assembly line, chimneys, pollution and the workers are mostly seen as people who have not had choice, people who don't have a degree and enter the job market without professional qualifications, basically who don't know how to do anything else and absolutely need to work and can't find anything better. A vision that does not correspond to reality, but it is the result of that anti-capitalist and anti-industrial culture which still finds its diffusers in many intellectuals, sociologists or mass-media communicators who, very probably, the only time they saw a factory were on a school visit in shorts.
Today in the factory the heavy and repetitive work is done by robots, by machines with numerical control or by mechanized transfers, the noise is almost totally absent, the spaces are large and bright, the floors are sometimes in polished parquet, ergonomics is the pillar of work organization. But what matters most is that the factory revolves entirely around its most important resource, the human one: whether they are professionals, employees or workers, indistinguishable to the outside visitor. The blue overalls have physically disappeared: engineers, technicians, clerks and workers all wear the same "uniform", generally a white coat or overalls that are spotless and not greasy with oil, like the old overalls of the collective imagination. The majority of young workers today have a technical or professional education diploma and the widespread organization of team work favors their proactiveness and creativity: the term "associates" is replacing that of "employees" in the factory language, both for workers and for employees. Making factory work attractive again, overcoming clichés or ideological prejudices, is therefore one of the tasks that the Government and the social partners, companies and trade unions are called to carry out to give youth employment a perspective.
The European data on youth unemployment show that in Italy the activity rate of the youth population, aged 15 to 24, is the lowest in Europe: 29% against 53% in Germany and 37% in France and that over 19%, again of young people aged between 15 and 24, are not included in any employment, school or vocational training circuit against 8% of the Germany and 12% of France. In order to relaunch the productivity of the country, and in particular of the industrial system, it is therefore necessary, as recently underlined by the President of the Industrial Union of Turin, Licia Mattioli, to focus attention on the training of skills and the culture of "doing ”, thrown into crisis by the decline of Technical and Vocational Education.
In our country, the simultaneous decline in industrial productivity in the last fifteen years and the parallel decline in enrollments in technical and professional institutes is not a pure coincidence: if we compare the training systems of Germany and Italy, in Germany only 30% of young people are directed towards high school courses, while around 60% choose those technological courses, in the most diverse training levels, which guarantee greater employability. On the table of "competitiveness" between the social partners, therefore, the question of vocational education and training must not be omitted, identifying the appropriate methods, for example, to restart those "business schools", whose students, thanks to the technical "knowledge" acquired, have not only been the fundamental resource of their companies in the past, but in many cases have turned into small and medium entrepreneurs in related activities of the parent company, contributing to the development of entire industrial districts.
