19.06.2020 – 12.55 – Yesterday, the last meeting on the Programme Agreement for the conversion of the Servola Ironworks took place: the central topic, between the anvil of layoffs and the hammer of the post-Covid-19 recession, was the need to contain job losses through the re-employment of workers.
In this regard, Friuli Venezia Giulia expressed its satisfaction for this last meeting, considering its requests accepted.
The Trieste Logistics Platform, at the insistence of the Region, has accepted that the 70 new employees will be chosen first among the 163 redundant workers of the ‘Ferriera’.
Specifically, the president of Icop, Vittorio Petrucco, will hire both the 38 Arvedi workers employed on the quay and some of the redundant workers.
Initially, Petrucco and the freight forwarder Francesco Parisi would have preferred to hire workers already experienced in logistics, but the Region insisted that a possibility be offered to (former) employees of the ‘warm’ area.
This would mean that some temporary workers at the rolling mill to whom Arvedi had not renewed their contract and who had not been paid the redundancy found would have to be “trained” by the Region, which would then take care of the technical conversion for a year and a half to ensure their employment on the Logistics Platform.
The local newspaper ‘Il Piccolo’ writes of 70 hirings for the Logistic Platform to be carried out partially among the workers of the ‘Ferriera’; while the Region writes of 50 people, but referring to the former employees of the warm area.
“The employment of 50 people for the dismantling and remediation of the former warm area and the commitments made by Icop allow us to look to the future with optimism – stressed the governor Massimiliano Fedriga and the regional councillor Alessia Rosolen – also strong of the resources put in place by the regional administration to continue to ensure those training courses that are essential to promote the wider employment of staff affected by the conversion.
At the end of the declaration, the possibility also emerged, thanks to Minister Patuanelli’s action, “to involve Fincantieri in the talks in order to expand the redeployment opportunities for workers at the Trieste steel plant”.
Patuanelli had “an interview with Fincantieri’s CEO Giuseppe Bono, during which he confirmed the company’s willingness to find, also with the involvement of the Group’s supplier companies, a concrete solution to the future employment of workers who may not fall within the perimeter of the activities envisaged by the closure of the warm area of the Ferriera plant”.
The tortuous nature of the affair, despite the strong commitment of the Region to bear the training costs (both for Icop and Fincantieri), remains far from the promises made last autumn 2019, when Fedriga-Rosolen promised “the full protection of all workers, without distinction”.
[M.G translation]
