The plants in the hot area of the former Ilva are all turned off. "From this morning there is no longer anything going on" confirmed the general director of Acciaierie d'Italia in extraordinary administration Maurizio Saitta, while the future of the Taranto plant continues to be traced through the fate of the workers and the results of the tender, two days before the deadline for submitting binding offers. The shutdown of the blast furnaces represents the full implementation of what was established by the judges of Milan following the ruling of the Supreme Court, which confirmed the decree of the Court of Appeal.
The confirmation came to the unions during the meeting at the Ministry of Labour, while the request for extraordinary layoffs for a maximum of 8,622 workers of the former Ilva, which the company communicated last 17 October, was being examined. A table that ended without an agreement and which will be updated next week.
"They were not able to give us all the guarantees we asked for regarding workers' wages - said the national steelworks coordinator for Fiom Loris Scarpa -. We presume that there are no conditions to reach any type of agreement if they do not guarantee us a future to resume work here". Guglielmo Gambardella, national secretary of Uilm, also expressed himself along the same lines, "as we expected, unfortunately, the conditions for having a complete discussion were not there and this was confirmed by the discussions we had with the technicians of the ministry".
"There are still many aspects to clarify, especially for workers in the related industries - underlined the national secretary of the Fim Cisl Valerio D'Alò -. We need all the doubts we have raised about this system to be removed from the table". The missing element remains the one that will emerge at the end of the race. In fact, November 8th is the deadline for submitting binding offers and the players involved are still the same, Jindal on one side and the Flacks group on the other, after it recently clarified that it had not made any about-face. However, doubts continue to surround the Italian consortium led by Federacciai, fueling the possibility of a withdrawal from the race. For the next step we will then have to wait for a new reconvening of the table on the dispute at Palazzo Chigi which, as already clarified by the government, will be around mid-November.
During the last meeting the executive confirmed its commitment to the employment emergency, regarding the industrial relaunch through the involvement of companies such as Leonardo, Ferrovie dello Stato, Fincantieri and Rheinmetall, and also on decarbonisation. And it is precisely on the topic of transition that the debate has sparked. In fact, the government was accused of diverting the resources intended for decarbonisation interventions in the steel industry towards the Mimit Sustainable Growth Fund, as part of a technical shift in manoeuvre. Resources that could be replenished with development contracts, despite the unions having repeatedly reiterated the need for greater commitment to the transition. In the last meeting with the unions, the undersecretary to the Prime Minister Alfredo Mantovano had confirmed the government's commitment "to ensure industrial prospects in Taranto, with electric ovens and decarbonisation", but we still have to wait for a real timetable.
