Schlein: 'We need to restart the country's growth'

"We need to encourage aggregations correctly, favoring the supply chain, safeguarding identity and territorial roots and avoiding what we don't want to see: the shopping of small and medium-sized enterprises by perhaps large foreign funds that don't care about the roots in the territory and the specific identity of the companies". This was stated by the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein, guest of the Confindustria small business forum underway in Rome.

"We need to restart the growth of this country - concludes Schlein - and on this we have tried, by listening to the social partners, employers' and trade unions' organisations, to draw up a plan in three fundamental axes. First problem, the cost of energy. We are not condemned to have the most expensive wholesale cost of energy in Europe. We need to invest more in renewables. We propose a national mission unit with adequate staff to halve the authorization times, because if in Spain it takes two or three years to build a new plant and in Italy we put in six or seven, it's not a destiny, it's a failure of governance that the public must take on board. It means overcoming the resistance that is too often encountered in the territories".

"The absence of an industrial policy in this country is a problem and cannot be blamed solely on this government", says Democratic Party secretary Elly Schlein. "We need a new Next Generation EU that creates a real European industrial plan and strategic autonomy - concludes Schlein -. We will not be able to build European strategic autonomy if we have a budget that is equivalent to 1% of the GDP of the entire European Union. It's like trying to make a Ferrari go with the engine of a 500."

"I want to applaud Confindustria and the other employers' and trade union organizations who signed a historic agreement. They signed a confederal agreement which demonstrated the maturity of wanting to address together, from different points of view and interests, the urgent needs that the country has, because they agreed on representativeness, which is a very strong way to eliminate the unfair competition created by pirated contracts signed by organizations that are not truly representative of companies and workers". This was stated by the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein, guest of the Confindustria small business forum underway in Rome.

"They also addressed the issue of wages together, foreseeing the times and methods of contractual renewals and also providing for a periodic inflation adjustment mechanism - concludes Schlein -. what we propose is not so different from what the companies have discussed, because our proposal made three years ago for a minimum wage, beyond the exploitation made by our adversaries, said exactly this. We do not take a numerical value for everyone, we take for each sector the collective agreement signed by the comparatively most representative organizations of that sector and we extend the overall economic treatment of that contract to all workers in that sector".