Two companies permanently leave the area of Taranto and the activities cease: they are Albini, with the Mottola weaving, e Cemitaly, of the group Italcementi, which years ago took over the plants from Cementir. The two plants have been inactive for some time and the staff (116 for Albini and 51 for Cemitaly) placed in layoffs. For Albini, workers in shifts are guarding the plant after Albini, on July 13, announced that the Tessitura di Mottola has been definitively liquidated. The staff fear that the machines could be taken away “and we don’t want this – say the workers together with the unions – because we believe that that plant, with another management and another business group, can be relaunched”. Headquarters in Albino in the province of Bergamo, where it was born in 1876, Albini inaugurated the Tarantino center in 2003 using the public funds of the reindustrialisation for the steel crisis areas (law 181 of 1989) and specializing it in production for large orders. The start of the liquidation dates back to last March.
Albinos: chronic oversupply
For the company, the textile-fashion sector is “characterized by the chronic oversupply, the price war unleashed by the Asian supply chain, the generalized reduction in consumption and the crisis suffered by an important part of the operators in the clothing sector, in formal detail “. «To these structural phenomena – explains Albini – was added the crisis caused by the pandemic, which hit the textile-fashion sector more heavily than all the other industrial sectors. A trend and a context that, for Albini, have meant a reduction in volumes and an aggravation of the production overcapacity in the less specialized weaving, without forecasts of an adequate recovery of the sector’s demand in the coming years “. Albini has hired a scouting company, la Virtues, to survey companies willing to take over. The unions say that there is still no feedback on this, as well as on the actual will of a textile ATI to come forward, a hypothesis proposed by the work and employment task force of the Puglia Region.
Meanwhile, there is a conflict over the layoffs. Albini – say the trade unions – does not want to take advantage of the new Covid cash tranche arranged for textiles until the end of October but to use the extraordinary one, for cessation of activity, lasting one year. The unions say no to the latter hypothesis. On July 22 there is a video call confrontation with the Ministry of Labor. The prefect of Taranto, Demetrio Martino, Filctem Cgil, Femca Cisl and Uilctus Uil asked for an intervention on the continuation of the Covid redundancy fund, “given the many other similar interventions”, a path that targets the reindustrialization of the site and with it the recovery of all the employees concerned, the payment of the cig of June 2021 given that workers and families are still without any form of support, and, finally, the verification of possible new investors. This, the textiles acronyms conclude, to avoid unnecessarily running further time that could inevitably be lost.
Cemitaly: there are no conditions to restart
For Cemitaly, on the other hand, institutions and trade unions were informed of the need to proceed with the collective dismissal of the 51 Taranto employees deemed structurally in excess due to the definitive cessation of activity. Cemitaly arrived in 2018 but as early as 2013, the group recalls, the Taranto plant, built 60 years ago, “was in a condition of prolonged production shutdown”. With the three production ovens shut down, the site had become just a grinding center. This is for three reasons: serious market and product crisis, difficulty in finding blast furnace slag from the nearby factory ArcelorMittal (ex Ilva) and the impossibility of otherwise obtaining the raw material at sustainable costs. Already in October 2018 Cemitaly announced the dismissal of employees, who were 67 at the time. Layoffs then blocked and converted with extraordinary layoffs for all employees. In the cigs period, initially extended until December 2020 and then transformed into a Covid cig which ends next September 15, Cemitaly declares that it has evaluated the possibility of a recovery but the conditions have not been found. Cemitaly argues that alternative solutions to layoffs are not possible and “the possibility of converting the site to other cement productions is not feasible due to both the more general structure of the group and the current situation in the cement market”.
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