The global reorganization that the Electrolux group announced in recent days provides for 4 thousand redundancies, a situation that is affected by the context characterized by both the growth of inflation and the drop in consumption that also affects household appliances. The Italian management of the company met with the trade unions to decline the impact in our country where, according to a note from Fim, Fiom and Uilm, the redundancies will be 300. Half of the workers, half of the white-collar staff and managers.
However, the reduction in costs will go hand in hand with investments and the reorganization of production which will concern in particular the Solaro site, where an innovative dishwasher platform should be built. Precisely this appliance is considered increasingly strategic, since “not yet relegated to a market of mere replacement and therefore potentially growing,” the company explained to the trade unions. The intention is therefore to produce a new product in the Italian factory, which will focus on low consumption and high performance and which will require a very important investment. In fact, the site needs an intense reorganization in the now obsolete technology department, in the packaging plant and in the assembly lines, with an amount of investments in the period 2023-2026 of 102 million euros. The new production platform should allow us to reach from the current 780 thousand pieces to 960 thousand in 2024, to 1,140 thousand in 2025 and to 1,329 in 2026.
However, Electrolux’s investment plan is linked to reaching an agreement with the trade unions both on redundancies and on increasing productivity. In particular, the company asks to switch from the current production revenue, equal to 90 pieces per hour, in two years to a revenue of 118 pieces per hour, for a daily production of 5,970 pieces. The major pieces would be linked to an ergonomic improvement of the workstations and to the strengthening of the staff, which however has not yet been quantified. For the trade unions it is «an extremely ambitious project, not predictable in its outcome, which greatly affects the organization of work. A comparison is now starting that will have to try to combine the sustainability needs of investments with the indispensable ones of health and safety in the workplace, as well as with the need to stabilize precarious workers and to be able to carry out a generational change ».