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Workers at Fincantieri yards around Italy are up in arms after
the draft of an internal market study proposing the closure of two of the
Trieste-based company’s eight Italian yards was leaked to the Rome-based daily
newspaper La Repubblica.
The study singled out Fincantieri’s yards at Castellammare di
Stabia near Naples and Riva Trigoso near Genoa as candidates for closure, while
Palermo would be scaled back. Castellammare’s recent orders include four giant
cruise ferries for Grimaldi and it is currently working on a hull section for a
new Carnival group ship. Riva Trigoso specialises mostly in military work.
The yards have a direct workforce of 660 and 1,000 workers respectively, many of
whom have been subject to temporary lay-off over recent months as the demand
squeeze has continued with little interruption. Fincantieri employs around 9,000
direct workers in Italy, and roughly three times as many sub-contractors.
Fincantieri, like its competitors around Europe, has been under mounting
pressure since new vessel orders ground almost to a halt with the economic
crisis. It has introduced temporary layoffs and other cost-cutting measures
while seeking to winkle out orders wherever it could find them.
Mindful of the potential social and political consequences of yard closures,
however, the state-owned company has always spoken of such drastic action as a
last resort, preferring instead to offer reassurances that what work did come in
would be spread around its network of yards.
This week, Fincantieri was still insisting that nothing had changed on that
score. ‘The company has taken no decision,’ it said in a statement. ‘Naturally,
depending on how business goes and on the serious market crisis that everyone
sees, we try to anticipate various scenarios, in part so that we are not caught
unprepared.
‘Our aim is to safeguard jobs as much as possible, and to avoid having to take
action with long-term consequences. That is why we have to study all
possibilities.’
Fincantieri added that ‘as far as the global market goes, we are optimistic that
orders for large cruise ships will return, while the market for every other type
of ship is completely flat. At the same time, we have been arguing for years
that some of our yards need investment in infrastructure in order to be
productive, particularly at a time when the crisis has rendered competition even
more fierce than usual.’
Castellammare is in particular need of investment: it still launches ships in
the traditional manner and has waited years for the installation of a
long-promised floating dry dock. Sestri Ponente in Genoa, meanwhile, is badly in
need of space, but plans for expansion into the sea have yet to be implemented. |
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