The
future of the Pomigliano d'Arco plant is still undecided
as the FIOM union, which has so far rejected Fiat's
proposals, announced yesterday that it won't accept
Fiat's terms for bringing Panda production, through a
700 million euro investment, to the Naples site. Last
Friday the other four unions that represent workers at
struggling Alfa Romeo factory reached a tentative
agreement with Fiat Group management to implement a raft
of new working practices, with the FIOM union being the
only one not to sign up.
Yesterday FIOM
Secretary-General Maurizio Landini said that after
consideration the union's board had unanimously rejected
the deal and wouldn't be putting it to a vote by its
members as it believed the terms being offered violated
the rights of workers. "Fiat can reach its productivity
goals for the Panda using the national contract,"
Landini told the media. The FIOM union will also call an
eight-hour strike on June 25 to demonstrate its
opposition to the deal.
Fiat is expected to
meet the four unions that have tentatively agreed a deal
today to discuss the proposals further. However on
Friday Fiat Group CEO Sergio Marchionne said that all
five unions needed to be in agreement to the new
proposals for Panda production to be switched from its
current home at Tychy in Poland to the plant. Marchionne
wants significant changes in working practices to be
made - and he believes they are needed to make the
factory globally competitive. They include a rise to 18
shifts from the current 10, six-day and Saturday night
working and limits the the right to strike.
The plant,
renamed as Giambattista Vico after a partial re-fit a
couple of years ago, was built at the beginning of the
1970s by the then-independent Alfa Romeo to manufacture
the Alfasud and its coupé derivative, the Sprint. In
recent years its importance has waned, the Alfa 147
which slots into the vitally-important C-segment was
built at the factory until recent months but its
successor, the Giulietta, is now built at a factory
where it is assembled alongside Fiat and Lancia models
that share many of its underpinnings and mechanicals, so
that leaves the Naples factory with just the Alfa 159,
159 Sportswagon and the niche GT Coupé.
Last year Pomigliano
d'Arco
assembled just 35,000 cars and it spent many months idle with
the workers sent home under the government-sponsored
temporary redundancy scheme. Introducing the
next-generation Panda to the factory could increase
annual production to as many as 280,000 units and help
to achieve a promise made to central government last
December to boost domestic production by around 50
percent. This commitment, which helped to alleviate
growing pressure that Fiat was shifting more and more of
its car production away from its domestic base, Italy,
was central to the carmaker being given the green light
to close the Termini Imerese factory in Sicily next year
without resistance from the government.
