The Fiat Group has talked up a 20 billion euro investment plan for Italy over the last year under the title "Fabbrica Italiana", but apart from outlined plans for a 700 million euro investment in the Alfa Romeo factory at Pomigliano d'Arco near Naples to build the next-generation Panda (which is currently manufactured at Fiat's Tychy plant in Poland), there has been very little concrete information about how and where this money will be invested and the company's unions has been agitating ever louder for less talk and more detail from Fiat management. Fiat has also announced the closure of its Termini Imerese factory in Sicily next year when the current-generation Lancia Ypsilon ceases production.

Fiat's senior management in turn has been highly combative, claiming that it loses money on the cars that it builds in Italy and that substantial changes in fundamental working practices will be required before this investment programme can be put into action. This took a worrying turn for the unions earlier this year when Fiat claimed that a new 5- and 7-seater minivan to replace the Fiat Idea and Multipla would be built at the company's recently acquired factory in Serbia (formerly Zastava) and not as had been planned at Mirafiori.

Shifting production of the new minivan abroad would leave Mirafiori, which has built famous models such as the 131 in its steeped history, looking very bare. At present the plant is just trickling out a number of niche models, all in small numbers. It is a far cry from its heyday when Mirafiori was one of the most important factories in Europe. Mirafiori has built the last-generation Punto Classic for Fiat Automobiles, which is being phased out with the arrival of Euro 5 legislation, as well the Idea and its sister, the Lancia Musa, both of which are also based on the Punto Classic's underpinnings, the ageing Multipla and Alfa Romeo's MiTo. All these models are struggling to find buyers, the most modern of these, and the only one that still finds foreign customers in any sort of quantity, the Grande Punto-based Alfa MiTo, has seen its sales slowing sharply at home in recent months: in October its sales slid to just 1,204 units in Italy. The Multipla managed 379 sales in Italy last month and the Idea 664 units, both have long since been reduced to niche appeal while the arrival in the showrooms of Opel's new Meriva has seen robust sales of the Musa quickly crumbling in recent months: during October the little Lancia MPV sold 1,091 units, down by a half year-on-year.

Last weekend Raffaele Bonanni, the chief of one of Fiat's biggest unions, CISL, raised the future of Mirafiori and challenged Fiat to outline its plans for the historic plant. The Fiat Group responded on Tuesday by clarifying its position with a statement: "In relation to the statement released this past Saturday by the Secretary-General of CISL, Raffaele Bonanni, Fiat wishes to clarify that, at the meeting held in Rome on November 4th, it expressed its complete readiness to hold talks on the future of the Mirafiori plant. As confirmation of this, on Friday November 19th, the Unione Industriale di Torino sent a formal letter to sector trade unions confirming the Group’s intention to hold a joint meeting on the Mirafiori plant with all trade unions, the statement concluded.