15.06.2010 POMIGLIANO D'ARCO'S FUTURE HANGS IN THE BALANCE AS UNION NEGOTIATIONS DRAG

FIAT PANDA CROSS

Fiat is proposing to shift production of the Panda (above, Panda Cross 4x4) to Alfa Romeo's Pomigliano d'Arco factory near Naples from next year.

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.
 

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