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20 January 2020ArcelorMittal will stop the Taranto steel mill 1 starting Thursday. The company announced this to the metalworkers' unions during a meeting.Of the 457 workers in the steelworks, 250 will go to layoffs while the others, union sources explain, will be employed in garrison activities but probably could also be relocated elsewhere in the steel industry.
The shutdown, which will last until the end of March, would have been motivated with maintenance needs but, according to what was communicated by Arcelor Mittal to the unions, the new production structures of the steel plant area are due to a poor supply of raw materials and the current production capacity linked to orders, explain Fim, Fiom and Uilm.
The company reiterated the need to maintain safeguards for almost all the maintenance and personnel required to operate to guarantee the protection of the systems for restarting. "With the stop of steel plant 1 from next Thursday, in the ArcelorMittal plant, ex Ilva, of Taranto, only steel plant 2 will remain in operation until the end of March, which will produce from 45 to 47 castings per day", explains to Agi Francesco Brigades of the Fiom CGIL secretariat of Taranto.
"Currently - says Brigati - the steelmaker travels more or less on the same number of daily flows only that are shared between the two steel mills: the 1 and the 2. On average - he adds -, the steel mill 1 makes about 25 a day. Now instead, with the stop of steel plant 1, everything will be moved to 2 which will work with three converters ".
The crisis stops production
Due to the market crisis, ArcelorMittal produced about 4.5 million tons of steel last year and not the 6 million for which it has the authorization to produce. Also due to the crisis, since July just over 1200 workers, out of 8200 in force at the Taranto plant, are in ordinary layoffs, which at the end of December was renewed for another 13 weeks in the absence of a union agreement.
Finally, in recent days, ArcelorMittal had announced the restart of the sheet metal production department from 10 February for four weeks, bringing 360 employees to layoffs to work, to carry out an order of 30 thousand tons.
Minister Gualtieri and the EU fund
On the EU fund destined for the transition to a green economy "we think we can do better": said the Minister of Economy Roberto Gualtieri. "We will discuss this aspect which also ends up in the context of the budget". It is "a fund that is mainly intended for countries that are lagging behind from the point of view of the ecological transition of the economy and Italy is among those that are ahead": at the same time "it is good that Italy can also access these resources such as the plan to relaunch a greener Ilva ".