Maybe Sergio Marchionne could be excused a wry smile as he plies the globes’ airways – at the recent Automotive News World Congress in Detroit the Chrysler/Fiat CEO remarked he spent the equivalent of 42, 24-hour days on aircraft last year – and as he digests the current wave of popular unrest sweeping Italy.
The unelected technocrat prime minister – Mario Monti – parachuted in to try and reign in Italy’s crippling deficit thought to be running at an eye-watering EUR1.3tn (US$1.7tn – when they got to US$500bn did anyone say, hang on, this is becoming a bit high?) has introduced a swingeing series of fiscal belt-tightening measures.
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These in turn have triggered this week’s crippling unrest as fuel cost and insurance rises have seen Italy’s lorry drivers blockade the nation’s motorway arteries and choke off component supplies to Fiat’s factories, leading to a national shut-down.
Fiat has to stand by completely helpless and watch as its attempts to initiate its grand new national agreement with unions lie shattered – for this week at least – as events totally beyond its control spiral into national chaos.
And it is in a cruel irony, in the week of all weeks when Fiat launched its sober new television advertising campaign, ostensibly for the new Panda, but exhorting a new approach to Italian industrial relations, that the country is paralysed by angry truckers stopping the automaker turning a single nut.
Here’s a flavour of the TV commercials:
“How many Italys do we want?” intones the intro. “The one whose young people are seeking a future or the one of great industries?
“We can choose which Italy we want to be. Now is the time to decide whether to be ourselves. Now is the time to start anew. Through hard work and by proving ourselves. The new Fiat Panda is the Italy we like.”
There are fantastic shots of Vesuvius alongside Fiat factories, Italians in space with the tricolore, washing-laden Neapolitan balconies next to waiters bringing pasta, but of irate lorry drivers dragging the motorway network to a juddering halt, there are none.
Fiat is at pains to point out its shiny new ad does not imply criticism of what has been, but rather is an ideal of what could be.
However, it has undertaken a massive review of Italian working practices with its hitherto hostile unions, who have, perhaps reluctantly accepted the sometimes radical proposals in exchange for better wages, bonus and let’s face it frankly, job security.
Most of Fiat’s bewildering spaghetti soup of union acronyms, FIM, UILM, FISMIC and UGL, have signed up to the deal at the Pomigliano D’Arco plant that has implemented what for the rest of us would be perfectly acceptable terms.
A 5.2% pay rise, bonus and extra overtime working for Fiat’s 86,000 staff has been agreed in exchange for the manufacturer extracting the flexibility to work up to 120h more annually on Saturdays should it be required, as well as reductions in daily breaks by ten minutes.
The hardline FIOM union however, reacted furiously, insisting the deal “worsened” its working conditions, a move Marchionne recently told just-auto in Detroit was “nonsense.”
Fiat and the union are now resolutely in a state of stasis with neither side apparently willing to talk. Meanwhile the other unions have inked the deal and are prepared to work.
Except they can’t this week, as their colleagues in the transport unions have brought the country to its knees – and Fiat’s just-in-time component stocking to boot.
The lorry drivers are now apparently causing food and petrol shortages, not to mention no brand new Pandas rolling off the production line.
Ironically, this weekend is due to see the glitzy arrival of the Panda in Italian showrooms. If they can get there.
“We can choose which Italy we want to be,” could be a Mario Monti-inspired commercial rather than the brainchild of Marchionne.
But it has never been more apt as Italy struggles through a period of stark reality and takes its painful fiscal medicine.
