Automaker Fiat SpA won narrow backing from its workers for a groundbreaking contract that limits strikes and absenteeism in exchange for investment in Italy, the unions said yesterday.
Workers in a referendum at Fiat’s historic, but loss-making, Mirafiori factory in Turin, Italy, voted 54 percent in favor of the new contract, a spokesman for the FIM union said.
Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne, who engineered the Italian automaker’s 25 percent stake in Chrysler Group LLC and transformed Fiat from an ailing conglomerate, had threatened to deploy the cash abroad if workers reject the changes.
Photo: REUTERS
The deal had been approved by most plant unions, but rejected by the left-wing Fiom. The deciding factor was support from white-collar workers, union spokesmen said.
“A 46 percent ‘no’ vote seems tremendous to me. To make good cars, you don’t need conflicts of this type,” Fiom Turin representative Giorio Airaudo said.
The contract is part of a Fiat-led unprecedented overhaul of Italian labor relations, which have been based on national deals rather than on a plant-by-plant basis.
If workers accept the new contract, the company has pledged to invest 1 billion euros (US$1.3 billion) to build new, high-end Alfa Romeo and Chrysler models at Mirafiori, Fiat’s oldest plant and a symbol of Italian industry.
“Now the industrial plan for Mirafiori will go ahead. Marchionne has to quickly deploy the investment, as he promised,” FIM national secretary-general Bruno Vitali said.
More than 96 percent of workers took part in the referendum on Thursday and on Friday.
The contract has already been agreed at Pomigliano, another of Fiat’s five Italian car factories, all of them loss-making. However, support at was Pomigliano surpassed 60 percent of voters.
However, Fiat, Europe’s No. 6 automaker by market share and Italy’s biggest industrial group, also needs the deal to work in order to safeguard sales in its home market.
The deal is part of a 20 billion euro “Fabbrica Italia” plan to double domestic production by 2014. It targets widespread absenteeism by curbing pay for those who take repeated sick leave around holidays and by ending wildcat strikes.
It cuts the number of breaks per eight-hour shift to three from four and raises the number of shifts to 18 per week from 15. Fiat can also call on each worker for 120 hours of overtime per year without union approval.
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