Pfizer Italia has decided to sell more than four hundred pharmaceutical informants to another company, without recognizing their right to refuse the new job and without really valid economic justifications. By Marzia Bonacci – April info.
440 to 2, this is the mathematical formula that summarizes the case raised by the pharmaceutical multinational Pfizer, world leader in the sector, where the first number represents the workers that the industrial giant has decided to sell by February - without providing them with guarantees or the possibility of choosing - to another giant, while the second number represents the number of parliamentary questions presented by Aleandro Longhi, of the DS, on the matter. In fact, the case did not have media coverage, although at stake is the occupational fate of more than four hundred pharmaceutical informants on whom the sword of Damocles weighs down, inclemently, of a forced transfer to another industry. Let us go over the story again, keeping in mind the two parliamentary questions presented by the honorable Longhi on Wednesday.
Pfizer Italia Srl is a company of the Pfizer Inc group, an American multinational drug company, which in the last weeks of December announced the decision to sell two "sales" lines, which correspond to two lines of scientific information, for a total of 440 employees transferred. Buyer: Marvecs. At the basis of the decision - communicated during the uncomfortable Christmas period, making union mobilization of the employees involved difficult -, according to Pfizer, there would be the need to "reorganize with the aim of obtaining a greater degree of flexibility to be able to react quickly to changes in the sector". A change the strategy that cannot, however, find its raison d'etre in the economic trend of the company which, according to the same, does not appear particularly in crisis. In fact, in early December the company presented to the workers the economic results of the last quarter of 2006, which prove a state of growth of the company (how could it not be given that it sells the famous and widespread Viagra?): + 5% of sales in the hospital sector and also an improvement in sales (+0.6%) as a result of the promotion activity by the pharmaceutical representatives (ISF). In short, the whistleblowers have done their job well on the word of the multinational itself. If there was an error, it is represented by a failure to reach the budget, certainly not attributable to the employees.
Now, the current decision to sell the two branches comes close to the one already made at the beginning of 2006 when 200 employees were sold. In the last two years, there would be a total of three transfers which in the previous two alone led to the casualization of about 400 workers.
Having said this, two sets of problems then arise, as Longhi himself recalled. The first concerns the protection of these workers that Pfizer wants to sell, because although it declares that those transferred to Marvecs will maintain the same treatment, it is also true that it does not specify to them how they will be guaranteed by the transferee, who could also proceed with their dismissal out of necessity. The second aspect, which is ideologically worrying, concerns the behavior adopted by the company towards its employees: in fact, they have not been given the – unquestionable – freedom to oppose the transition to another industrial reality. A diktat which, however, contrasts with European and Italian regulations, testifying to the persistence of an "owner" mentality that considers workers as its own "commodity". As argued by the Court
