Institutional meeting that leaves little hope for the 376 jobless employees
WITHOUT JOB and without salary. The 376 scientific informants of X-Pharma are destroyed, which is sailing in bad waters and has decided to close after only two years of activity. Yesterday afternoon a delegation of workers who had fallen into hell in a few days shouted their desperation to the mayor Adriano Poletti and to Bruno Casati, councilor for industrial crises of the province. The summit convened urgently in the Municipality at the request of the unions lasted for hours, it served to bring the situation into focus and prepare the countermove. The script is the same as already seen in similar cases in recent months, with Marvecs, another Colleoni company, Roche from Monza and Astrazeneca from Caponago, the big names in the area that have "scrapped" the drug experts in the wake of a structural crisis that they are trying to resolve with a "blame deal". That is, by transferring the redundant staff to specialized companies and guaranteeing, at least on paper, a job and salary for three years, coming out clean and paying fine incentives to the buyers. We are talking about millions of euros. With some downward adjustments over time, this also happened to X-Pharma, born from the sale of three company branches, one from Solvay, one from Fournier and one from Merck Sharp, to which individual hirings were added, from Bayer, Shering, Ucb and Dompé, all in three tranches, from January 2006 to the last two months ago. About eighty informants work in the Milanese hinterland, the rest throughout Italy, about twenty administrative workers also work in the Agrate office, they too are in the middle of the street. According to reports from the unions, the company's 2007 balance sheet would have recorded a loss of 9 million euros on a turnover of 40. But no economic document has been filed with the Chamber of Commerce. THE «HOLE» is enormous, and makes it almost impossible to find a buyer on the market who takes over highly qualified personnel and licensed products, the real resource on which to focus. The skein is tangled. «It is a scandal that must be denounced publicly – says Casati – we are in the presence of a violation of law 30 and of the sale of a business branch. Labor is sold here." The institutions have placed themselves at the disposal of the workers. "We need to involve the mother houses from which the informants come - adds the commissioner - and open an all-out negotiation on the recovery of professionalism". A difficult road to travel, in the presence of a crisis that has nothing to do with the economic situation, but which is the same Fedefarma he announced at the beginning of 2008 providing data that leave no way out: in Italy there would be 10,000 informants too many, half of whom in the Milanese hinterland, one of the most developed pharmaceutical hubs in the country. Drama within drama. X-Pharma workers got the bad news on July 24th. "For months the managers told us that things were going well - explains Mario Tornaghi of the CISL - then we found ourselves having to deal with the closure". We are fighting to save incomes and jobs: «these are our objectives», adds Livia Raffaglio of the Uil, «that of X-Pharma is a business to be maintained», explains Giancarlo Lombardo of the CGIL. The informants are desperate. FROM 1 SEPTEMBER they should enter the extraordinary redundancy fund but after the lack of union agreement, the last word belongs to the Ministry. The Region, whose opinion is not binding, has already expressed its favour. “We are at the gas barrel – says Daniele Muzzarelli, one of the informants without
