The secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein participated in the assembly of Federmanager, the association that represents executives, apical paintings and high professionalism of the private industry and that celebrates its eighty years of activity.
In his intervention on the margin of the assembly, the secretary has resumed many of the themes exposed by the president of Federmanager, Valter Quercioli, illustrating his vision of the country regarding the current setting of Italian industrial policy and the decisions of the government on energy, incentives to enterprises and management of industrial crisis.
Schlein left the country’s strengths: manufacturing, innovation and “the desire to rise even in times of great complexity” such as the present one. For this reason, he said, the priority is to focus on a stable industrial policy. “It needs an industrial policy planning that has a multiannual scope because enterprises need continuity in incentive programmes and need to be able to plan their own investments”.
One of the points indicated by Schlein is the need to resume the “Industry 4.0” model: ‘Transition 5.0 was very bureaucratic and therefore on 6 billion incentives enterprises demanded only less than two.’ He added that the return to instruments such as hyper-amortization and overcapacity – i.e. tax relief on investments in instrumental goods – is “a right direction”, but not enough in terms of resources. He cited the demands of Confindustria, which “requires 8 billion a year for 3 years”, and said that today “there is so much a third of that figure”. For Schlein “it is necessary to make an extra effort to give continuity to a real industrial policy that can support innovation, ecological conversion and make it convenient for our enterprises”.
The secretary of the Democratic Party then resumed the issue of energy costs, considered for years one of the factors that limits the competitiveness of Italian companies compared to European competitors. “We have the most expensive bills in Europe, in Italy we must not accept it as a fact.” The example should come from other European countries: «Spain, Portugal have disconnected the price of energy from that of gas, it is necessary to do so also in Italy to give immediate breath to both the enterprises and the Italian families». It is not the first time that Schlein supports this measure, known as “disappearance” or “separation” between the price of electricity and gas, claiming that it would directly reduce bills for families and companies. On this issue Schlein also linked the energy question to the purchasing power: the cost of energy “they pay it three times” the workers, “when they receive the bill at home, when they go to do the shopping and costs everything more and when a small and medium enterprise gets in trouble because it fails to pay the energy and puts them in cash integration”.
Following this, Schlein agreed with Federmanager on the role of the State in industrial policy. The subject has returned central in recent years due to the energy crisis, pandemic and geopolitical tensions, which have made the supply chain more fragile than many sectors. Schlein said that “the State must take some responsibility in terms of industrial policy”, especially in cases where the productive and employment continuity of entire territories is at stake. It has brought as an example Taranto, that is the former Ilva, one of the main steelworks of the country and also one of the most complex industrial and environmental cases of recent decades. “It is necessary that the institutions work to give a clear and concrete perspective to the future of Taranto”, he said, explaining that he had met the metalworking unions, “very worried” for the lack of certainties.
On Taranto, Schlein said that it is not enough to guarantee employment in the short term but that it serves a solution that holds together more goals at the same time: “It is necessary to give guarantees to workers and workers who are in difficulty but also to give guarantees to the city”, i.e. to protect the environment and public health in an area that for years signals very high levels of pollution. For Schlein this requires direct State intervention in the management of the plant: “The State must take responsibility to accompany a decarbonization process that assures the industrial future of that city and at the same time the employment and health and the environment of people”. In your opinion, you must avoid the “sickness”, that is the term in which the industrial assets are separated and sold to different subjects, reducing the total production capacity of the plant. “It must be avoided in all ways,” he said, adding that “if a temporary nationalization is needed” in order to ensure together “the protection of health and the environment”, “employment continuity” and “industrial waste of that establishment”.
Taking up a passage from Federmanager’s report on human capital: “When institutions, policy and governments put an industrial policy in place, it is not just about supporting the purchase of technological machinery,” he said. According to Schlein, tax incentives should be built to simultaneously finance hardware innovation and skills update: “We ask that there is a tax credit that facilitates the purchase of machinery and investment on the training and skills of the human capital, because it also serves this”. It linked this theme to artificial intelligence and the latest technological transformations: “It serves for example when we deal with innovations like artificial intelligence, so the two things go together: technological machinery but also formation of the human capital”.
In closing, the secretary of the PD said to share the idea that managerial quality is a decisive component of the industrial estate of an industry, even when the State intervenes: “It must be understood that the difference does not so much the property but the managerial quality”.
L’articolo What Elly Schlein said at the Federmanager Assembly proviene da IlNewyorkese.
