Turin, one of the nerve centers of the European automobile industry since the factory was inaugurated on May 15, 1939. Fiat’s Mirafiori on the outskirts of this Piedmontese town at the foot of the Italian Alps, today it is experiencing its particular decline fanned by the flames of the crisis in the automotive sector.
Until now Turin has been Fiat and the emblem par excellence of the Italian car has been linked to the destiny of the people of Turin since the Agnellis decided 125 years ago to enter the vehicle business. In fact, Giovanni Agnelli’s great-great-grandson, John Elkmann, is the current president of Stellantis, a group of which the Fiat commercial brand is integrated.
Today, Mirafiori manufactures the electric version of the legendary Fiat 500 – when stoppages due to lack of activity allow it – and employs more than 2,800 people which, at the moment, are in the process of reducing working hours as a result of the low demand for battery cars in Europe.
“Mirafiori has closed, although occasionally it reopens”, this is how the plant workers define the current situation of the factory which, according to unions have denounced on numerous occasions in recent weeks, is “unsustainable” in the medium term.
However, to understand the crisis that Mirafiori is currently going through – and the entire Stellantis group in Italy – we must go back to 2014, when Fiat, in a last attempt at survival, diluted its Italian identity to announce the merger with the American Chrysler which gave rise to the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) group. The French PSA joined this alliance, years later, in 2021, giving way to the group that is known today as Stellantis.
In this period of more than a decade, Turín has been losing strength within the manufacturer’s operations. In the last 40 years the city has lost four car factories from the closure of Lingotto in 1982 to the closure of the Grugliasco plant a year ago.
Meanwhile, at Mirafiori Fiat employed nearly 60,000 people to carry out the production of more than a million cars that left its facilities each year, including the first version of the Fiat 500. Thus, Turin, with between 50,000 and 60,000 citizens linked to the automobile industry, Today, it is experiencing a particular moment of crisis with Stellantis workers clamoring to recover the lost jobs and the vigor that the plant once had.
This past Friday, hundreds of workers began a march from Turin to Rome to ask the Government of Giorgia Meloni for solutions to Stellantis’ intentions to consider the Turin factory dead, as they allege. The Rome Executive has criticized the automobile company run by Carlos Tavares on numerous occasions and even has even threatened to expropriate some of the inoperative brands in its catalog to offer them to Chinese companies that commit to manufacturing cars in Italy.
In fact, Tavares had to give explanations less than a week ago before the Italian deputies and senators for the Mirafiori situation. During his speech, the Portuguese limited himself to criticizing the high production costs that Stellantis is having to bear in Italy, especially, with regard to the cost of energy and took the opportunity to attack the electrification objectives imposed by the European Union with the ban on the sale of combustion cars from 2035, but did not provide any solution to the workers of Turin.
A plant with an uncertain future
Despite everything, Stellantis insists that Mirafiori has a future. The factory produces gearboxes for electric and hybrid vehicles, houses an auto parts recycling center and a battery technology laboratory, and will begin production the new hybrid version of the Fiat 500 at the end of 2025. However, current prospects see Italian production of Stellantis falling below 500,000 this year, the lowest since 1958.
Furthermore, the workforce that remains within the more than 2 million square meters that this industrial complex occupies is for the most part unemployed or close to retirement. The average age of workers is 58 years, according to the unions, and there is hardly any generational replacement willing to work in the motor industry.
At the same time, and although the latest Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo models have been designed in Italy, much of their manufacturing is carried out in French plants or in European countries where labor costs are lower. Tavares, last Friday in front of the political class, admitted that producing the Alfa Romeo Junio in Italy instead of in Poland could add just over 10,000 euros to the car’s final bill.
For now, Turin puts pressure on Rome so that Meloni gets two large Chinese groups such as Dongfeng or Chery to take their European factories to the city in order to provide an outlet for the out-of-work automobile sector employees who are in the city and bring life back to the former industrial epidentle of northwestern Italy.
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