PALERMO (ITALPRESS) – The Strait Bridge “is not just one work
for the Sicilians or Calabrians”, but “for the country”. She said it
Gaetano Vecchio, president of Confindustria Sicilia, in
an interview with the Italpress agency. “The Bridge is certainly useful, but it must be built in parallel with a series of infrastructures that are currently lacking in Sicily” or must be strengthened, such as “the Catania ring road which has been collapsing for decades, the Palermo ring road is used as a city street. The country must have the perception of the fact that the Bridge cannot be built unless in parallel with the repair of the infrastructure in Sicily”.
To the new European MPs, Vecchio wants to underline that “growing southern Italy in combination with the growth of the north is an interest of the country and of Europe”, while “the failure to renew the decontribution of the South, which allowed a progressive relief until 2029 to personnel will be a debacle. It was not a gift to the South, but it is a theme of cohesion of the country,” he explained. “If we don’t give the south of the country at this historical moment the opportunity to reconnect with the production capacity of the rest of the country, we will be holding back the whole of Europe”.
One of the issues to work on is employment. “We have spent a lot of resources on professional training, but we have never addressed it to the real needs of the country: I still see many courses for hairdressers and beauticians and I don’t see courses for excavator or welders. In Sicily we will have billions of works, but we lack specialized manpower. for centuries we have been a great source of emigration of personnel, in recent decades we have “given” intellectual manpower to northern Italy and northern Europe: today there is an opportunity for this manpower to return, we can attract all those Sicilians we have around for Italy and Europe with knowledge that can be very useful to us today”, he explained. “The issue of the misalignment between what the company asks for AND what is on the market exists and is strong, it can only be filled with training which must be aimed at the needs of the companies”. Sicilian companies “are not only smaller, but they are also weaker: we are working with the support of the regional government on the one hand to try to make working in Sicily less tiring from a banking point of view, because it is known that companies in the South pay higher interest expenses simply because they are more risky. The idea is a regulation proposed by President Schifani to reduce the interest paid by companies, obviously with a parameter that will try to protect the virtuous”.
“On the other hand, we are trying to think about why we can transfer GDP from the infrastructures that will be built in Sicily – billions of works already under contract – to the island’s industry: today we have a series of components that are built in the North and could instead be made in the South”. This “means transferring GDP permanently to industry in Sicily, because we want an island that develops tourism and agriculture, but we cannot forget that today the majority of GDP comes from industry”.
– Italpress photo –
(ITALPRESS).
