The great global process of reshoring, which is bringing businesses back to their country of origin, also has its victims: workers. Among them are the 420 employees of the Jabil plant in Marcianise, in the province of Caserta, where electronic circuits and components are produced. The multinational based in the United States, the country that more than any other has promoted the return of production to the homeland, has reiterated in recent days what it had already announced close to May 1st: the Marcianise site will close. The fact that the company – which has over 250 thousand employees worldwide – has not provided any particular explanations as to why it decided to close its only Italian plant, other than talking about its own global business strategy, has convinced workers and unions that the basis of everything is precisely the relocation mechanism of companies made in the USA promoted by the American federal government. Which particularly concerns some strategic sectors of the US economy, including that of circuits and electronic components in which Jabil operates.
The bishop of Caserta, Pietro Lagnese, wrote a letter to the American president, Joe Biden, in recent days, having it delivered to the US ambassador to Italy while Biden was busy at the G7 meeting held in Puglia in recent days. «Jabil – writes Lagnese to the American president – is not a loss-making or uninnovative company: it produces charging stations for electric cars, the cars of the present and the future; railway control systems in the high-speed market, the trains of the present and the future. And much more. There are therefore no economic or production reasons that motivate this transfer but, the workers explain, it is a geopolitical strategy of the United States to bring innovative companies back to America.” The bishop of Caserta asks Biden for «a small secular miracle: he intervenes to defend these jobs in Italy, in Marcianise. Ask Jabil to find an alternative solution, new productions.”
Last Thursday, Fiom, Fim and Uilm promoted a metalworkers’ strike throughout the Caserta area which ended with a rally by the general secretaries of the three groups, Michele De Palma, Ferdinando Uliano and Rocco Palombella. The unions reiterated the clear “no” of Jabil workers to yet another relocation, given the failure of the previous ones which led around 250 people from the Marcianise site to others in the area. In total, approximately 500 Jabil employees have left the plant between 2015 and today. The 420 remaining also refused the renewal of the redundancy fund that supported them until May 31st, proposed by the multinational. On Sunday the multinational announced the decision to impose holidays on all workers. The distance between Jabil, who wants to close the Marcianise site, and the workers, who reject any alternative, is becoming increasingly greater.
