Automotive, textiles and steel. Cash demands double

A two-speed North-West, reflecting the difficult moment in some manufacturing sectors such as automotive, textiles and steel and, on the contrary, the industrial resilience of others such as shipbuilding. Figures from the Tagliacarne Institute processed for Il Sole 24 Ore Nordovest reveal a production slowdown in Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta, where requests for redundancy funds in one year have increased by 44% and 156% respectively, while in Liguria the request has dropped by 15.2%. The Northwest as a whole recorded a 34% increase in the number of lay-offs over a year, with almost 33 million hours of CIG requests compared to 24.5 million last year.

Aosta and Novara stand out in terms of the significance of the increases in the request for social shock absorbers compared to a year ago, with heavy percentages such as +156% in the province of Aosta and +118% in Novara, but in absolute terms it is Turin that represents the province with the highest load of requested lay-off hours, more than 18 million, more than half of the entire Northwest area, with a growth of almost 70%.

There are three sectors that set the pace in the area, particularly influencing the data recorded in Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta. Combining the lay-off applications of just two sectors, metalmechanical production and motor vehicle production, one third of the total number of applications is reached, totalling more than 11 million hours. To this picture must be added the third big sick person, the textile sector, which records four times as many lay-off applications as a year ago. Worryingly, even the anti-cyclical sectors par excellence, such as the food industry, register some slowdown with 620,000 hours requested.

This slowdown evidenced by the trend of unemployment benefit claims in many sectors was evident in the indicators of industrial production trends. Unioncamere Piemonte's economic survey showed a drop in manufacturing production of 1.1% in tendential terms in the second quarter of the year, 'a result that has not been observed since the Covid period and which represents the lowest point in six essentially flat quarters,' points out Gaetano Fausto Esposito, director general of the Tagliacarne Study Centre. The results are affected by means of transport (-8%) and textiles-clothing (-6.1%) and mechanics (-2.9%), "fully confirming the difficulties highlighted by the redundancy fund". Even the export data processed again by Unioncamere Piemonte shows a drop of almost 5% in the first six months of the year, "with negative peaks of -16.2% in the means of transport sector and -14.2% in Biella, which is the textile district par excellence," concluded the director.

The labour market analysis conducted by economist Mauro Zangola highlights a couple of trends. In Piedmont, in the second quarter of 2024, the employed grew by 39,000 units (+2.2%) compared to the same period in 2023, 'the highest growth rate among the most industrialised regions of the North if we consider that in the same period of time the employed decreased by 1.2% in Veneto, grew by only 0.2% in Emilia Romagna and by 1.1% in Lombardy,' Zangola points out. Over the same period in Liguria, employment actually decreased by 2.3%. In Piedmont, only two sectors increased employment compared to 2023, services other than commerce and public establishments (+40,000) and construction (+19,000), while industry lost 5,000 workers and agriculture 11,000. In Liguria the drop in the number of employees was contained thanks to the jobs created in the Industry and Construction sectors.