Fieg press release

In a context of severe structural crisis for companies and workers, public subsidies have enabled publishing companies to continue to produce and distribute quality information and to meet the challenges of digital and artificial intelligence.

The publishers of the FIEG, despite the reduction in average daily copies sold from 2,500,000 in December 2016 to just over 1,000,000 today and a halving of revenues in the last decade, have used substantial own resources to guarantee the pluralism of information, investments in products and, above all, the protection of jobs, allowing the sector to be one of the few in Italia where no collective redundancies are recorded.

In fact, redundancies have been avoided without invoking privileges, but through recourse to industry regulations - which require both significant investment and new recruitment - and this has always been done with the consent of the trade union. The funding for early retirement was not 'received' from the companies, but directly financed journalists' access to early retirement.

The situation has worsened with competition from free content disseminated by digital platforms and social media, which, without having the responsibility and costs of publishers, mean that more and more users receive information, often of dubious quality, without directly accessing editorial sites, causing the user base and advertising revenues to decrease. And even in this case, the path of responsibility was pursued, avoiding drastic interventions on employment levels.

Despite the serious difficulties in the sector, which are certainly not the fault of the publishers, given the presence of the same critical issues in other countries as well, we are faced with a union that has shown no willingness to sit down at the table to face the challenge of modernising the national labour contract, preferring to entrench itself behind economic demands to recover inflation, which is already guaranteed by the contract's pay automatisms.