From the former Ilva to Natuzzi, here are all the open crises in Apulia

Ex Ilva, first of all. Lastly, the stalemate over the Natuzzi dispute. First also the Brindisi petrochemical plant, the Cerano coal-fired power station and then again Borsch and Marelli with all the difficulties of transition for companies linked to the automotive world.

There are 42 disputes still open, which are also monitored by the Regional Committee for monitoring the economic production system and crisis areas, the task force of the Puglia Region dedicated to the main business crisis cases. Forty-two disputes are still open, involving 11,640 workers. In total, there have been 72 crisis tables managed by the (Sepac) business support system since it was set up in 2016. Apulia is the only region to have set up an ad hoc body to follow the various company difficulties and, above all, their - sometimes very strong - impact on the sector and the territory. Presiding over it from the outset was Leo Caroli.

Although each company has its own story, put all together the Apulian data represent a microcosm of the biggest sector crises at specific historical moments: coal, with the resignation of the Brindisi power plant and the need to reconvert the territory, as well as the workers; chemistry, with the table concerning the petrochemical plant in Brindisi after the closure of the Versalis cracking plant, with 1600 workers at risk between direct and induced, which are added, in the same province, to the uncertainties triggered by the crisis of theLyondellBasell site, an important production complex specialised in the production of polypropylene. Borsch, Marelli, Graziano, all stories of large companies and then of difficult labour disputes linked to the transition of the automotive sector. The former Ilva in Taranto, then, Europe's largest steel complex, is a story in itself, which has always overlapped with the city's history.

One of the tasks of the regional task force, considered strategic by Antonio De Caro's junta and overseen by councillor Eugenio Di Sciascio, is to encourage the use, with other regional institutions, of active policy tools for employees at risk of redundancy and to relocate those expelled from production processes, with retraining programmes.

This is one of the main concerns now of theNatuzz workers and especially of the many women, about half of the 1,800 employees: that of not being able to find another job, after having been especially trained in sewing and cutting. The Upper Murgia is still an economically fragile area, with an entrepreneurial dimension largely introduced by Natuzzi, founded in 1959 in Taranto and then brought to Santeramo in Colle, in the province of Bari, by Pasquale Natuzzi, still the company's owner, assisted in the latest industrial plan by his son Marco.