Textiles, fashion, leather and footwear: 100,000 workers in Tuscany under Cig
From the Biella spinning mills to the Santa Croce tannery, portrait of a sector in difficulty
3' min read
Key points
3' min read
In Biella, a land of spinning and woolen mills with hundreds of years of history, abandoned warehouses are nothing new: the Piedmontese province, with just under 170,000 inhabitants, has seen the 25,000 textile workers of the late twentieth century drop to around 15,000 today.
In the district of Santa Croce sull'Arno (Pisa), on the other hand, where the large Senegalese community is mainly employed in the tanning industry, activities are beginning to close. 'They are going back to Senegal,' explains Marcello Familiari, secretary general of Femca-Cisl of Tuscany, 'because the tanneries, which employ about 11,000 workers in that area, have suffered a major drop in production, with the risk of social fallout.
Leather spinning and tanning is worth 100 billion euros
Leather spinning and tanning are what in fashion is referred to as the 'upstream of the chain', from which starts a manufacturing production chain with 60 thousand companies and 600 thousand employees that generates, in value, around 100 billion euro every year, of which 25 billion euro in trade balance surplus. The powerful post-Covid rebound in consumption has sunk, however, into a downturn in purchases worldwide and especially (for luxury) in China: the crisis has led to a drastic drop in purchase volumes from downstream to upstream in the chain. And vice versa.
Textiles and tanners are working on samples for spring 2026, but the strength of the crisis is such that 'many companies do not have any planned orders,' explains Moreno Vignolini, textile entrepreneur with Ritorcitura Vignolini in Prato and president of Confartigianato Textiles, 'and this makes us imagine that the situation will not improve in 2025.
Since the end of 2023, fashion companies have started to apply for and use shock absorbers, which, especially for the small ones, have run out: the 'cassa in deroga' introduced by Decree 160/24 will be widely used, but it will not be enough'.
