I’ll tell you what will happen to Ita with Lufthansa
What is happening and will happen in Italy with the entry of Lufthansa. Facts, challenges and scenarios. Paolo Rubino's analysis
A former Alitalia pilot speaks of "social carnage and cancellation of 75 years of history" , commenting on the decision of the Rome Labor Court ordering the reinstatement in Italy of 77 employees of the old company. And it saddens this judicial twilight, all in all of a miserable entity, of a story that does not begin with the transfer, in 2021, of the last remains from a decayed company to a new one specially created to welcome them.
THE VIVISECTION OF ALITALIA BEGAN IN 2001
The expression " good and bad company " has accompanied national air transport since well before 2021. It is in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, in 2001, that the vivisection of Alitalia begins, born fifty years earlier from a visionary aggregation of material assets and skills resurrected nationally from the disaster of war. The turnaround of the new millennium is plastically defined by the end of the age of aggregation and the beginning of that of disintegration. We start by separating passenger transport from passenger service.
In 2002 the company split into Alitalia transport and Alitalia services. The definition good and bad has not yet emerged, but it is implicitly assumed that good is the tool, the transport, bad the purpose, the service to customers. The service activities were then ghettoized in a special society from which they would emerge, one at a time like the lambs of the silence of the innocents, to be delivered into the hands of speculators with little interest in developing the company and much instead in hoarding the gratitude of politicians in season for taking chestnuts from the fire for them.
From 2008 onwards, then, bad and good become the lexical mantra that strikes the imagination of the media and public opinion. From one bad company to another, extracting a piece of it, tautologically defined as good , ever smaller, ever more lacking in managerial and strategic autonomy, we arrive at the Ita peanut of 2021. The latest reincarnation of Italian air transport is an ectoplasm whose miserable significance is certified by the petty actions of its top management, by the micragnous network of planned connections, by the intuitive hetero-direction of strategic choices for fleet purchases and the means to finance it.
With a government decree which, in 2022, establishes by law that the future proprietary control of Ita can be entrusted exclusively to another air transport company, in the evident absence of a national subject with these characteristics, it is definitively certified that Italy renounces to carry out this industrial activity.
THE END OF INDUSTRIAL AMBITIONS
Wondering today whether the sentence of the Rome Labor Court could disturb Lufthansa is mere gossip. If finally forced to rehire 77 employees, or even 777, Lufthansa will certainly not fail to negotiate this small, and ephemeral, sacrifice with far more strategic concessions from the government. The invitation to reflect is, if anything, on another theme: the line of defense on which our ambition of a national travel, tourism and hospitality industry is currently falling back seems to have settled on the reduced concessions for itinerant trade , beach concessions and the micro-enterprise of apartments intended for B&Bs. Miserable end to industrial ambitions that have been rhetorically touted for decades.
The implementation of the Bolkestein directive increasingly threatens this redoubt. It is more than probable that the need to support, with the consent of Brussels and Frankfurt, a public debt increasingly confined to the pension and health care spending of an increasingly old, weak and cowardly country will soon cause the opposition to Bolkestein to collapse as well. And further proof of this comes from the silence that has fallen on the FRI TUR – PNRR program which, after the emphatic announcements of March of this year, seems to have disappeared into hyperspace.
But on the other hand, a country whose demographic projections say that there will be fewer than 50 million inhabitants in just a few decades, with a 1:1 ratio between workers and pensioners, why on earth should it concern itself with developing robust productive activities? Accepting this future consistently means protecting small incomes, certainly not promoting business risk. And small pension annuities will probably be the relief for former Alitalia employees. Therefore, it must be said that in the end de minimis non curat praetor!
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/alitalia-vicenda-giudiziaria/ on Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:48:54 +0000.