Source: news agency the minute news
(IlMinuto) - Cagliari, August 22 - A net profit of 1.636 billion euro in the first half of 2009. Investments for $ 140 million for the strengthening of capacity in the production of ice cream in Eastern Europe. These few figures show the good health of Unilever: the Anglo-Dutch multinational has shown it can overcome almost free of the storm of global economic crisis. Even before the crisis began in late 2007 - but the decision was announced in 2006 - Unilever had lifted their moorings from Cagliari. At the end of 2008, after a year layoff, the 67 employees at the plant Algida model of Cagliari had been dismissed. Yet the factory
Viale Marconi, active since 1963 and in the hands of Unilever since 1975, was defined as recall former workers of Cagliari leader in Europe for the quality of its products, high flexibility and professionalism of its workers, with prestigious international awards and absenteeism in the peak of 2.7 percent. "" A factory model without overt crisis situations - explain the ex-employees who made profits in 2007, the last year of production .
Probably, now, many of the families of these model workers are struggling to put together the ends meet, but these days on the home page of the site www.unilever.com is in the foreground the campaign "An end to hidden hunger. An International efforts to eliminate malnutrition for 100 million people in Africa "(End to hidden hunger. An international initiative to eliminate malnutrition than 100 million people in Africa). The contradiction is plain to see: you'd think that the main concern of the corporation - which owns many of the most popular brands in the field of nutrition - not the defeat of world hunger.
Yet the closing of the ice cream factory in Cagliari can not be explained only by the brutal laws of globalization, by cutting labor costs by outsourcing production in Eastern Europe. Why, in fact, a few months after closing in Cagliari, Unilever has opened the Ice Foods Centre of Excellence in Caivano, Campania? A center, say former employees Sardinians, "with powers similar to those that have always marked by the establishment of Cagliari?
This is the explanation of workers: "In the restructuring plan that Unilever - can be read in the press release of June 21, 2008 - launched on a national scale, Sardinia is the only region that saw the factory closed with workers in the street and started without any alternative to unemployment, contrary to what has happened in other contexts. This situation is explained by institutional weakness, political and union of our region, unable to find solutions to revive the economy and protect the Sardinians. E 'on this basis that Unilever has found fertile ground to carry out its plan, unfairly punishing workers and Sardinia.
