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Italiano Lecce: Globalization – the Italian Way
Workers of the Lecce Tobacco Plant
According to the director of the Confindustria of Lecce, Antonio Corvino, “We need to individuate a strategy that, first of all, will allow British American Tobacco to reach its objectives… Globalization is not a process that can be stopped… It is all a matter of company autonomy, it has every right to exercise its will.” Anyway we look at it, the Confindustria with its convolutions and so-called promoters of globalization, for some reason has lined up on the side of BAT.
With the liberalization of the market, which all the European countries, except Italy, are promoting, there is more than one business, Italian or foreign, it makes no difference, ready to take up this production. And it might be the Chinese who want to produce here; they are the greatest producers in the world.
Globalization means not raising obstacles to free enterprise, respecting the laws. What the Confindustria is supporting is globalization the Italian way; it is a pathological sycophancy to the multinationals; it is the defense of a cartel of three companies, which all have their manufacturing abroad.
British American Tobacco, Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco hold almost 100% of the Italian market, a market that has been constructed to ensure their profits, a market contrary to all principles of free competition.
Why are new factories being opened in Europe while in Italy they are shutting down? Why until 2004 were 95% of the cigarettes sold in Italy manufactured in our country, while today we are down to 5%?
Behind this process, there are obscure lobbies and ambiguous political choices. On the contrary, a policy that followed the European Community’s directives would encourage the return of cigarette production in Italy.
The Strategic Importance of the Production Pole of Lecce
Today a company that wants to enter the European market cannot produce outside the Community because it would be irremediably penalized by customs duties. In Europe all the tobacco processing sites, with some minor exceptions like Yesmoke, are in the hands of the multinationals.
A technologically advanced factory like the one in Lecce, that guarantees top quality according to international standards, requires years of planning and construction, and highly skilled professional capacities that cannot be improvised. No one would let a plant like the one in Lecce go … perfectly operational, “turnkey”.
And the site’s future potential is great; it is a small plant, if we compare it to the tobacco factories with ten thousand or more workplaces that are common today. The Lecce factory if it continued its production, would inevitably end up being enlarged to become one of the most important manufacturing poles of the region.
But unfortunately, the strategy of the multinational giants is to buy up everything in order to monopolize the market.
Today, BAT’s only interest is to dismantle the plant in Lecce so that no one else can manufacture there, and the company is fully supported in this plan by a cowardly and servile Italian political class.
In this scenario of European unity and globalization, the response of the Italian Government has been to elude the sentence of the European Court that imposed the elimination of Italy’s “minimum price” on cigarettes, the cause of all evils. It abolished the “minimum price” and then introduced a ridiculous and equally illegal “minimum tax”.
It is a Machiavellian lobbying maneuver worthy of some third world countries. The objective is to leave everything exactly as it was before, an umpteenth gift to British American Tobacco.
It is very different from Italy’s handling, in the European Union, of another similar problem: the market of milk production; it was carried on with total transparency and in the interest of Italian producers.
Today, Italy is the only European country that effectively has kept the minimum price and has adopted policies that oppose the liberalization of the market.
But can we be sure that all the politicians are following that old plot, with which BAT was allowed to close twenty-one of the twenty-two ex-ETI (Italian tobacco production) plants?
Workers, unite and do not leave your factory, things could soon change!
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