The shadow of failure hangs over Nissan's reindustrialization. Given the continued delay in the investments promised by the so-called decarbonization hub, Comisiones Obreras considers that public aid must be rethought and warns that alternatives must be considered if the investments, manufacturing and hiring of former Nissan personnel are not already materialized.
“In the current situation, public aid cannot be given and people continue to be deceived,” emphasizes the general secretary of the Workers' Commissions of Catalonia, Javier Pacheco. “Power points are no longer useful to us, we want to see contracts with suppliers that ensure future manufacturing,” adds Miguel Ruiz, general secretary of Sigen-Sir USOC.
His statements come after the meeting held on Thursday by the reindustrialization monitoring commission, where a new delay in the plans was noted that, in the best of cases, would delay the relocation of most of the workforce until 2025. from Nissan. Two years have passed since the closure and in December 600 people will stop collecting unemployment benefits. Almost 700 more also aspire to be relocated, although they are working in other companies. To date, the hub has hired only a hundred people. Another 95 have joined Silence, the only company that has started manufacturing.
The union unrest focuses above all on QEV, the engineering company that leads the hub together with Btech. Joan Orús, CEO of QEV, had announced the start of manufacturing in the Free Trade Zone for this same 2023. To do this, he promised to transfer the production of the Zeroid vans that are now made in China. “Now we are seeing that he does not have the financial capacity,” warns Pacheco. “The hub has taken Nissan's assets at a bargain price and to facilitate the operation, the workers gave up 10 days of compensation per year,” he adds.
The unions show a little more confidence towards Btech, especially in the conversations it has with Chery to manufacture vehicles for the Chinese company, specifically its subsidiary Omoda, in the Free Zone. Btech also plans to manufacture pick-up trucks under the Ebro brand and with patents assigned by Nissan.
Until the hub begins to invest, it will not be able to use the 65 million euros in aid assigned to it by the Electric Vehicle Perte. In addition, the Generalitat has granted 2.1 million for the training of personnel under the Conforcat program. However, at the moment only 330 people out of the 1,300 possible interested parties have been able to participate. To alleviate the impact of the loss of unemployment, a dual FP program is being negotiated with the Generalitat with workers receiving the minimum wage.
