Ita Airways, the layoffs are still 4 thousand (to be paid by the public coffers) but the company hires 1,200 people

Waiting to understand if there really is someone willing to buy it, Ita Airways, subsidiary 100% by the Treasury, increases fleet and personnel. But it does it in a particular way, like almost everything that has happened in this company for years. With the closure of Alitalia and the debut of Ita, fleet and manpower have been greatly reduced. Of the more than 10 thousand employees there are 2,500 left. Recruited with new, less favorable contracts, because, at least in theory, Alitalia and Ita Airways they are two different things, they are not “in continuity”. This real or presumed discontinuity, which is also being examined by the labor judges given the many lawsuits undertaken by former employees, unties the hands of the company, also in terms of new hires. The birth of a new company was the condition requested by Brussels to give the green light to yet another attempt to relaunch the carrier. Ita Airways was structured around this ambiguity, which sooner or later will need to be clarified, which at the beginning flew with planes with the Alitalia logo, the same code AZ, but was technically another company.

With a second round of hiring they are practically back on the team all the trade unionists of the old Alitalia. It is no coincidence that until then the main workers’ organizations had not said a single word against the unscrupulous methods of the former president Alfredo Altavillarecently unleashed. The president had started with a hard line, then the contractual conditions proposed had turned out to be so penalizing that the company found itself short of staff while trying to take off. Management backed down, peace broke out with the main trade unions and hiring arrived. Other 4 thousand however, employees still remain in extraordinary layoffs, at the expense of the community. For them, due to mistakes made by the commissioner’s management, the integration of the members has just been skipped checks for October, November and December.

Ita has now started the hiring process of 1,200 people in view of the expansion of the fleet with 39 new aircraft expected in 2023. It would be logical for him to draw on the pool of former Alitalia, recovering already trained professionals and relieving the State of part of the checks. In the past, general reassurances in this sense had also come from management. But no. In the next few days the recruitment plan will start in collaboration with the Cving company, of the human group. December 14th the selection interviews will be held in Rome, on 16 December in Milan. The professional positions sought are those of certified flight attendants, aspiring flight attendants, pilots. That’s fine for the unions. Meanwhile, the company accumulates losses, approx 1.5 million euros per day. Of course, the period was complicated for all carriers, there is a post-Covid recovery but not all routes have returned to pre-pandemic values. At the beginning of November, the Treasury paid the company others 400 million, penultimate tranche of the 1.3 billion of transfers authorized from Brussels.

Ita waits and hopes that someone really comes forward because she can’t stand alone. The Draghi government had given preference to the consortium of the US fund Certares with the companies Delta and Air France. Admitted to exclusive negotiation, the trio then pulled back also because in the meantime it arrived at Palazzo Chigi Giorgia Meloniless inclined to the French solution. During the electoral campaign, the Prime Minister had expressed the will to preserve the Italian character of the company and proposed a new recovery plan managed by the state. In the last few weeks, the Lufthansa hypothesis, perhaps supported by an Italian partner, has regained ground such as Fs or the ubiquitous Cassa depositi e prestiti. On the other hand, the MSC naval group of Gianluigi Aponte which, until the summer, had cherished the project of an air-sea integration. For now, nothing concrete. Although there are those who argue that Ita Airways was modeled on Lufthansa’s wishes, the German company has had several opportunities in the past to take over the Italian carrier and convey its traffic to the Frankfurt hub. However, when it was time to close, she always withdrew. Attentive commentators note how the “game” between AirFrance and Lufthansa is more than anything else to prevent the competitor from acquiring the Italian carrier. The match remains in the hands of the taxpayers who have spent so far over 13 billion euros for the “flagship” airline .