Restructuring events
European Restructuring Monitor (ERM)
The restructuring events database contains factsheets with data on large-scale restructuring events reported in the principal national media and company websites in each EU Member State. This database was created in 2002.
Eni is an Italian multinational company operating in the oil and natural gas sectors. It is active in about 70 countries with a staff of 72,258 people.
In Italy, Eni operates in the exploration and production of hydrocarbons, in the natural gas, in the oil products, in the petrochemicals, in the oilfield services, and in construction and engineering activities. With regard to the part of its business focused on the chemical production, one of its most important industrial sites is the Eni petrochemical of Gela (in Sicily), in which 1,600 people are employed.
On 17 January 2007, the company announced a reorganisation plan of the Eni petrochemical located in Gela that provides for, on one hand, an investment of around 600 million euro in order to modernise the plants and to improve the company’s efficiency and cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, the plan envisages a loss of 400 jobs.
In order to minimise the negative consequences of its decisions, the company announced recourse to economic incentives for voluntary resignation, ‘mobility’ with a view to early retirement and different measures to support the redundant personnel.
The trade union representatives are interested in the investments’ plan provided by the company in order to enhance the production capacity of the Gela industrial site. At the same time, they disagreed with the company’s decision to cut the personnel and they fear that the reorganisation of the Eni plants could lead to further job losses in the local network of firms that developed around the plants of the multinational company. For all these reasons, the unions urged national and local public authorities to intervene, in order to find ways to avoid the redundancies envisaged by the restructuring plan.
Eurofound (2007), Eni Petrochemical, Internal restructuring in Italy, factsheet number 64800, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://dev.eurofound.europa.eu/restructuring-events/detail/64800.
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