Softlab Procession in Caserta: Workers Without Pay

The workers of the branches complain about "four months of back pay" and above all "no response on the industrial plan" Caserta and Maddaloni of the IT company Softlab, who this morning demonstrated through the streets of Caserta until they reached the square in front of the Prefecture.

For months, the Caserta workers of Softlab – the company offers IT services to over 400 clients including banks and public bodies, has 1200 employees in total and operates through operating companies with offices in Italy, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain and the USA – have been protesting about salary delays and because a part of them, around 250 between the two offices, have been on redundancy for years, and only a few carry out work duties.

The Softlab dispute is closely related to the dispute involving workers at the Jabil plant in Marcianise, who for months have been asking the US company in vain not to follow through on its decision to lay off 190 of them.

The approximately 250 employees of the Caserta offices of Softlab are in fact all former employees of Jabil, who left the latter's workforce in recent years due to the crisis in orders that Jabil, a multinational electronics company with 250 employees worldwide, is complaining about for the Marcianise site.

To reduce the workforce, Jabil has been incentivizing its workers' departures since 2018 and paying other companies, including Softlab, to hire them. Softlab's commitment, made with the Government and the Region, was to activate reindustrialization projects to concretely engage the former Jabil employees hired.

Thus, in March 2021, a branch was opened in Maddaloni after the one inaugurated by Governor De Luca in Caserta in February 2019, but to date, most of the Softlab employees, just like in the Jabil days, have continued to be on redundancy pay, only a part actually work and many are paid late.

Two companies – Jabil and Softlab – that complain about deep problems for the Caserta sites despite being engaged in rapidly expanding activities, such as those related to the ecological transition for Jabil, which produces charging stations for electric cars on behalf of Enel, and the digital one for Softlab.

On January 16, two female and one male Softlab worker were also injured during a roadblock set up in Maddaloni outside the company headquarters; they were in fact hit by a driver who forced the blockade.

In a joint note issued today after the Caserta march, the confederal unions Cgil, Cisl and Uil and the metalworkers' unions Fiom-Cgil, Fim-Cisl and Uilm, affirm that "the Softlab dispute is the mirror of the failures of the reindustrialization projects started by Jabil, where without any guarantee and monitoring of the national and regional institutions involved in the operation, the professional heritage of the workers was sold off".

The unions also ask that “the PNRR funds be used to promote an industrial policy especially in a sector in which the market is rapidly expanding also thanks to the necessary and strategic ecological and digital transition”.

The unionists, who met with the vice-prefect of Caserta, also denounced that "up to now there has been no official communication on the actual disbursement of the loan from Invitalia (a company of the Ministry of Economy, ed.) to Softlab".

The reference is to the financing of the Gid Fund, the incentive aimed at large companies that find themselves in temporary financial difficulty following the Covid-19 emergency, promoted by the Ministry of Economic Development and managed by Invitalia with an endowment of 400 million euros.