The latest announcement came in late January from Rieti, where a company in the so-called "Pump Valley”, Etatron, which specializes in the production of metering pumps, decided to stop operations by laying off its 15 employees. Industry, even at the highly specialized, continues to suffer for various reasons, as Istat has also confirmed: large companies suffer as well as small ones, and in parallel they drag on crises that are now even years old and have not yet found a solution. According to CGIL estimates, there are as many as 183,193 workers overwhelmed by the effects of company or sector crises in the industry and networks sector, starting with the 58,026 employees of companies for which crisis tables have been activated at the Ministry for Business and Made in Italy, to date 59 in all. "We give the exact figure," explained Pino Gesmundo of the CGIL National Secretariat in recent days, "because we are talking about people, not mere statistics, and to these we add the tens of thousands of workers of companies in crisis that have tables open at the regional level, for which there is no national mapping by the institutions, but which we know and represent (18. 609 in the Veneto and 18,241 in Puglia, just to give two examples), or again, the 5,141 workers in companies that, despite having made a request, do not have a table at the ministry”. At risk of crisis due to ongoing transformations are 70,000 workers in the automotive sector, 25,459 in the steel industry, 8,500 in telecommunications, 8,000 in the power generation sector (coal-fired power plants and combined cycles), 4,094 in basic chemicals, 3,473 in petrochemicals and refining, and 2,000 in the electricity sector due to the end of the protected market.
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