The plant (English page)

Nokia Siemens Networks- Jabil today’s stand

Four years ago Nokia and Siemens merged their telecommunications branches to create NSN and than NSN Italia. 

By then, between “Volontary Leave Incentive” programs, Job suspension, production outsourcing (which counted 700/800 workers cut) and other “non strategic” activities shut-down, in total 2000 workers have been lost, today about 1000 only are left.  

January 2008

After a very hard negotiation where the labour unions were forced to accept the production outsourcing, we were against it because so doing the completeness of our business value chain has been lost, endangering our Company competitiveness, an agreement together with “Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri” has been reached:

• NSN committed to keep remaining activities by Italian premises and invest furthermore in research and development, to grant also to Jabil (the American production buyer) future business with the new products and prototipes. 
• Jabil committed to keep the same level of investments in Italy by producing for NSN and searching new Customers. 

December 2008

NSN started to incentivise people to leave, due to activities transfer abroad and Company branches outsourcing.

Radio Access Research & Development department by Cinisello Balsamo (Milano)

By 2007, about 900 employed engineers and consultant, were engaged with Cinisello Balsamo RA R&D department, by may 2010 NSN outsourced remaining 184 employed workers to an external company dealing with software development consultant services.

Cassina de’ Pecchi (MI) MicroWave R&D department

By 2007, 1200 engineers were employed, and more than 20% of the world-wide MicroWave business was engineered and produced there.

Every year new releases and products were engineered.

A dedicated and committed MW sales team was working full time, while today MW sales are done by NSN together with the whole portfolio less efficiently by far.

The whole MW business chain was present and controlled: product engineering, prototypes creation and testing, production, sales, services and maintenance.

Today NSN consider its Cassina plant the world wide centre of competence for MW.

In fact:

• The production sale to Jabil, has been done while in Germany, by an ex-Siemens factory, and India NSN started to produce all new MW products.
• MW R&D department has been sistematically reduced and the MW sales team lost.
• The R&D of the Indoor Unit of the MW has been transferred to Shangai, were two years ago a new MW R&D department has been opened with hundred employs.
• To support all Shangai colleagues the Support Function team has been created in Italy, in reality all these workers have been invited to leave NSN, by isolation, strong psychological pressure, temporary lay-off, all this justified by NSN with the MW business decrease.
• Has been decided to leave the historicall MW Cassina plant to transfer remaining activities to a rented plant.
• Today NSN is negotiating to sell the remaining MW R&D to complete the process to transform a complete MW centre of competence in a NSN sales branch wasting 50 years of industrial history.

Jabil productive plants

By mid 2010 Jabil sales to “Competence” (a company of the Mercatech found), all Italian production plants. Competence accounted 70 million Euro debt in 7 month, and just before the Milano Court declare its bankrupt, Jabil decided to repurchase the whole property back from Competence.

We hope that this bizarre and expensive action is in reality the evidence that Jabil is willing to reinvest in the Italian industry. Nevertheless the future is not made by good intentions. For the labour unions it is essential that the new owner will announce its trustful industrial plane to reinvigorate today’s activities and workers. Until than all workers will keep in assembly with permanent garrison.     

Conclusions

NSN choise to sell its productions, lay-off strategic activities, desmontle its sales teams, transfer its R&D to Shangai, do not start any new product development, will cancel a valuable industrial and professional know-how where we were leader for more than 50 years in the telecommunication market.

In Cassina it is still possible to restart and return to the MW market, but NSN shall take different decisions like investing again to develop new product, reinvigorating its R&D to cooperate with the Italian University and restart production and all correlated activities to regain its primary role in the telecommunication market.

It is not possible to keep considering only short term financial without a mid/long term industrial project, the only project is to abandon all.

Also for what concerns Italian Government investment ( State and Region Lombardia) into the telecommunication market due to the digital divide and broadband development plans, the MW technology is essential since it complete the optical fibres network to connect sites where it is very expensive to go with the fibre (hills, valley, isolated areas).

Due to the above all workers are against NSN and Jabil strategies: to gradually abandon Italy, to lose relevant know-how and competence, to “destroy” our industrial history so important for Italy.   

RSU FIOM NSN  Cassina Dè Pecchi (Milano)