Top-Down Ecological Transition in the Automotive Sector and Labor Crisis: An Analysis of Bari Industrial Area Transformations.

In the past decade, ecological transition has become an imperative, in light of the increasingly dramatic consequences of climate change, becoming a central pillar of global and EU policy. However, ecological transition implies productive transformations that can have a negative impact on certain social issues. Literature on the topic highlighted that, while in the past environmental and social issues have often been considered as opposed to one another, more recently the concept of “just transition” has opened the space to understand them as intertwined. At the same time, literature shed light on different approaches characterizing ecological transition, to be broadly distinguished between “bottom-up” and “top-down”.

Building on qualitative field study developed by the authors as part of the PRIN 2022 research group “Just transition in the factory. Workers' mobilizations and participatory innovation in emergent Italian experiences”, the present contribution intends analyzing the social implication of a top-down transition by examining the consequences of EU Parliament ban on diesel and petrol cars by 2035 on the Bari-Modugno Industrial area. The district hosts some of the largest car component producers of Southern Italy, which employ various thousands of workers, offering valuable job opportunities in an area characterized by high levels of unemployment and labor exploitation. Building on in-depth interviews with workers, union representatives, as well as engineers and local managers, the paper explores how the adoption of a top-down approach to transition promotes the exacerbation of conflicts between environmental and social issues, ultimately preventing just transition to take place. In addition to that, the paper argues that top-down governmental ecological transition can be used by companies as a justification to close or resize productive sites considered as unprofitable and delocalize production.