Guillermo Dorronsoro wondered in one of his recent tweets “if Fagor has to change or has to change the world”. The question is inspiring and also tempting. But I will not even fall into trying to assess or give advice on the situation of Fagor. I don’t feel like it, but neither do I have the information, much less the knowledge to say something minimally sensible. So I just trust that your people with a renewed spirit will be the ones who lead their own future. So cheer up everyone!
To change the world? I join, of course, but I bet fundamentally to start by changing what is ours. The world begins here, with us and our closest things, and if we are capable of transforming ourselves and changing this closest world, this will be our most practical and surely most valuable contribution. Fagor’s complicated situation has at least one positive derivative: It has served as a trigger for a collective catharsis that suddenly confronts us with the crude and serious crisis in which we are submerged; as if the 2,000 direct jobs that are at stake in this case would suddenly make us aware of the already more than 78,000 people who have lost their jobs in this crisis that does not end.
And the collective catharsis is good, because it reveals to us the serious structural problem that we are facing and of which Fagor is only the tip of the iceberg. We have a very labour-intensive productive fabric, which competes fundamentally in operational efficiency and which faces serious competitiveness problems in the medium and long term; At the slightest fluctuation in demand, we find that our companies lay off workers and these, from being an asset, quickly become an “unbearable expense” (A drop in GDP of 6.3 percentage points has caused a mouthful of 15.8 percentage points in the level of employment in the Basque Country).
And this is the structural problem that we have to urgently address, because when the financial crisis comes to an end (it seems that slight green shoots will appear again, which we hope do not dry up…), it will continue to be the “Achilles heel” that leads us to an unfortunate scenario of growing deindustrialization. Those who think I am an alarmist need only look back and analyze the industrial restructuring processes that, after the oil crisis, took place in the Basque Country.
So let’s not waste another minute, let’s unite all the forces of civil society, the business fabric, the science and technology system and, of course, the public administration and let’s get down to work on a true plan of shock for a great transformation of the productive fabric and let’s stop with so many band-aids…