Jobless benefits for 7 years??!! And they are all surprised and upset when the money runs out!!! Where do these parasites think money comes from? Somebody has to earn it so people like her can sit on their arse for 7 years getting paid!

Considering that Greeks have already folded we can only guess what sort of arrangements they must have had. Now the rest of the world has to pay up so and it is still not enough for them as they can't keep f*cking around all their lives. Oh no, they will go out to protest and throw petrol bombs that nobody wants to support them anymore!

Absolutely disgusting!! Socialism at its finest...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-1 ... limbo.html

I assume in that woman's case, trying to find work didn't enter her thoughts.

Reading the story, it seems the deal she took is a deal she was freely offered (I can't imagine she was able to force Al-Italia to give her a deal they didn't want to) in which case it was the management of the company who gave it to her. Presumably on the grounds that it would cost less to pay her whatever the equivalent of dole is in Italy than actually pay her wages for those seven years i.e. she was in effect made redundant.

So they paid/would have paid her to sit on her arse for 7 years because it was better for the balance sheet than actually paying her to do an actual job and they've made such a massive cockup of running the company that they now can't even afford to pay her that much, and they're running crying to the government in the hope it will bail them out, either by just paying her instead - because as it sounds from now on the Italian government will actually be paying her dole, won't they? - or as it happens, just letting them welch on the deal they made with her.

So basically she as an employee made a deal in good faith with the company management, they were incompetent either in agreeing to a deal they couldn't stick to or failing to run the company well enough for it to be able to stick to the deal and now the higher management is relying on the public purse to bail them out. While presumably either keeping their well paid jobs or being allowed to leave with a nice fat payout.

Absolutely disgusting! Capitalism at it's finest...

The state the Italian economy is in, I very much doubt there are a lot of jobs to go round. Especially if you're a 55-year old.

Erm, do you realise that Alitalia was a state owned company do you?
And that it had only one year of profit (1998) since its foundation in 1946.
And that the state has pumped 4.9bn euros into it since 1998?
And the EU forbid the governemt from supporting it anymore so are not wondering why she got the jobless benefits rather than the redundancy pay?
You surely do, it's not like you talking about things you are clueless about....

What a muppet

Why are we still attacking people claiming unemployment benefit? Take your average FTSE 100 CEO's annual salary, how many JSA claimants would that support? We're lumping hundreds of thousands of civil servants out of work whilst Vodafone et al avoid massive tax liabilities. It's not like George Osborne is even trimming the fat - we're fast approaching the stage where government work is piling up because the people are no longer in place to do it. We're about to get to the absurd position whereby we're sacking permanent civil servants to reduce head-count, only to have to take new people on on a temporary contract to clear the backlog of work that results. Madness!

The problem lies not with the state nor the welfare system, but how ludicrous the capitalist system has become. There is not a single human being on this entire planet who adds enough value to a company to justify a seven-figure salary. If a Grade 7 civil servant can manage 2,000+ employees across four sites on a five-figure salary then so can your average store/regional manager at Tesco.

The amount of public money (in the UK at least) lost through fraud and error in the benefits system is a drop in the ocean compared to corporate tax avoidance & evasion.

That's nice and friendly. How about being a little less aggressive?

It's a flag carrier, of course it is. Just because it's state owned doesn't absolve the management from bad decisions. Not does it make it somehow 'socialist'.


Again, I'm not sure how you think this is related to 'socialism'. Unless you consider the British financial industry, which has been supported to the tune of considerably more than €4.9b, is somehow also a bastion of socialism. Al Italia operates in one of the most fiercely capitalist market segments that exists. The managers were paid a lot of money. They failed, as your statistics neatly illustrate. Now they are welching on their legally contracted responsibilities to this woman. How this is at all related to 'socialism' I can't even begin to see.


It's fatuous distinction. They paid her not to do her job. Whether they paid her a lump sum - what we would know as 'redundancy' or in a stipend is irrelevant. Al Italia is a state owned company but it is not the state. Any more than RBS currently 'the state'.


You're a real charmer Koli, you know that? I only wish I had your brains.


I'd rather be a muppet than a troll.

Jon

Almost all European governments spent much more than they could realistically afford in the 90's and 00's, simply because it was a vote winner. Standing up and saying "No we can't afford these spending increases to fund services" just wasn't viable to stay (or get into office). Of course it was wrong, but since when have politicians cared about that. They just want to have their cake and eat it. Just look at the way Labour borrowed more and more money even when they economy (and therefor tax income) was doing well. They couldn't balance the books if their lives depended on it.
Some governments are more guilty of this than others. Now they've been rumbled they expect the rest of us to bail them out, not just because they're skint, but because they're trapped in a currency who value can't be altered to suit their needs. For example, when I went to Spain this year it was expensive. If they still had the Peseta, the value could have dropped making it cheaper and attracting more tourists while reducing imports, helping the economy. But they can't do that. Neither can Greece.
I am thankful to the Labour government for two things in their thirteen years of power:
1) for the public smoking ban
2) keeping us out of the Euro. Can you imagine the state we'd be in now if we were part of it?

I'm one of the 99%

IMO the EU should return to what it was originally planned to be.... a free trade zone. None of the shared laws, unelected courts/groups overriding our courts etc, Just unrestricted trade for the benefit of all.

Alitalia wouldn't have been able to lay her off properly because of the protective Italian labour laws that make it next to impossible. Thus Italian companies sometimes have to cut a deal whereby the abandoned worker retains a large part of their income until retirement. Those labour laws are the main reason why Italy is so uncompetitive - even against Germany, within the single currency. Government debt isn't especially the main problem in that country - yes the government borrows too much, but household debt is low (and savings high, which is how they funded their govt debt). Their companies borrow too little though because they don't invest - which is much worse.

People have tried to fix these problems before by the way - the last two or three were murdered by communist terrorists. Which seems a bit pointless because the other major Italian problem is political atrophy. No real reforms were ever likely to happen because Italy can't reform in any circumstances except those of dire crisis. This is why pensionable ages change with so little warning that this poor woman might actually be taken by surprise when she is in her 50s. That's the real shame here - this reform should have come with enough advance warning that a 55 year old would not be affected, but for that to be the case it needed to be made in advance of the catastrophe rather than on the brink of it.

The Italians are having to go through a lot of pain now because they showed too much tolerance for inept politics for far too long. I recognise how tempting it is to accuse either Blair/Brown or the current mob with them and decide that they are just as bad, but it is very wrong to be seduced by that impulse. For all of our flaws, one thing we do get in this country is relatively coherent and fairly responsible policy decisions (offer excludes the Iraq invasion). Whether we all vote Tory or Labour, we are at little risk of turning out the Italians and the Greeks.


Far from it. Capitalism is all about creative destruction, a company like that can't survive in an open market, along with many of their peers. There should be 4 or 5 global airlines at most; and the idea of a flag carrying national champion that gets to hog a valuable airport (like Milan) and owns all the most profitable routes to it should be a thing of the past in a capitalist scenario.

Right, and how do you propose to enforce the free trade zone without courts? And how do you propose to create a viable free trade area without harmonisation of standards and regulations?

The vast majority of businesses - especially those that trade internationally - support the EU because they (typically) only have to comply with one set of standards and one regulatory framework in order to trade in 27 different countries.

Those who want us "out of Europe" are typically Little Englanders with no knowledge or regard for what the EU actually does, nor the benefits of membership for the UK.