Fiat gears up in Serbia, disappointed in Italy

The ambitious project of Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionn comprises of building six million cars per year by the year 2014 together with Chrysler. It might be running into resistance from unions in Italy which are stagnant to adapt to the new rules of work. But in this economically depressed southern Serbian town, there are workers ready to sign on.

Back in Italy, facing uncompromising situation, Turin-based Fiat is increasing its plans for the communist-era Zastava plant in Serbia that will plough $700 million into dangerous waste cleanup and also in the new assembly lines. This will further put around 3,000 people into work. Zastava is very well known for making the Fiat Yugo compact which was exported to the United States during the 1980s. During this summer, Marchionne stated that Serbian workers will make small minivans which were earlier planned for the Italian plant. Now it has been made clear that if the Italian unions do not agree to more flexible work conditions than even more investment will go abroad. This will act as a sign of determination of Marchionne to forego Italian home base of Fiat.

Zoran Mihajlovic, the head of the Zastava auto union commented that generally any job that will come up there for their workers would surely get a positive response. But they are not the one who will like to see employees in other country lose jobs over it. He further added that hopefully  both workers in Italy will have jobs and also the workers in Serbia will get novel models. Presently, the economic negligence has formed the city of 180,000 a living museum to the old Yugo. Here, the Florida and Koral the long-archived models ply the streets. The change of shift at the plant is not what it was once when eighteen thousand workers pumped out hundreds of thousands of Yugos in an year.

Either single or in pairs, the lone workers proceed out of the gate, slipping behind the wheel of an old Yugo or proceeding wearily over bridge homeward, the boxy compact which began for the amount under $4,000. But this was also viewed widely as one of the worst cars in the history of automotives.

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