Occupational Psychology and Plant Closure: Oral Narratives from the Falck Steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan)

This paper outlines a research on deindustrialization in Sesto San Giovanni, a medium size city just at the outskirt of Milan, which, from the start of the 20th century until the end of the 1990s, was a major hub of heavy industry such as steelmaking, heavy machinery, electro-mechanical engineering. The paper state first our general research questions and key assumptions, explaining how we related to deindustrialization studies in devising them. Then sketches the industrial history of Sesto San Giovanni, focusing on the closing of the Falck company, also based in Sesto, and the most important private steel producer in Italy since the Second World War. This contribution points to address the case of a special program, created at the beginning of the 1990s, under the title of the “Falck Observatory”. The Observatory was an initiative of the Falck Human Resources Direction with the participation of the trade unions and the Lombardy Agency for Employment; created to help redundancies from Falck finding an alternative job, it sought advice from the Department of Psychology at Catholic University in Milan. During our research we were lucky enough to get our hands on some reports, signed by the Catholic University researchers, concerning the outplacement activity of the Observatory; in that way, we had access to several interviews conducted in 1993-1998, which gave us also insight into the making of the Job Insecurity studies within the Italian occupational psychology. From this evidence we have understood that a field of job insecurity studies developed in Italy from practical and empirical experience and only later concepts and theoretical frameworks were appropriated from the US. One original aspect of our investigation has been the fact those records also drove us to include in our interpretation the narratives by top managers and middle managers (head of departments, head of division, plants directors that had been made redundant as well) instead of neglecting them or keeping them separate from those by workers. Our research on Falck has the opportunity to fill two gaps. On one hand, in job insecurity literature, very few case studies had been addressed to the issue of the corporate support as moderator in context of downsizing: that is one further reason to held the Falck Observatory case as particularly interesting. On the other hand, in deindustrialization studies, little attention has been generally paid to managerial narratives; by contrast, a lot it has been devoted to executives in job insecurity studies: in Falck, during the ‘90s, the cuts hit managerial levels as well; in our interviews conducted with Falck employees during 2014-2015, we had the chance to examine not only the workers reaction but also the middle managers reaction to the shut-down.