Bologna, September 1, 2026 – “This is our story… ended up in the trash. It is the image that sums up the bitterness of these days: the fabrics, the samples, and years of work thrown away without much ceremony.”
The heartbreaking letter from the Woolrich employees involved in the dispute between Bologna and Milan opens with these words. Some of them, yesterday morning at 9:30, at the Confindustria headquarters, signed the conciliation minutes based on the agreement signed in February at the Region.
In via della Cooperazione, the cry of the Woolrich workers echoes through the empty corridors of the company closed since yesterday. It represents the ignored voice of about a hundred employees between Milan and Bologna left without work.
The workers’ letter
“We have reached the end and, in some ways, there is almost a sense of relief because the tension had become unbearable – the workers continue –. But what remains is a lot of anger. They made a drastic decision over the heads of 100 people and their families, without lifting a finger to see if there were alternatives to save the plant and those working in Bologna.”
“The only goal was to take the brand”
In the end, the feeling “we had from the beginning turned out to be the right one: the only real goal was to take the brand and leave everyone else at home. An operation done only for the brand, without a shred of an industrial plan and without any respect for those who made that name great by working every day,” they state.
The workers also complain about the lack of transparency from the company: “Outside, they told the fairy tale of the year about time to manage the transition, but the reality is that they pushed us out the door as soon as possible. So what was supposed to be a year was actually reduced to just six months.”
And they claim “their dignity”: “Despite this way of doing things, we continued to work professionally to hand over to colleagues in Turin, even though everyone knows that skills and trades built over decades cannot be transferred in a couple of months – the employees emphasize –. The unfairness of the whole affair was clearly seen in the last few weeks. While at official meetings with the unions the company was blocking, behind the scenes it was approaching individual workers with private offers to convince them to stay a little longer.”
A wealth of skills
Then, when they realized the management chaos they had caused on their own, they even went as far as recalling people already laid off to ask for help to patch things up.”
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Skills and Bologna loses a historic outerwear brand and a wealth of people and expertise.
“This is not the entrepreneurship the country needs, but only a cynical, distant, and opportunistic management – the letter concludes –. We leave with our heads held high for how we behaved and for the quality of our work, but it is right that the city knows exactly how things went.”
A dispute that started in 2025
A story that began in December last year, when the new owner of the clothing brand, the Piedmontese BasicNet, announced the unilateral transfer of 109 people from Bologna, in addition to 30 from Milan, to the new headquarters in Turin. Last winter, workers were offered an incentivized transfer to Turin.
Or, otherwise, they would have had to stay at the Bologna or Milan offices until a maximum of March 31, 2027. A date that was then brought forward to yesterday.
And so the dispute ended in the worst-case scenario. At the Bologna headquarters, in the morning at Confindustria, 64 workers, with an average age between 40 and 50 years, gathered to sign the union conciliation minutes aimed at ending the employment relationship. The agreement provides for recognition of a severance incentive commensurate with seniority, with amounts ranging from 30,000 to 100,000 euros gross.
Added to these are 14 Bologna workers who had anticipated their exit by signing the conciliation minutes already in July, bringing the total number of Bologna office employees who lost their jobs in the procedure to 78. The stores in the city remain open. But it is still the end of an era. For over 40 years, since landing in the city in 1982, Bologna was the main territory of the brand’s European activities. Until yesterday. When the Two Towers lost a stronghold of employment and skills.
