More Than 100 Roberto Cavalli Workers Will Resign as Company Moves Headquarters

Luisa Zargani
·3 min read

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MILAN — After striking and protesting the company’s planned decision to move its headquarters, more than 100 out of 170 employees at the Roberto Cavalli complex outside Florence will not move to Milan and effectively lose their jobs.

The workers have agreed to a preliminary adhesion to a social plan, whereby they will resign and be compensated with eight to 11 months of wages, depending on the years worked at the company.

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More than 50 employees will move to Milan, in accordance with the national contract.

“The Florentine headquarters of the company will disappear, we are losing a huge professional and human patrimony, in addition to a resource for the territory,” stated unions Femca Cisl and Filctem Cgil Firenze on Monday. “We remain worried about the industrial future of the brand – there are numerous suppliers in Tuscany ⁠— and the workers also appear to be concerned, since more than 100 have decided to quit rather than move to the Milan headquarters. The workers have fought as much as they could to convince the company to renounce closing the plant in Sesto Fiorentino, and we thank the local institutions that have been close to us.”

The move to Milan is expected to start in September. As reported, the unions see this development as a mass layoff strategy.

Last month, the fashion company declared that the goal was to define the “manner and timing of the transfer and we want to do it quickly, in the interest of the employees,” noting that “the shareholder’s decision is irrevocable.”

The unions have repeatedly voiced concern over the effects that the move would have on the territory, but the company said it “continues to be engaged in supporting Tuscany, since a significant part of its suppliers are Tuscan.”

Cavalli’s strategic plan is to continue to pursue “a mainly commercial vocation, increasingly moreso in the future,” and “the decision to aggregate all the commercial and administrative functions at the Milan headquarters is for this reason mainly physiological: The city is the point of reference for investors and national and international clients.” The company has also said the decision was in line with the current trend of digital transformation, which “means we need to move the axis close to the companies that supply these digital services, mainly polarized in the Milanese area.”

Roberto Cavalli is owned by the founder and chairman of Damac Properties, Hussain Sajwani, through his private investment company Vision Investments.

Vision Investments, part of the Dico Group, is an evolution of a partnership that was signed in 2017 between Cavalli and the Dico Group for the development of Cavalli interiors for luxury hotels under the Aykon brand. The namesake founder of the brand is no longer involved in the Italian company.

This story was reported by WWD and originally appeared on WWD.com.

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