If during the two years and little that it takes Roger Torrent at the controls of the ‘conselleria’ de Empresa i Treball has stood out for some ‘late motiv’, it has been the need to “reindustrialize Catalonia”. A message that vindicates that feeling of past glories, when Catalonia was rich, full and part of it owed it to its anomalous industrial muscle, compared to the rest of Spain. And which, in turn, manifests a firm commitment to the future, so that the country and its economy assume the benefits and risks involved in manufacturing things again, not just designing them.
Torrent synthesizes in the almost 300 pages of “From the steam to the núvol. A story for the reindustrialization of Catalonia” (Pòrtic Edition) his apology for recovering the lost bonanza of the sector that manufactures things. With a slang and depth accessible to all audiences. It is not an ideological corpus, more suitable for a conversation in a coffee machine than in a club of scholars. He himself acknowledges that he is not a student of the subject and does not aspire to appear so. But a former mayor of a municipality, Sarrià de Ter, aware of what happens when the factories stop.
And he wants to take advantage of his speaker to relaunch a debate that in recent decades has lost centrality and prominence. What has led to a decline, shared in practically the entire West, of the sector whose shame was uncovered by the covid crisis. “During the pandemic we realized that we could not even manufacture paracetamol& rdquor ;, he stated this Wednesday at the presentation of his book.
Torrent points out that energy is a key and essential lever for the industry of the future and its competitiveness, without quite pointing out with sufficient criticism and self-criticism the accumulated delay in Catalonia during the last decades on this point. He also identifies infrastructures as another key resource, lamenting that without its own State behind it – one of the few references to independence – little margin is left for Catalonia to promote them.
Feeding, chemistry, automotive They are the sectors that the ‘conseller’ identifies -as he did a few before- as the tractors of the industry of the 21st century, in the same way that they were of the 20th. Although there is now a temptation to rename them ‘circular economy’, ‘life sciences’ or ‘mobility’. Euphemisms that in addition to modernizing the concept, Torrent claims that they imply a redefinition of it.
Engine of a new social pact
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In an agile story, which jumps between the past and the future of the Catalan industry, the Republican identifies in this sector the engine of a new social pact. And it is that he sees in a powerful industry the guarantee of political stability -via good salary and working conditions- that economies excessively dependent on tourism cannot offer. “The Welfare State was agreed in a factory & rdquor ;, he metaphorizes.
Torrent has presented his book the same day that his department has made public the degree of execution of the National Pact for Industry -his investment sheet for the entire legislature-.- 80% in 2022, after delaying the pact for several months before the difficulties derived from negotiations with employers and unions and from parliamentary arithmetic. A four-year retrospective will allow us to see how much of the reindustrialization vocation that the book presented this Wednesday embraces ends up transcending paper.