Silence will manufacture the electric car at Nissan and hire 110 former employees of the Japanese brand

The Catalan manufacturer of motorcycles and electric vehicles Silence will be the first industrial project to land in the former Nissan facilities in the Zona Franca, after having closed an agreement with the works council of the former employees of the Japanese brand.

The company led by Carlos Sotelo will hire 110 of the 1,400 workers who lost their jobs last December, with a salary 20% higher than the sector agreement and a guarantee of work for three years. These are the labor conditions agreed upon in the reindustrialization table that was established for the dismissal of the entire workforce and to find industrial alternatives to the departure of the Japanese brand from Catalonia.

The Silence project, a company controlled by Acciona and which has its origins in the manufacture of electric motorcycles, focuses on the production of its first electric vehicle, called S04, of small size because it is designed for urban mobility. The industrial plans foresee manufacturing a thousand units in the first year, to reach 30,000 units in five years.

The agreement with Silence is important in the sense that, although the job relocation does not reach even 10% of the workforce, it opens the way for other proposals that are on the reindustrialization table to occupy more spaces in the Zona Franca and the Montcada i Reixac factory ---Nissan's third production plant in Sant Andreu de la Barca has been left out of the reindustrialization---. Among them, the decarbonization hub led by QEV for the manufacture of various models of electric vehicles and which would occupy most of the Zona Franca. This initiative would mean the hiring of 600 workers in 2023 and the same number the following year; and the production of 100,000 electric vehicles.

Despite the progress made in recent hours ---in an intense negotiation--- the unions still show their misgivings about how the reindustrialization process is being carried out. For this reason, this Wednesday they staged a protest demonstration through the streets of Barcelona. "There is a lot of nervousness because the agreed deadlines are not being met, which set June 30 as the start date for the industrial projects that would give continuity to the plants and jobs," union sources assured, "because these hundred workers are only a small part of the total (about 1,400) who are at home waiting for the concretization of the relocation project."

In addition, the workers' representatives have expressed their fear about how negotiations are being conducted with the decarbonization hub and about the delay in tendering the land, owned by the Zona Franca Consortium, to find a single logistics operator who will then rent them to industrial projects and who can give financial solidity to the decarbonization project.