On 22 May, in the afternoon, a delegation from the company Bridgnorth Aluminium came to Irurtzun to inspect several auctioned machines on the Internet. The British met with a surprise: Under the slogan “Do not go through Inas!” and “Defend employment!”, dozens of workers armed with papelites. They were kept in lockdown for two hours inside the company, until they were escorted by the civilian guards, according to the same sources. They didn't take a screw.

Inasa is nothing more than a new victim of the “strategy” of multinationals that are destroying the industrial web, but this action has made their situation known: “We are on permanent guard, if we carry the machinery there is no future either in Irurtzun or in Sakana. It's making us hard, but it's the only hope we have. We will fight to the end, they will have to pass over the people,” explained Info7 Irratia Fernando Carrión, a member of the works council, on last week’s general strike.

Bankruptcy fraud

“When I started here, there were over 1,000 jobs, and now you see, the situation is black.” Pello Lazkoz, from Arbizu, had been in the factory for 26 years, until a year ago he was fired with 155 people on the street. The factory was launched in 1956 and has been in the hands of the American group Reynolds for many years. Hundreds of workers have worked for decades in the manufacture of aluminium, which in 1986 was considered the most industrial village in Navarre.

In 2010, the plant was acquired by the venture capital company Bavaria Industriekapital (Baikap). The task of this German holding company is to restart loss-making companies as soon as possible and to dismantle them as soon as possible if it is not achieved. For this, of course, he manages the workshops with a hard hand. In Inasa, this form of “management” was quickly noted.

The first threats of dismissal, early retirement and wage cuts began in 2011. But the hardest year was 2012. The management made a gesture of implementation of Rajoy’s labor reform: reducing wages by 35% -10,000 euros per year for each employee – and eliminating certain social benefits (dining room, buses, training…).

Indefinite strike, disagreements between trade unions, pre-agreement, lack of liquidity, strike again… On 21 June 2012 the management announced the final SRE for almost the entire team and the closure of the plant and blamed the indefinite strike.

The company has maintained the commercial equipment for months and then submitted a competition from creditors: "Inasa has presented a fraudulent competition for a 13-employee warehouse that hides that it is a factory in which more than 200 people have worked," the workers reported in a statement.

“You’ve come late”

Little by little, Baikap has begun a process of dismantling: he first brought the stock to other factories, then put the machinery on sale… They have also had to relocate the weather station that was on his site.

It shouldn't be easy for a worker who's been a half-life here, who's eaten the beans, to see the machines on the net. In the Sakana, the gap left by each milling machine is a new step towards a place where no one knows it.

But the feeling of the workers is that Inasa is not closed by the crisis, but by speculation. The blockade of the machinery in the factory has been an action derived from hope and not a desperate impulse. The workers have been organizing for months: they created the platform, put the company in the court and analyzed the alternatives. They concluded that the creation of the cooperative was not viable and that the future was in the hands of an investor.

Former workers who for two months offered a free job offer to attract this potential partner, in which at least 70 people have registered. In particular, it was found in April this year that an investor group was interested in the plant and that 115 jobs would be maintained.

The sequence from there shows that Baikap’s final objective has been the liquidation of the company. Rubalcaba hastily signed the sale of part of the machinery in Bilbao, amounting to EUR 3.1 million. According to the regional magazine Guaixe, when the investor told him his intentions, the management group responded that “you are late.” “The lawyers were working during the weekend. On Monday, the deadline for submitting claims for the sale of tickets was dismissed. Therefore, behind the rush to close the sale there was only the will to close Inasa,” explains Guaix.

Factory machines with open doors

“Our main goal now is not to remove the machines. The boss has raised objections but we are negotiating and we are hopeful,” says young Gorka Oronoz. In the hut next to the factory, in the raindrop, the sound is continuous. As soon as they saw the danger of carrying the machinery, they raised the camp and there spent the nights and days, accompanied by a bottle of pacharan and solidarity.

It seems that if you keep the machines inside, the investor's offer can go ahead. Ángel Cuevas is 46 years old and has 27 of them in Inasa: “The only thing we ask of the government and the institutions is time, we don’t want aid or subsidies, just time, for the investor to negotiate.” Last week the board of spokesmen of the Parliament of Navarra asked the UPN government to mediate to maintain Inasa’s jobs.

The Irurtzun have realized what's at stake, that it's the machines that pump blood to the people, and the implication is very large. “The neighbors have brought us food from the beginning, we had to tell them not to bring it to us anymore,” says Cuevas, while next to the hut the former factory cook distributes them hot coffee and snacks. By drawing up these lines, the workers' wall remained standing.