ROME, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Italian Industry Minister Antonio Marzano will next week kickstart stalled talks between crisis-hit carmaker Fiat and unions over some 8,000 planned layoffs, his spokesman said on Saturday.
Negotiations to limit the number of job losses at Italy's largest private employer hit deadlock on Friday, with unions angrily demanding a top level government official get involved.
"Confrontations between the unions and Fiat continue but Minister Marzano will be restarting the talks on Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. (1000 GMT)," the minister's spokesman Gianpaolo Segala told Reuters.
Under intense pressure to pare back a pile of debt and revive its troubled car arm, Fiat is planning a radical restructuring, which includes laying off more than 8,000 staff for at least a year.
On Friday the company said it had proposed "significant changes" to its do-or-die recovery plan, including making pledges to reinstate a "substantial" number of workers once its industrial overhaul was operational.
But unions were unimpressed.
Speaking at a rally in the southern city of Naples, Guglielmo Epifani, head of Italy's largest union CGIL, warned that half of the laid-off Fiat workers would not be rehired.
"It seems that the company does not want an agreement. It won't even bet on itself," said Epifani, whose union represents more than five million workers and pensioners.
About 100,000 people, including CGIL members, Fiat workers, students and anti-globalisation protesters, took to the streets of Naples on Saturday to highlight the plight of the south, which unions say gets clobbered by the government's 2003 budget.