1. For recent studies of twentieth-century company welfare polices see the articles in “Paternalismes d'hier et d'aujourd'hui,” Le Mouvementsocial 144 (1988);Google ScholarGueslin, André, “Le paternalisme revisité en Europe occidental,” Geneses 7 (1992):20111;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSchweitzer, Sylvie, ed., Logiques d'entreprises et politiques sociales (Lyon, 1993).Google ScholarFor debate over terminology, see Gitelman, Howard M., “Welfare Capitalism Reconsidered,” Labor History 33 (Winter 1992):18;Google ScholarDewerpe, Alain, “Conventions patronales: L'imperatif de justification dans les politiques sociales des patronats français (1880–1936),” in Schweitzer, ed., Logiques d'entreprises, 21. Schweitzer has suggested using a “more neutral” term (pratiques sociales) than those normally employed;Google Scholarsee Schweitzer, ed., Logiques d'entreprise 5–18.Google Scholar

2. Figures from the November 1951 Census of Industry are quoted and analyzed by Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulle condizioni dei lavoratori in Italia, Relazioni, Rapporti umani e provvidenze sussidiarie e integrative 14 (Rome, 1959), 151–55.Google Scholar

3. Ibid.This part of the investigation and the results which emerged are dealt with in Benenati, Elisabetta, “Anni Cinquanta: Comunità o famiglia aziendale?,” Parolechiave 1 (1993): 131–48.Google Scholar

4. As is confirmed, f or example, by Costa, Angelo, secretary of the Confederazione generale dell'industria italiana, in L'industria italiana per i suoi operai, ed. Confederazione generale dell'industria italiana (Rome, 1953), 7–12.Google Scholar

5. While there has been some attention given to nineteenth-century paternalism, few works have studied this type of company policy in Italy after the First World War. Among them see Guiotto, Luigi, La fabbrica totale: Paternalismo industriale e città sociali in Italia (Milan, 1979);Google ScholarGuiotto, , “L'ideologia imprenditoriale tra paternalismo e repressione: il caso Falck,” in Milano anni cinquanta, ed. Petrillo, Gianfranco and Scalpelli, Adolfo (Milan. 1986), 138–84;Google ScholarRoverato, Giorgio, Una casa industriale: I Marzotto (Milan, 1986);Google ScholarRuggerini, Maria Grazia, “Paternalismo padronale e paternalismo operaio alla Calza Bloch di Reggio Emilia,” in Operaie, serve, maestre, impiegate, ed. Nava, Paola (Turin, 1992). 81–95;Google ScholarBigazzi, Duccio, “Les permanences du paternalisme: Les politiques sociales des entrepreneurs en Italic. XIXe–XXe Siécles,” in Schweitzer, ed., Logiques d'entreprises, 79–115.Google Scholar

6. For the views of historians who see company paternalistic management as one of the distinguishing characteristics of delayed industrial development, which allows technological development and premodern social relationships to exist simultaneously, see Bigazzi, , “Les permanences du paternalisme,” 79–82; 112–13. See also the works of Guiotto in note 5 above, in which it is argued that paternalistic company programs are archaic (neofeudal) tools of a repressive ideology.Google Scholar

7. On the necessity of worker acceptance, see Perrot, Michelle, “Le regard de l'Autre: les patrons français vus par les ouvriers (1880–1914),” in Le patronat de la seconde industrialization, ed. Boyer, Maurice Levy-Le (Paris, 1979), 293.Google ScholarOn the paternalistic relationship examined from workers' points of view and on the elements of “making a deal,” see Zahavi, Gerald. Workers, Managers and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson 1890–1950 (Chicago, 1988),Google Scholarin which he takes up ideas developed in Genovese's, Eugene D. discussion of nineteenth-century plantation paternalism in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

8. Yves Lequin and Sylvie Vandecasteele speak instead of a separation from labor history as the consequence of choosing solidarity with the company as a community. See their L'Usine et le bureau: Itinéraires sociaux et professionels dans l'entreprise XIXe et XXe siécles (Lyon, 1990), 9–10.Google Scholar

9. On the coexistence of paternalistic relationships and class identity, see Zahavi, Worker Managers, and Welfare Capitalism, 107.Google ScholarOn multiple identities, see Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge. 1990);Google ScholarGittins, Diana, “Marital Status, Work and Kinship, 1850–1930,” in Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940, ed. Lewis, Jane (Oxford, 1985), 249–67;Google ScholarMorgan, Carol E., “The Domestic Image and Factory Culture: The Cotton District in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England,” International Labor and Working-Class History 49 (1996):26–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThe last two works cited are examples of an approach that in recent years has contributed, especially in the United States, to enriching labor history through lively debate. For a reference to this debate, see Frader, Laura L., “Dissent over Discourse: Labor History, Gender, and the Linguistic Turn,” History and Theory 34 (1995):213–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarBut, for now, poststructuralist and feminist historiography, too, have given little importance to analysis of sentiment as a sphere not separate but interwoven with work. For the historiography of sentiment, more highly developed in Europe, and on its limits, see Groppi, Angela, “I sentimenti e i loro storici,” Memoria 1 (1981):53–64.Google Scholar

10. My research on the Torinese, Calzificio, published as La scelta del paternalismo: Un'azienda dell'abbigliamentro tra fascismo e anni '50 (Turin, 1994), was based on analysis of company papers (mostly official company records and personnel files), union papers (fascist unions' archives and textile and garment workers' unions'archives) and oral sources (in-depth interviews with a group of “privileged witnesses” chosen from workers and management done between 1987 and 1988). In this article, frequent reference will be made to this work.Google Scholar

11. On the effects of introducing circular looms in hisiery industry see Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 25–28; 36–38.Google Scholar

12. Spriano, Paolo, Storia di Torino operaia e socialista (Turin, 1972), 392–444.Google Scholar

13. See Spriano, Paolo, L'occupazione delle fabbriche (Turin, 1964).Google Scholar

14. Sapelli, Giulio, Organizzazione lavoro e innovazione industriale nell'Italia tra le due guerre (Turin, 1978), 15–31.Google Scholar

15. What Mario Giani, a former manger at Westinghouse, set out to do met with little cooperation from manufacturers. In 1923 he decided to make the same proposal to the nascent fascist unions, and it was from this effort that the first nucleus of the dopolavoro (after-work) program would emerge (removed from union control in 1925 with the founding of the autonomous body Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro [OND—National Agency on AfterWork], abosorbed by the Fascist party in 1927 and brought back under union control in 1939).Google ScholarSee De Grazia, Victoria, The Culture of Consent:Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Board of Directors' Report to Shareholders,04 5, 1921 and 03 29, 1923 Tribunale di Torino, Archivio societá, n. 148/916 (hereafter cited as ASTT).Google Scholar

17. After a period of violence against union headquarters and militants, what followed was first divesting non-fascist unions of the ability to take action (with the 1925 Patto di Palazzo Vidoni [the Vidoni Palace Agreement]), in which the managers' association and the fascist unions mutually recognized each other as exclusive bargaining agencies). Then the 1926 union law made strikes and lockouts illegal, legalized the fascist unions' monopoly, and removed labor cases from the rest of the judiciary system with the creation of Magistratura del Lavoro (Labor Courts), while another set of laws (the so-called leggi fascistissime [extreme fascist laws]) severely limited rights of association and of the press.Google Scholar

18. It was also a resuscitation of issues and experimentation pursued during the war by Mobilitazione Industriale (Mobilization of Industry). See Bigazzi, “Les permanences du paternalisme,” 94–95. On the role of foreign examples, see note 21 below.Google Scholar

19. On the backwardness of the Italian productive structure and its resistance to the introduction of scientific management, see Sapelli, Organizzazione lavoro e innovazione, 26; Grazia, De, The Culture of Consent, 60–61.Google Scholar

20. On the regime's progressive takeover of working-class associations, see Mancin, Massimo, Le mani sulla solidarietà (Turin, 1994).Google Scholar

21. Ispettorato dell'Industria e del Lavoro, “Le istituzioni sociali e di benessere istituite in Italia a favore dei lavoratori delle industrie (Inchiesta dell'Ispettorato dell'Industria e del Lavoro)”, Bollettino del Lavoro e della Previdenza Sociale 2 (11 1923): 1–19. The survey intended to demonstrate that Italy was not extraneous to the practice of private welfare that showed up in many industrial countries and particularly in the American industry.Google Scholar

22. Grazia, De, The Culture of Consent, 63.Google Scholar

23. In 1926, the Confederazione generale fascista dell'industria italiana founded the Ente nazionale italiano per l'organizzazione scientifica del lavoro (ENIOS) and began publishing the magazine L'organizzazione scientifica del lavoro; in 1927 the Third International Conference on Scientific Management was held in Rome.Google Scholar

24. See the presentation of the results of a survey done by the Confederazione generale dell'industria on the growth of social welfare in firms, “L'Assistenza Sociale nell'Industria Italiana”, L'Assistenza Sociale nell'Industria 1 (01–02 1928): 2–5.Google Scholar

25. Grazia, De, The Culture of Consent, 50.Google Scholar

26. On the intensification of the regime's directives, ibid., 68–69; on industrialists' conviction that they could overcome the economic crisis only with government help, see Grifone, Piero, Il capitale finanziario in Italia (Turin, 1971), 111.Google Scholar

27. Grazia, De, The Culture of Consent, 69–70; Bigazzi, “Les permanences du paternalisme”, 97.Google Scholar

28. This was the figure in the period immediately before the beginning of the international economic crisis. At the beginning of the 1930s, there was a drop in the number of employees which lasted until 1934, when it began to increase. In 1937 there were 400 employees, in 1938 over 560, and at the end of 1942, immediately prior to the bombing of the factory, there were approximately 700. See Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 87–124.Google Scholar

29. This ranged from the use of national raw materials, to the collection of employee donations for the Fascist Loan in 1926, to extensive public praise about the regime's industrial relations policy, up to direct propaganda to get workers to join the Fascist labor unions.Google Scholar

30. “Il barone Basile al Calzificio Torinese”, La Maglieria (02 1929), 151.Google Scholar

31. Up to 1940, real wages did not rise above the 1921 level. See Merlin, Gianni, Com'erano pagati i lavoratori durante ilfascismo (Rome, 1970);Google ScholarZamagni, Vera, “La dinamica dei salari nel settore industriale, 1921–1939,” Quaderni storici 29–30 (1975):530–49.Google Scholar

32. Problems in selling goods abroad nearly led to the closing of the factory in 1931. The work force fell below 400 people, and in 1932 one family of owners went into bankruptcy. See Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 52–59.Google Scholar

33. Giacomina L. recalled, “we used to face one another, there were rows of machines, one on this side and the other over there. There was noise but it was possible to speak … I remember I was always quite happy, I used to sing and sometimes Marengo [head of production] would be there and I would just see him going like this with his hand, and so I'd turn around. ‘You can sing, but not so loud’, he'd say”. Elena D. remembered, “Oh, the work went well, we really were a family; in fact Compareti [administrative clerk] was still with the firm and, poor thing, he would hear us singing and always wanted us to stop and Mr. Marengo, standing there, would say ‘If they're singing, they're working! Don't worry about them singing’”. Ibid., 126–28.

34. The accounts of the working women are full of references to the familial atmosphere of those years. For quotations and successive references, see ibid., 125–66.

35. Workers' habit of lending completed stockings, recalled in many witnesses' accounts, made it possible for all to “produce” the dozen to be handed in and counted for piecework.Google Scholar

36. For a more detailed analysis see Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 110–17.Google Scholar

37. Some more distant residential locations (in the city and in adjacent towns) were also noted as points of reference. Ibid., 101–13.

38. Working women's accounts highlight the factors of personal emancipation that were principally the result of participation in sports activities (training, traveling to matches, or taking part in national rallies), to some extent challenging Grazia's, Victoria De analysis in How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, 1992): 218–21.Google Scholar

39. That the social programs in Italian industry in this period had reinforced workers' identity in terms of role rather than class is stressed by Roverato, Una casa industriale, 340, and by Bigazzi, “Les permanences du paternalisme”, 104–5.Google Scholar

40. On the use of the family metaphor by workers stressing horizontal rather than vertical relationships in the factory as a community, see Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd et al. , Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987), xvii, 363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Under this new setup, Davide Vitale was not only majority shareholder but also became managing director, flanked by a new, purely managerial figure, Giuseppe Lattes. See Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 61–63.Google Scholar

42. In addition to L'assistenza Sociale nell'Industria, mentioned above, the employers' magazine for the sector, La Maglieria, from the beginning of the 1920s on, conducted a campaign to make scientific management known to its readership and to recommend welfare programs as a tactic for increasing productivity. Ibid., 130.

43. It is especially the opening of the lunchroom that seems to have been motivated by the plan to introduce shift work using new machinery ordered from Germany and to recruit workers from outside the usual in-house channels. Because of the vicissitudes of the war, both reorganizing work schedules and changing the recruitment system had to be delayed. Ibid., 132–133.

44. Board of Directors' Report to Shareholders, March 23, 1939, 148/916, ASTT.Google Scholar

45. Starting in 1941, special distribution of rationed foodstuffs in company canteens was authorized. This measure triggered an increase in the number of canteens: In one year there was a jump from 431 to 1,762; in September 1942, in factories which had been declared to be auxiliary, there were 713 canteens which every day fed over one-third of the work force. See Bigazzi, Duccio, “La fabbrica nella crisi del regime fascista”, in Istituto veneto per la storia della Resistenza ed., Sulla crisi del regime fascista, ed. Istituto veneto per la storia della Resistenza (Padova, 1996), 323–31. Bigazzi emphasizes how this way of solving the problem of food shortages for working people during the war contributed to making factories “a main reference place, really and symbolically, for people living in industrial towns” in the struggle to overthrow the Fascist regime (300).Google Scholar

46. Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 134–36.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., 73–74, 136–37.

48. In particular, the commissione interna (workers' committee), born in the postwar period, disappeared in the early 1950s. See below for further discussion of its role.Google Scholar

49. Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 146.Google Scholar

50. On the question of complicity and on workers' perception that the door was not open for everyone, see ibid., 149–52.

51. In particular, publicity was given to the possibility of moving up from blue-collar to white-collar work for those studying at night school. Through 1957, this happened to approximately fifteen people, eleven of whom were women. Ibid., 148.

52. The company's dopolavoro was never set up again, but in many Italian factories the dopolavoro were reopened after the war and affiliated with the state-run Ente Nazionale Assistenza Lavoratori (ENAL). When, at the beginning of the 1960s, an attempt was made to organize a sports team again, it met with little success.Google Scholar

53. For many women the start of work had occurred when they were twelve, while for machinists apprenticeship began around the age of fourteen. Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 87–88, 96.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., 156.

55. Ibid., 137–38.

56. The supervising structure was a pyramid, with Davide Vitale at the top. It included maestre (master hose makers), supervisors, foremen, directors, and the head of personnel. On the ways this structure was formalized and on how it was perceived by workers, see ibid.., 139–42.

57. In the mid-1950s, one-third of workers left work before the end of their first year and over half failed to last more than three years. For a deeper analysis of turnover, see ibid., 117–24.

58. The figures for the mid-1950s show that, although the number of immigrants from the northeast and south of Italy had begun to grow, more than seventy percent of the active work force had been born and grew up in the Piedmont region and quite a large number of these lived in the factory neighborhood or in one of the other traditional areas where the Calzificio recruited its work force. Ibid., 101–16.

59. From the account of Elena D., an employee of the Calzificio for thirty-four years. On the incidence of the arrival of workers from Polesine after the 1951 flood, and on the loss of solidarity, see ibid., 106, 138–39.

60. In the mid-1950s, when the commissione no longer existed, a police report on the Calzificio Torinese warned, “seventy percent [of the workers] are oriented towards left-wing parties”. See Appunto, October 7, 1955, folder 247, Fondo Prefettura-Gabinetto, Archivio di Stato di Torino.Google Scholar

61. Drago, Francesco et al. , Movimento sindacale e contrattazione collettiva 1945–1970 (Milan, 1971), 41, 47.Google Scholar

62. The unified union founded in 1944 (CGIL) broke up after the political strikes of the summer of 1948 into three national confederations based on differing party affiliation and marked by ideological and strategic conflict: Communists and Socialists in the CGIL, the largest of the three; Christian Democrats in the Confederazione italiana sindacati lavoratori (CISL); and Social Democrats and Republicans in the Unione italiana del lavoro (UIL). Only in the late 1950s did antagonism between the three begin to decrease. On the history of the Italian unions see notes 63 and 66.Google Scholar

63. On the peculiarity of the Italian union movement after the Second World War, see Salvati, Bianca Beccalli, “The Rebirth of Italian Trade Unionism, 1943–54”, in The Rebirth of Italy 1943–50, ed. Woolf, Stuart Joseph (London, 1972), 181–211;Google ScholarFoa, Vittorio, Sindacati e lotte operaie 1943–1973 (Turin, 1975);Google ScholarAccornero, Aris et al. , Problemi del movimento sindacale in Italia (Milan, 1976);Google ScholarCraveri, Piero, Sindacato e istituzioni nel dopoguerra (Bologna, 1977);Google ScholarRomagnoli, Umberto and Treu, Tiziano, I sindacati in Italia: storia di una strategia (1945–1976) (Bologna, 1977);Google ScholarZaninelli, Sergio, ed., Il sindacato nuovo. Politica e organizzazione del movimento sindacale in Italia negli anni 1943–55 (Milan, 1981).Google Scholar

64. On negotiating by commissioni interne in the late 1940s and 1950s, see especially Treu, Tiziano, Sindacato e rappresentanze aziendali (Bologna, 1971);Google ScholarAccornero, Aris, “Le strutture di base negli anni '50”, Quaderni di rassegna sindacale 4 (1974): 84–121;Google ScholarBenenati, Elisabetta and Sabattini, Claudio, Sindacato e potere contrattuale (Rome, 1986);Google Scholarand studies conducted by Accornero, Aris, Berta, Giuseppe, and Musso, Stefano in 1944–1956. Le relazioni Industriali alla Fiat: Saggi critici e note storiche, ed. Fiat, Archivo storico (Milan, 1992).Google Scholar

65. Impressive documentation of employers' attacks on the commissioni interne was collected by the parliamentary commission investigating conditions of workers in Italy. On the question of the commissioni interne, it published, between 1959 and 1964, a volume of Relazioni and five volumes of Documenti. See Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulle condizioni de lavoratori in Italia, Relazioni. Commissioni Interne, 6. Documenti. Commissioni Interne: diffusione, 4; Commissioni Interne: elezione, 5; Commissioni Interne: funzionamento, 6; Commissioni Interne: nella vita aziendale, 7; Commissioni Interne: tutela de membri, 8.Google Scholar

66. At the same time there was a significant drop in union membership: In industry. members in the two most important unions (CGIL and CISL) fell from approximately forty-seven percent of workers in 1950 to twenty percent in 1960. The commissioni interne regained power in the early 1960s, when a new wave of worker protest arrived; at the end of that decade, the new workers' struggles replaced them with factory councils (consigli di fabbrica). For union membership see La sindacalizzazione tra ideologia e pratica: Il caso italiano 1950/1977, ed. Romagnoli, Guido (Rome, 1980).Google Scholar

67. Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 157.Google Scholar

68. Many accounts of that period at Fiat have survived. Among them, see Pugno, Emilio and Garavini, Sergio, Gli anni duri alla Fiat (Turin, 1984);Google ScholarSerra, Bianca Guidetti, Le schedature Fiat: cronaca di un processo e altre cronache (Turin, 1984).Google ScholarFor an overview of the national situation, see Ballone, Adriano, Uomini, fabbrica, e potere: Storia dell'associazione nazionale perseguitati e licenziati per rappresaglia politica e sindacale (Milan, 1987).Google Scholar

69. This quotation and the following one come from the account of Marco P.; see Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 152–53.Google Scholar

70. Ibid., 149.

71. Ibid., 152.

72. Ibid., 153.

73. On strikes as a means of defending personal interests and a demonstration of morality and condemnation of scabs, see Ibid., 159–61.

74. This quotation and the following one come from the account of Marco P.; see Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 160.Google Scholar

75. This interpretation, however, does not take into account the power of a relationship of inequality to corrupt workers' ability, in a changed situation, to put an end to this type of relationship. Ibid., 162–64.

76. This was especially so where, as in the case of the Calzificio, company management– because of its Jewish origins, its support for the Resistance, and its socialist leanings– had earned an antifascist and progressive image. Ibid., 75–77.

77. The terms in quotation marks were those generally employed in the official documents, leaflets, and meetings of the largest union (CGIL), whose tone was heavily polemical against the approach and strategy followed by CISL. For documentation, see notes 63 and 64 above.Google Scholar

78. The accusations against grassroots militants and commissioni interne members— that by bargaining in one factory they would divide the working class— were particularly heated in the period 1949–1953. For an analysis of the situation in the automobile industry, see Lanzardo, Liliana, Classe operaia e partito comunista alla Fiat (Turin, 1971);Google ScholarContini, Giovanni, “Le Lotte operaie contro il taglio dei tempi e la svolta nella politica nivendicativa della Fiom”, Classe 16 (1978): 3–49;Google ScholarBenenati and Sabattini, Sindacato e potere Contrattuale, 24–78.Google Scholar

79. From the account of Marco P. see Benenati, La scelta del paternalismo, 164.Google Scholar