What happens when a simple, farming community suddenly becomes the site of a highly mechanized factory with an imported managerial force and the last word in employee comforts and production schedules is described here by the Professor of Commerce called in by a distraught management to help pick up the pieces after a bitter total strike. His observations dramatize not only the clash between two economies but ways and means by which management can make the difficult and delicate transition less painful for all concerned.
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References
1.
Italian General Census of 1951 including periodic readjustments published by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
2.
The survey was carried out by the Instituto per l'Addestramento nell' Industria under the direction of the author. It took approximately four months to conduct the interviews in the factory and community and tabulate the raw data. Then followed a rigorous cross check and presentation of the findings with our interpretation of them and recommendations for the future to the R-T factory management in Civita Incognita.
3.
The interviews were based on an oral questionnaire designed to cover the following areas: (1) Morale of workers in the working atmosphere. (2) The flow of command and company discipline. (3) Professional capacity and the grade of operating knowledge of the workers. (4) Influence and activities of the Commissione Interna which might be roughly translated as a shop committee. Elected annually by the employees from a slate of candidates proposed by the unions represented in the plant, it is the organ which represents the workers in negotiations with management on questions dealing with the application of labor laws, employment contracts, internal discipline and certain phases of personnel administration. In some respects the unions are able to influence the actual functioning of the Commissione Interna within a plant. (For details see Neufield'sM. F.Labor Unions and National Politics in Italian Industrial Plants (Cornell International Industrial and Labor Relations Report [Ithaca, N. Y., Cornell University, 1954].) (5) Communications between the personnel and the management. (6) Treatment given to the workers in assistance and recreation.
4.
The fact that this investigation was carried out three years ago does not in any way, in the author's opinion, affect the validity of the results obtained nor their timeliness, for our findings correspond quite precisely to situations still existing.
5.
Both the General Census of 1951 and the later periodic findings of the Central Bureau of Statistics (See note 1.) and other authoritative bodies have established documentary proof of cultural and professional inferiority in the South.
6.
A typical example is the opinion delivered in February, 1958 at a national convention on political and economic matters staged in Rome by the Confederation of Italian Labor Unions (CISL) by Professor G. Di Nardi of Rome University.
7.
He said: “Our diagnosis [of the predicament of Southern Italy] generally dwells on the premise that there is only one factor lacking, and that being capital, but it is becoming ever more evident that the factors which really limit our development are more than one; and in fact are multiple… . We could quite easily turn the situation upside down and say that the factor which is, in fact, really lacking is the man himself; not man in the numerical sense, … but man in terms of the various qualifications which enter into efficient productive combinations.”
8.
Professor Di Nardi, in the same speech, also criticized bureaucratic red tape which discourages new undertakings, especially in the South. He said in part: “The citizen [and he was referring to the citizen of Southern Italy] who works within the … economy moves within a jungle of administrative procedure which puts him at the mercy of every public official.”
9.
Further confirmation of this preoccupying effect of the new industrial employment has been given by another survey carried out by “Doxa” Research Institute, in a very small township in Calabria where an industrial factory has been opened up. Also here it has been found that the increase of income deriving from employment in the factory, has created an immediate need for money availability, which assumes proportions double that actually earned by the workers.
