Word: msa
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...MSA and the council decided to limit the experiment to plants that 1) employed 500 men or less, 2) had good labor relations, and 3) were capable of expanding production 100-400% without running into marketing difficulties. Using these conditions, they jointly selected five plants that turned out a variety of products, including motorcycles, compressors, pumps, liquid-gas bottles, agricultural equipment, woolen cloth and pharmaceuticals...
Vicenza's labor unions were deeply suspicious that increased productivity might turn out to be no more than a newfangled way of cutting employment. MSA insisted that all the pilot plants publicly agree that they would share increased earnings, if any, with the workers, that they would hold periodic management-labor conferences on the experiment and that they would fire no workers as a result of increased productivity. These were not simply concessions to union fears. Productivity, as MSA preached it in the experimental plants, is a dynamic concept which holds that by increasing efficiency a manufacturer...
...October 1952 the Vicenza experiment got under way. As a first step, MSA sent into each factory an Italian in-plant trainer, generally an engineer trained under U.S. guidance. The in-plant trainer's job is to break down the resistance of foremen and low-level supervisors to new production ideas. Since Italian factories are frequently caste-bound, the in-plant trainer starts off with a course in labor relations...
Predictably, the Dulles approach to Congressional relations frequently paid off. Assistant Secretary of State Thruston Morton still recalls with admiration a breakfast at which Dulles briefed freshmen Congressmen and Senators shortly before the MSA appropriation was to be voted on last May. "That group for the most part stood like rocks when the vote came up in the House," says Morton. "They told me afterwards, many of them, that they had no intention of supporting the Administration's foreign-aid program until they heard Dulles explain...
...turn of events in Iran, was yet aware that they were also going to play hob with his attempt to cut down foreign spending. The State Department tentatively decided that the best it could offer at the moment is about $20 million out of a special emergency MSA fund. Before the U.S. threw Iran this life preserver, it wanted to discuss the rescue operation with Britain. Called in, British Ambassador Sir Roger Makins said that he realized the importance of keeping Iran in the anti-Communist camp. Still, it would not do to advance aid so quickly or generously...