Word: vicenza
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...play its trump economic cards against the Communists and Socialists. The trumps are those dynamic qualities of production and distribution which make U.S.-type capitalism demonstrably the best pathway to a higher standard of living. Last week TIME Correspondent Robert Christopher reported on an experiment in the province of Vicenza, Italy, where a group of imaginative U.S. foreign-aiders played the trumps with signal success, to the profit of Italian management, labor and the free world...
...Fourth of July 1952, two officials of the U.S. Mutual Security Agency in Italy were driving north from Rome to the Italian industrial city of Vicenza (pop. 82,000). One was Walter C. McAdoo, 56, a Philadelphian and former pulp-mill executive, and the other was James L. Hockenberry, 54, a onetime agent for Prudential Insurance in Lebanon, Pa. and wartime specialist in on-the-job industrial training. Their mission: to find an Italian plant willing to try out American methods of increasing productivity...
...they drove along, Hockenberry was struck with a better idea: if the benefits of productivity were to get a real U.S.-type demonstration, why not expand the experiment to include several plants in the Vicenza area, instead of just one? McAdoo agreed, and so, later, did the Italian National Productivity Council. Vicenza province was ideal for an area-sized trial-a relatively prosperous district dependent on no single industry but bulging with small and medium-sized businesses...
...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...
...Vicenza's Juliet castle was turned into a tavern complete with medieval trappings and frescoes illustrating the great love story. A long-faced waiter, who obligingly changed his name from Mario to Romeo, served sentimental vacationists with specially prepared Scaloppe alla Giulietta e Romeo in the dining room. When supper was done, the tourists were led in awe to an upstairs bedroom to gape at Capulet relics that included, said the guides, the very bed in which Juliet had slept. Neither Vicenza nor the tourists cared in the slightest that Verona's tourist bureau stoutly denied the authenticity...