Word: vicenza
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...rose from 240,000 caps in 1932 to more than 42 million in 1955. Caps with Arabic lettering went to a milk company in Beirut, Lebanon. Caps with "Pida Pepsi'' and "Quaker Oats, Mucha Nutricion a Poco Costo" went to Mexico. Caps went to fruit peddlers in Vicenza, Italy, to soft-drink vendors in Caracas, Venezuela, to pickle packers in Pittsburgh...
...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...
...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...