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title="MTM in Italy"
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# MTM in Italy

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Italy was the second country in Western capitalist Europe (after the UK, 1948) to achieve the right to a public healthcare system in 1978. To these days, the Italian national healthcare system remains an odd story of success despite many counter-reforms. As Chiara Giorgi noted,
 
> According to the 2017 OECD data, life expectancy at birth in Italy is 83.1 years, compared to the 80.9 years of the European Union average: but the total health expenditure per inhabitant is 2,483 euros, against 2,884 of the average EU (a 15% gap). It is a paradox worth probing that the European country with the longest life expectancy has achieved this result with reduced spending.
>


[Chiara Giorgi, Rediscovering the roots of public health services. Lessons from Italy, OpenDemocracy, 24 March 2020](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/rediscovering-roots-public-health-services-lessons-italy/)
 
However, in the ‘60s, the national health conditions were dire. Italy had an average was of one death in the workplace per hour and one accident per minute (by comparison, today there are 3 deaths per day and 800.000 accidents per year). So in the ‘60s, as the country was undergoing massive industrialization, the idea of a “class war” was really a reality that workers could witness every day. And these were only numbers linked to direct deaths at work, without taking into consideration the indirect effects of environmental degradation and chronic conditions that begun to flare up at the time.

In Italy, the first experiments with MTM methods are introduced by a company called BEDAUX CONSULTANTS. In the early 1970s, Luigi Firrao authored a long exposè for the newspaper *Il Manifesto*, in which he retraced the companies’ early moves: 

> The reorganization of work based on the methods and systems of the MTM constitutes the only real response of the Italian patronage to the results achieved with the struggle of the working class. All the talk about plant automation and improving productivity by investing in machines that yield more without increasing the worker's effort is just smoke and theory compared to the reality of the factory as it is today.
 
> The most important consultancy firm on work organisation operating in Italy today is Bedaux Consultants, which applies all the systems we have listed above in its interventions for the reorganisation of production.[...] Bedaux’s parent company, of course, is in the United States. In 1927 the Italian Bedaux was founded, whose presidency was assumed by the elder Giovanni Agnelli (the founder of FIAT) and the first work organisation interventions took place precisely at FIAT and Pirelli.
 
> Since 1966, Bedaux Consultants has been headed by engineer Roberto Amadi, who trained at Alfa Romeo and Magneti Marelli. Bedaux's most recent publication lists one by one the companies in which it has intervened to rationalise exploitation systems.
 
> The companies for which Bedaux has worked include: BUITONI, BARILLA, LAZZARONI, PERNIGOTTI, PERUGINA, SPERLARI, SUPERGA footwear, ITALCANTIERI (IRI) paper mills BINDA, STERZI and DONIZELLI; pottery POZZI and SBORDONI, engineering companies such as MAGNETI MARELLI, FIVRE, MAGRINI, AERFER, ALFA ROMEO, ANSALDO, BREDA, CMF, CMI, FMI, SALMOIRAGHI, S.GIORGIO PRA, LAGOMARSINO, CEMFOND, SANT'EUSTACCHIO, SPICA, SUNBEECAMICA ; steel companies including DALMINE and SCI; among textiles COTONIFICIO CANTONI, DE ANGELI FRUA, LANEROSSI, MCM
 
> In addition to this, Bedaux organises a large number of courses to train timekeepers, time and method officials, etc. Bedaux is not alone. More than thirty other companies in Italy organise workers’ exploitation as external consultants, while many companies are frantically trying to hire their own specialists for the same purpose.

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# The “American Department” : MTM at Lebole


Lebole was and still is a clothing factory based in the Arezzo province, Tuscany, that became famous in the 1960s for a TV slogan advertising its men’s suits that recited “Ho un debole per l’uomo in Lebole”, translatable in English, albeit losing the rhyming of the original, with “I have a soft spot for men wearing Lebole”. 

Aside from its successful promotional campaigns, the Arezzo plant, opened in 1962 in a 75.000 square meters pavilion, is also famous within the history of Italian labour struggles for being amongs the first to introduce the MTM methodologies imported from the US. 

But the factory didn’t only make men’s clothes. As Ivana Peluzzi, one of Lebole’s former workers who kindly agreed to talk with us, put it, 

“this factory [also] produced excellent trade unionists and women who went into politics” 

Indeed, despite the commercial emphasis on men, the story of Lebole’s factory is a story of an all-female workforce, which reached a peak of 5000 workers in XX.

Many of these women came from the countryside and had a peasant background. They chose the factory over agricultural and domestic work attracted by a more ‘modern’ form of life. Some of them had been trained as tailors and seamstresses in the traditional sartorial methods.

Yet, the organization of work at Lebole did not allow these women to demonstrate their skills. 
Rather, the introduction of MTM was preceded by a period of study, where expert consultants would observe, film and carefully time each of the workers’ movement in order to determine the most effective ways of scripting their workflows and movements, de facto expropriating them of their knowledges.

The MTM method was first introduced in 1965 in only one of the three Lebole pavilions, which was quickly nicknamed as the “American Pavillion”. At first, the workers selected to participate in the experimental production line were envied by the others, as they were see as being considered the best one. But very soon this initial perception changed into concern, as rumors begun to spread about the loss of freedom and brutal rhythms required by the reorganized work process.

As the MTM methods were rolled out across the entire production line, the health of the Leboline (informal name used by and for the workers at Lebole) begun to take a toll. 
Faintings, mass faintings, nervous breakdowns, depressions begun to spread. One of the workers reported how she couldn’t stop thinking about the same movements that she had to repeat all day long even when she was at home or in her sleep. Another one decided to end her own lifeand walk under a train during a lunch break. In an attempt to limit the absences claimed for illness, the company doctors would frequently prescribe booster injections.  

As workers’ struggles and unionization efforts grew stronger and stronger across the country, the Leboline also begun to organize against the conditions of exploitation that impacted their lives. 


 
 

