Little attention has been paid by the Italian historiography to retracing with accuracy which and how many facilities Italian firms made available for the welfare of workers and how they evolved over time. Such an inadequate consideration is certainly due to the difficulties in elaborating the different censuses on the corporate welfare that were made during the twentieth century by the Italian public administration and the association of industrial employers. The chapter aims to reconstruct the evolution of various facilities of corporate welfare in Italy from the 1920s to 1950s, focusing on their territorial and sectoral distribution and trying to verify whether there has been a link between the spread of care facilities and charities and different industrial relations patterns. For example, it is likely that the increase of sport and leisure services for workers, observed in the 1930s of the twentieth century, was one of the consequences of labour relations imposed by the fascist regime, that, in exchange for the wage compression and the ban of strike, provided organised forms of cheap recreation not reachable to the industrial workforce previously. The historical sources used for this study are three surveys on corporate welfare institutions made in 1923, 1931–33 and 1954–55 (the first carried out by the State inspectorate of industry and labor, the second by Fascist association of Italian industrialists and the third by the Parliamentary inquiry committee into working conditions).

Corporate Welfare Facilities in Italy: An Historical Perspective and Quantitative Approach

Paolo Raspadori
2021

Abstract

Little attention has been paid by the Italian historiography to retracing with accuracy which and how many facilities Italian firms made available for the welfare of workers and how they evolved over time. Such an inadequate consideration is certainly due to the difficulties in elaborating the different censuses on the corporate welfare that were made during the twentieth century by the Italian public administration and the association of industrial employers. The chapter aims to reconstruct the evolution of various facilities of corporate welfare in Italy from the 1920s to 1950s, focusing on their territorial and sectoral distribution and trying to verify whether there has been a link between the spread of care facilities and charities and different industrial relations patterns. For example, it is likely that the increase of sport and leisure services for workers, observed in the 1930s of the twentieth century, was one of the consequences of labour relations imposed by the fascist regime, that, in exchange for the wage compression and the ban of strike, provided organised forms of cheap recreation not reachable to the industrial workforce previously. The historical sources used for this study are three surveys on corporate welfare institutions made in 1923, 1931–33 and 1954–55 (the first carried out by the State inspectorate of industry and labor, the second by Fascist association of Italian industrialists and the third by the Parliamentary inquiry committee into working conditions).
2021
9783110614282
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11391/1481080
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus ND
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
social impact