Una «famiglia di lavoro». Le politiche sociali della Fiat (1918-1963)

The study investigates the origins, forms, and transformations of Fiat’s social policies between the end of the First World War and the early 1960s, drawing on the idea of the large firm as a “miniature welfare state”. These policies encompassed health, education, housing, insurance, and assistance, targeting employees and their families. The analysis is structured on two interconnected levels: the internal world of the company and the broader social and political environment. Inside the firm, attention is paid not only to managers, clerks, foremen, and workers, but also to the many figures entrusted with the functioning of corporate welfare institutions – doctors, priests, nurses, social workers, nuns, and clerical staff – highlighting both the division of reproductive labor and the discretionary powers embedded in the workplace. Externally, the study examines the interaction between Fiat’s welfare system and the state, trade unions, political parties, and the Catholic Church, exploring the rationales behind different models of assistance and their conflicts and convergences. By focusing on the mechanisms of industrial welfare and the politics of social reproduction, the research situates Fiat as both a barometer and an exception within Italian capitalism. It shows how the company assumed substantial costs of social reproduction – healthcare, childcare, housing, leisure – effectively synchronizing family life and urban settlement patterns with the rhythms of mass production. At the same time, the analysis underscores that this project was never fully coherent or uncontested: corporate rationales constantly encountered the logics of other institutions and the everyday practices of working-class families, which could appropriate, resist, or reshape welfare provisions. Fiat thus emerges as a privileged observatory for the social history of capitalism, where the management of welfare was inseparable from the governance of labor. Its policies contributed to the reproduction of a stable and loyal workforce, promoting an “ideal Fiat worker” integrated into the corporate community and enjoying a relative status of privilege, while reinforcing inequalities and limiting class-based solidarity. This industrial welfare regime not only defined the company’s internal order but also played a decisive role in shaping the broader configuration of the Italian welfare system in the twentieth century.