On August 10, 1967 he died Victor Valletta, the man who for over 45 years in the last century drove the Fiat, first as general manager, then chief executive officer and finally as president.
Vittorio Valletta was born in 1883 in Sampierdarena (today a district of Genoa), from a petty bourgeois family, his father was a railway employee, he moved with his family to Turin and graduated as a student-worker at the evening school of accounting, graduating then to the Scuola Superiore di Commercio (the current Faculty of Economics and Commerce).
He began his professional activity as an accountant and at the same time as a teacher at the same Higher School of Commerce, from which he graduated.
In 1921, at the age of 38, his turning point took place.
JOINING FIAT
The post-war Fiat has just emerged from a two-year period of serious social tensions with strikes and factory occupations accompanied by a disorder in the company accounts.
The managing director and one of the founders of Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, decides to change the top management by inserting new men. As Administrative Director he calls on Vittorio Valletta, who in the meantime has become one of the most popular professionals in Turin.
Vittorio Valletta, while continuing in his professional and teaching activity (he will later be known by all as the "Professor"), will immediately devote himself not only to the recovery of company accounts, but will contribute in a decisive way to the reorganization of company methods and processes , thanks precisely to his scientific activity as a scholar of Taylorist work organization systems applied in the United States.
Only with his appointment as General Manager in 1928, by now fully employed in the company, will he give up his professional studio and leave teaching.
RELATIONS WITH FASCISM
In the following decade, the Agnelli-Valletta pairing would start the production of automobiles accessible not only to the wealthy classes, but also, if not yet to the popular classes, at least to the urban middle class of professionals, public and private officials, traders: from the new factory the Balilla, the Ardita and then the Fiat500 (the Topolino) will come out of the Lingotto.
Both Agnelli and Valletta tried to maintain a relationship of equidistance with the fascist regime even if even then Fiat could not fail to be pro-government, as Avvocato Agnelli once defined it.
If the Senator of the Kingdom Giovanni Agnelli, thanks also to the connections with the House of Savoy, could assert his autonomy from the regime by appointing, for example, Curzio Malaparte, disliked by Mussolini, director of La Stampa, or by taking on as private tutor of his nephew Giovanni ( not yet Gianni) the liberal anti-fascist Franco Antonicelli, the “Professor” Valletta, appointed managing director since 1938, could not do the same since, as head of the executive, he still had to maintain relations with the Roman power.
The fact remains that no "political" appointment was ever made to the board of directors of Fiat nor can one find declared sympathizers of the regime among the top management of the company.
The development of Fiat and the consequent increase in employment levels worried the Turin fascist leaders who feared the growing opposition to the regime among the working class.
Prediction that came true punctually on 15 May 1939 at the official inauguration of the Mirafiori plant when Mussolini, annoyed by the coldness with which the workers present in the square followed his speech, left the stage midway through the ceremony where Agnelli and Valletta were also present, both in one of the rare occasions in a black shirt.
THE SECOND POST WAR
As had already happened at the end of the first post-war period, even after the liberation of 1945 the wind of political and social passions swept over Fiat.
On 28 April 1945, the National Liberation Committee approved the purge of Agnelli and Valletta for collaboration, appointing a Fiat management committee made up of four "commissioners" in their place.
A group of partisans, misunderstanding a communiqué from Giorgio Amendola on the list of those sentenced to death for collaborationism, went to Valletta's house to pick him up, but in the meantime the British had already intervened and took him under their protection, however declined, after the first critical moment, by Valletta himself.
The British would later reveal to the Liberation Committee of Upper Italy the operations agreed with Valletta to sabotage Fiat's industrial war production destined for the Germans.
At the end of 1945, Senator Giovanni Agnelli died, having already been acquitted of the charge of collaboration.
The American authorities will then insist on Valletta returning to the helm of Fiat, also because the four "commissioners", more politicians than managers, were demonstrating serious difficulties in restarting the company.
In April 1946, with the purge provision annulled, Vittorio Valletta returned to the helm of Fiat.
An anecdote has it that on that occasion Valletta asked the young representative of the Agnelli family, the then twenty-five-year-old Gianni: "There are two cases: either you do the President or I do"; and Agnelli replied "Professor, you do it".
A few days after his return to Fiat, Valletta, in a hearing at the Economic Commission of the Constituent Assembly, explained that for the post-war recovery large production units were needed to promote economic growth and broaden the employment base.
A vision of development of the country similar to that of Enrico Mattei, but not shared by other industrialists, public and private, who saw Italy only as a country of artisans and small and medium-sized enterprises and unsuitable for large production concentrations.
THE FIAT “LAND, SEA AND SKY”
Valletta's Fiat was "Land, Sea and Sky", not only for the production of vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors) and railways but also for that of Large Marine Engines and airplanes such as the Fiat G.91, which for years was was the aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori.
But above all Valletta was the architect of mass motorization of the Italians.
Unlike Alfa Romeo and Lancia, whose cars were intended for a medium-high range of customers, the Professor focused on the production of economical cars, the so-called utility cars, which could also be purchased by white-collar workers and more than 8-10 months salary or salary.
The country was invaded by Fiat 500s and Fiat 600s, offering Italians that sense of freedom of movement they had never had: on Sundays everyone went to the beach or on a trip outside the city and in August the great exoduses for collective holidays.
The epicenter of this true mass revolution was the Mirafiori, where every morning the Professor crossed the gates at the wheel of his Fiat500.
On the model of the American plants, in particular that of Ford's River Rouge, the Mirafiori plant, with its 60.000 employees and over 3.000 cars produced per day, will become the archetype of the Fordist-Taylorist factory, with plants of such dimensions as to maximize economies of scale and a work organization in which there is a clear separation between simple and repetitive activities, entrusted to the workers, and other complex activities, which are the responsibility of the hierarchical line.
The production system is only declined by the technical system, reducing the contribution of manual labor to a mere indistinct factor of production: the car assembly activities are organized at fixed positions on the assembly line with cycles of work operations between one minute and one minute and a half, the same that the worker will have to repeat throughout the work shift, while the old professional trades such as fixers, sheet metal workers or revisionists will tend to disappear.
RELATIONS WITH WORKERS
The hard work in the factory in those years, (in the working-class districts of Turin, such as Borgo San Paolo, Falchera or Vanchiglia they said, but with pride, "mi travaj a la Feroce" - I work for Fiat), was tempered by a policy salary and particular attention to the needs of workers, according to a model of corporate liberality, defined by critics as "Vallettian paternalism", as opposed to the participatory and "enlightened" model of Adriano Olivetti in Ivrea.
While on the one hand the Professor in the XNUMXs, under pressure from the American ambassador in Rome Claire Boothe Luce, adopted a policy of isolating communist workers in the Fiat factories with the creation of the so-called "red star" departments, on the other, sometimes regardless of Confindustria policies, he kept the wage levels of Fiat workers at higher levels than other metalworking and non-metalworking companies.
In the rounds of renewals of the national contract for metalworkers, to avoid tensions between workers, it will always close union agreements for advance wages with the union at the time social democratic Uilm-Uil or with the powerful and collaborative SIDA (Italian Automobile Union), born on the model of the American trade unions at the end of the Fifties from a split of the Fim-Cisl of Turin.
Valletta also developed a system of good practices for employees which will guarantee, at least until the end of the sixties, consent and identification with the company, starting for example with the totally free mutual insurance (the glorious MALF -Fiat Workers' Company Mutual ), or the supplementary pensions and building plans of the Fiat manufacturers, but also nursery schools, scholarships or summer camps for the children of employees.
And we must not forget the policy of strong commercial discounts reserved for the employees themselves for the purchase of a new car every 6 months, which fueled a market for employees' half-yearly cars worth more than 10% of the total new market: in short the manufacturing worker also became the seller of his own car with a good profit.
If Valletta's relations with the Americans were very close, the last significant act of the Professor was directed towards the Soviet Union, in the midst of the Cold War.
At the end of the XNUMXs, in fact, he entrusted intermediaries, probably within the PCI, with the task of initiating contacts with the Muscovite ministries, with a view to possible economic agreements between Fiat and the Soviet Union.
Valletta, after meeting President Kennedy at the White House in 1962, will receive the green light from the US State Department to sign an agreement with the Soviet government to build, the first European company, a "turnkey" automobile plant in Russia in a city called Tolyatti.
THE LAST YEARS
In 1966, almost eighty years old, he handed over the Presidency, the malicious voices "spontaneously" told Gianni Agnelli, the lawyer, that his grandfather Giovanni Agnelli had already identified as his "dolphin".
On 28 November 1966, after leaving the presidency of Fiat, he was appointed senator for life by the President of the Republic Giuseppe Saragat, another Turin native, and died on 10 August 1967 due to a sudden cerebral hemorrhage in his summer residence in Tuscany.
In the words of Giuseppe Saragat "the highest representative of a bourgeoisie promoting social conquests and well-being for the working class, development and progress for the nation, dies with Vittorio Valletta".
A few days after the burial, the Russian ambassador in Italy, accompanied by Gianni Agnelli, will place a laurel wreath sent by the then Soviet Prime Minister Aleksej Kosygin on his grave.
Two more years would have passed and everything would have been different with the hot autumn of '69 and the following '70s of union conflict and terrorism.
