Old workshop — Necchi, Pavia, 1949

In the spring of 1949 Necchi employed 2,034 staff, most of them recruited from the Pavia countryside: 800 workers had been hired in the previous months to fill the new assembly shifts.

In 1949 Necchi turned out about 1,000 sewing machines a day; by 1954 it had reached 3,000 — a ratio of one machine every two worker-seconds, sustained by assembly lines on the American model.

In 1950 the worker De Gennaro was dismissed by Necchi for criticising the company's paternalistic policies in the communist factory-section bulletin: dissent, even in small print, was not tolerated even outside shift hours.

Fordism is the greatest collective effort yet made to create, with unheard-of speed and a historically unique self-awareness, a new type of worker and of human being.