The history of industrial paternalism is full of paradoxes. Although depictions of the entrepreneur as provider and guiding spirit for numerous families gathered under his wing are readily associated with the cultural legacy of preindustrial life, companies have frequently introduced employee benefits in conjunction with innovations in technology and work relations. Imagery and practices featuring the personal solicitude of a familiar boss have been articulated by huge enterprises with elaborate managerial hierarchies. While trade unionists have routinely denounced company welfare plans as “A pocket full of tricks/To soothe the weary worker/When he groans and kicks,” more than one employer has echoed the lament: “Everything we give them for nothing makes them a bit lazier, and a little harder to deal with, and more prone to find fault.”

During the twentieth century, company welfare programs have been developed in Italy, as in other countries. Once they had been introduced in some large firms after the “Red years,” social programs spread to the rest of industry at the end of the 1920s, with more noticeable growth during the Depression years when, in other countries, such programs were on the wane. Companies investing in assistance and recreation did so not because this was perceived as being in the firms' interest in managing workers, but in obedience to directives from the Fascist government and in keeping with the corporate ideology of a regime that seemed to assure protection of the country's industry.

Paternalism is a construct that continues to be used by historians of eighteenth-century English society. As an explanatory or exploratory term it does resonate with some of the inflections in the sources, particularly those dealing with the mediation of class relations by the prototypical country gentleman justice of the peace, that denizen of countless novels, and the subject of much historical research over the last thirty years. Paternalism, in the sense of a putative concern for the welfare of the working poor, provided they kept within bounds, was certainly the announced creed of many better- and lesser-known philanthropic gentlemen of the period, and we can find (apparent) plebeian celebrations of the belief:

God bless Lord Dudley Ward

He knows as times been hard.

He called back the sodgermen,

And we'll never riot again,

Na boys, no boys, no the brave Dudley boys.

When industrialist John D. Rockefeller visited the new open-pit mining operation of his competitor, Daniel J. Guggenheim, in Bingham Canyon, Utah, in 1910, he declared with genuine envy and admiration,“it's the greatest industrial sight in the whole world.” What most impressed Rockefeller were the massive steam shovels that had revolutionized the process of copper extraction by enabling firms to mine and smelt tons of previously worthless low-grade copper ore. Equally impressive was the fact that, where skilled American miners had very recently toiled underground in search of rich veins of copper, unskilled immigrants now worked aboveground, loading tons of newly blasted copper ore onto train cars. Rockefeller was not alone in expressing wonder at this new man-made marvel. Hundreds of sight-seeing tourists also traveled to the mine by train each week to experience the thrill of industrial America's newfound ability to move mountains. Like Rockefeller, they saw nothing but progress and modernity in the great open-pit mine.

The most celebrated case of paternalism in India is that of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (Tisco) and its company town, Jamshedpur. In the context of India, Jamshedpur is a marvel: a relatively clean, spacious, and prosperous city where more people live in middle-class neighborhoods than in slums. With a population of 650,000, Jamshedpur is certainly the largest company town in the world, and, because it is still controlled and administered by the private company that founded it in 1909, it is probably the oldest extant company town. Aside from the town, the steel company itself holds a special place in Indian industrial history. It was founded and capitalized in the colonial period by the Indian business community of Bombay in 1907, began production in 1911, and thereafter took its place as the largest private company in India and the largest integrated steel mill in the British Empire. It has survived revolutionary political changes, near-bankruptcy, and nationalization attempts, largely because its directors convinced the British that it was an essential defense industry and the Indian nationalists that it was a national treasure run by men of integrity for the benefit of the nation.

When International Harvester executives announced their plans in 1904 to build a clubhouse for employees at the McCormick reaper works in Chicago, they hoped that the facility might lure workers away from the coarse pleasures enjoyed in the surrounding working-class neighborhoods. They believed the three-story building would serve as a symbol of good taste and proper behavior in a grim landscape of tenements, taverns, and smoking factories (Fig. 1). As one newspaper reporter noted in that year, “the hope and expectation of the stockholders and officials whose money is going into this building is that it will prove a magnet to draw the employes from saloons and other places of resort where waste of money and weariness of flesh are the penalties that add to loss of time.” McCormick executives saw the brick and limestone structure as more than recreation center: It was also a transformative machine, gathering men up from the streets and converting them into efficient and compliant workers.

For as long as the people of Monterrey, Nuevo León could remember, class harmony had characterized their preeminently industrial city. Local residents attributed this aura of industrial peace to the unique character of the region's workers and the inherent benevolence of their employers. They took special pride in both. Like all northerners, Monterrey's workers had a reputation for hard work, industriousness, and staunch independence. They manifested the last through their celebrated autonomy from Mexico's national labor federations. The industrialists, in turn, earned local renown for having built their companies with Mexican capital. Furthermore, such pillars of local industry as the Cuauhtemoc Brewery and the Fundidora Iron and Steel Works provided fringe benefits unique by contemporary Mexican standards. Since the 1920s, local boosters claimed, company paternalism had established the basis for Monterrey's industrial peace and prosperity. Then, just as General Lázaro Cárdenas assumed the presidency in 1935, class struggle seemingly engulfed the city. In a startling development, the steel workers broke from the Independent Unions of Nuevo León and affiliated with the national Miner-Metalworkers Union. Two weeks later, the operatives of Monterrey Glassworks, a Cuauhtemoc subsidiary, voted in support of militant unionism.

Long before Michel Foucault compared the factory to a prison, employer paternalism had acquired a pejorative sense for many observers. Those who favored the idea in France preferred the term “patronage,” following the usage of engineer and social philosopher Frédéric Le Play. The Centre des Jeunes Patrons (CJP), a progressive employers' group founded in 1938 in the wake of the Popular Front social crisis, vowed to “rehabilitate the patronal function.” Corporatist theorists imagined new forms of “association” or “community” in the workplace, a conscious break with paternalist habits of rule by “divine right.”