The Elastic Man

Next to Gina Lollobrigida, Italy's greatest pneumatic export is the Pirelli automobile tire. In Italy the huge Pirelli rubber company is as well known as pasta and Puccini: bambini suck Pirelli nipples, their parents slumber on Pirelli foam rubber mattresses, millions stride about daily on Pirelli-made rubber soles and heels. Pirelli is Italy's sole maker of tennis balls and linoleum, its biggest producer of raincoats, rubber sponges, battery cases, overshoes and ice bags. Every year Pirelli turns out enough high-tension wire to stretch to the moon and back, and its coaxial cable piped the wedding of Grace Kelly to TV stations all over Europe.

As Italy's third largest business--and one of its biggest dollar earners--Pirelli turns out 55% of all the nation's rubber products. With 16 foreign plants scattered from Belgium to Brazil, the company peddles its broadly diversified line in 112 nations and principalities, employs a worldwide staff of 50,000 people.

But Pirelli's achievements are not only commercial. President Alberto Pirelli, 74, has passed on so many benefits of free enterprise to his workers, in the form of high wages and fringe and other benefits, that he has furnished Italian businessmen with one of the best examples of how to fight the Communist unions that dominated Italian labor in the postwar years. Last week, when the votes were tallied for this year's elections in Pirelli's plants, anti-Communist unions handed the Reds a solid shellacking. At Pirelli's big Turin plant workers voted 54% in favor of anti-Communist unions, tumbled the Red vote from 69% to 46% in a year. The Communist vote in all Pirelli plants fell below 50% for the first time since World War II; anti-Communist unions won a clear majority with 64 of 113 seats on plant councils, thus democratic unions became the major bargaining agents with the company.

Cables for La Scala. Italy's greatest international enterprise began in the ferment of Italian nationalism in 1870, when a patriotic young engineer, Giovanni Battista Pirelli, learned that the proud new nation of Italy was forced to import rubber hose from its recent enemy France. Two years later Pirelli, then 27, opened a rubber plant in Italy with $42,000 of borrowed capital, 35 workers and a smattering of experience in the art of vulcanizing rubber. For Italy's new army Pirelli produced some of the earliest military telegraph wires; for Milan's Edison Central Electric Co. he branched out into rubber-coated power lines. His first customer: Milan's famed La Scala Opera House, which has been lighted ever since by Pirelli cables. Rubbermaker Pirelli kept branching out, into bustles, bicycle tires, carefully trained his son Alberto to take over the family business.

Born in the family residence next door to the Milan plant, Alberto Pirelli grew up with the acrid smell of strong chemicals and hot rubber in his nose. At 21 he joined the company, soon proved his talent for promotion and boosting sales. To give the company's auto-tire business a push, he sponsored a 10,000-mile Peking-Paris drive in 1907. In Paris the next year he became the first Italian ever to ride in an airplane (with Orville Wright, for ten minutes, at an altitude of 30 ft.), was inspired to start making and selling free balloons and dirigibles. A Pirelli airship, the Norge, carried Roald Amundsen across the North Pole.

Bags for Vegetables. At his father's death in 1932 Alberto Pirelli took over the company, led it through its worst disaster--World War II, which left the company's machinery smashed, its warehouses empty, its workers disorganized and ripe for Communist conquest. Pirelli scoured Milan for temporary offices and all Italy for capital. With Marshall Plan funds, and U.S. machinery pouring into Italy, he was able to build five brand new factories, refurbish his old plants with automatic machine tools and Detroit-style conveyors.

From wartime frogman equipment he adapted skindiving suits, became Europe's biggest producer of rubber fins and rafts. With U.S.'s Visking Corp. (plastics) Pirelli worked out a license deal, is now taking Italy's vegetables out of open street stalls and packaging them in polyethylene bags. But Pirelli's biggest business is still tires, notably racing tires. Pirelli will design a tire for a particular race, even different stretches of the same race, depending on whether the course is over mountains (where heavy tires are needed) or a flat straightaway (where light-walled tires are needed to dissipate the heat).

Guns For Revolt. Though he is a shy and patrician cosmopolitan, Pirelli has proved himself one of Italy's best tacticians at dealing with the Communist-run CGIL unions. For decades the Pirellis--like other Italian industrialists--kept their underpaid workers toiling in stifling, smoky factories for long hours, thereby presented Communist organizers with a readymade example of capitalism exploiting the worker. After World War II Pirelli workers openly formed factory Soviets, boldly seized and briefly ran one plant. Less than four years ago anti-Communist police squads pulled surprise raids in Milan, uncovered in one Pirelli plant a Red arsenal that included scores of machine guns, three 20-mm. cannon, seven bazookas, 700 rifles and Tommy guns.

To defeat the Communists' militant spirit with propaganda, Pirelli followed a simple, highly effective strategy: he began sharing the fruits of free enterprise with his workers. As he improved factory conditions, building modern plants in place of the smoky sweatboxes workers once knew, he added a free medical, surgical and hospital plan (cost to the company: $1,600,000 annually), also built modern, low-cost housing for 7,180 Pirelli families.

Pirelli put in cafeterias to give all workers at least one big meal every day at a nominal fee of eight lire (about 1-c-) per meal. Sample menu: minestrone, roast veal, vegetables, cheese, dessert, half a pint of wine. Workers can go to free vacation camps on the Italian Riviera; their children can go to the Italian Alps in summertime, while retired oldsters can spend their waning years in a free home at Iduno, near Lake Como. As individual productivity has gone up to double prewar records, Pirelli has rewarded his workers with repeated pay boosts, pushed their real wages up 96% in eight years, v. a 28% rise in Italy's cost of living. Result: for the first time Pirelli workers can afford motor scooters, TV sets, even small cars.

As a champion of free enterprise Alberto Pirelli expects to keep his company growing, and workers' living standards rising. Says he: "I hope we never stop." Suiting his action to his words, President Pirelli jauntily set out for North America this week to inspect his newest wire and cable subsidiary in Mexico, then will head north to open still another new 300-worker plant in St. Johns, Quebec.

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