"Watching Workers Lives: Company Housing at Baťa and Olivetti, 1920-1960"

This paper investigates relationships between labor and management in the domestic space. It focuses on the Czechoslovak company Baťa and the Italian company Olivetti in the interwar years as cases of extensive business engagement in housing and neighborhood development for workers and their families. Both companies looked carefully at their workers, monitoring their lives outside of the factory in a newly built environment to transform people and their economic future to realize greater industrial productivity and production. For Baťa, explicitly, controlling workers’ lives outside the factory would guarantee their successful adaptation to the needs of mass production. Olivetti approached space and architecture as a tool to enhance the human inside the producer - thus reconciling the ruptures created by the advent of industry. This paper discusses how their ambitions and the resulting housing projects were implemented in the towns of the company headquarters. It shows where and how workers lived to find out how living in company housing changed their relationship with their workplace. And, it assesses the extent to which businesses bridged the separation between the factory and the home to exert their power as control.