Now he pays his McDonald's workers the scale earned by every other worker represented by the Commercial Workers Union. It's a wage scale three times what their Manhattan fast-food counterparts earn. If a small firm were to move outside the region, it would be like a hand suddenly detached from its body. U.S. economists try to compare it to. Relations between companies in Emilia-Romagna are nothing like those in Veneto, a conservative Catholic region to the north.
Income is high and enterprise is small in Veneto.
But the aim of Veneto's small-business owners is to emulate local firms like Benetton, now a multinational giant that maintains profitability by contracting out manufacturing to cheap overseas labor. Nor is there any of Silicon Valley's chronic entrepreneurialism, where big firms splinter into new start-ups by former employees who peel off with key ideas and contracts, who in turn get sideswiped by trusted employees who themselves split off with valued customers. Power in Silicon Valley was never wrested from Fascists by a Communist-led resistance movement. Nor was Veneto ever isolated from the rest of the country by a central government that sought to undermine its local leadership by withholding loans and credits. It was the only region in Italy where workers actually seized the big factories from their owners.