[...] On the 23rd IBM in New York put at my disposal a Cadillac with a chauffeur and a technical expert from Turin to be my guide at Poughkeepsie, up in Westchester where IBM’s huge factory is. This is a factory with 10, 000 employees, like a medieval city, and in front of it is a huge carpark for 4, 000 cars (these immense carparks full of grey and blue cars, that you see as soon as you leave New York, are one of the things that give you the most authentic feeling of America). I am received by a group of managers who explain to me first the way the whole organization is structured, and one of the first things they tell me is that there is no trade union. Naturally I ask why; ‘They don’t need them’ is their answer. In fact they are all paid better here than elsewhere, the paternalism is quite open, and the colour portrait of Mr Watson hangs everywhere; I will later learn that on Mr Watson’s birthday the employees were invited to the party with a cyclostyled letter explaining that if they did not have a car to go to the party with their wives, a car supplied by the management would come to fetch them at such and such a time; if the wife did not have an evening-dress the management would provide her with one, and a baby-sitter service was also assured for that evening, and at table number such and such places numbered such and such were booked for them, and when Mr Watson came in they all had to stand and sing the following song to the famous tune, etc., and there on the letter were the words of a song in honour of Mr Watson. [...]